The fallacy of scavengeing

I have decided to stick to one simple need and go into some detail about the problems of scavenging after a disaster. So the SHTF and the natural gas is no longer being delivered to your house and it is getting cold. You have seen all those beautiful wood burning stoves at your local big box store and decide to run down and get right now. Well first of all, several thousand other people are facing the same problem and the store has 10 in stock. Just in time delivery, etc, you know, but you arrived first and just after the last guard left and you loaded it up and got home with it. Now all your problems are solved, not really, you do have a stove board to sit it on so you don't set the floor on fire don't you? Well you took some boards and sand and now have that covered. Wife may have a nervous breakdown, but you are ready to start the fire. You do have a chimney don't you? Well not in the living room, so is it going out the wall or thru the roof? Back to the store, they had 5 wall thimbles but they are all gone and the mob is getting unfriendly, so you decide to run it out a window and use some sheet metal to replace a pane of glass and run the stovepipe thru it. Oh, that is a double glass thermopane insulated window and it easier to lower it and make a wood frame for the metal heat protection. You do have stovepipe don't you? Well you beg a few feet from a neighbor and go thru the window, up the wall 10 feet, get 2 elbows and get ready to connect it to the stove. You do have the adapter to connect the stove to the stovepipe don't you? Well the old neighbor who gave you the stovepipe figures out how to cut, bend, use screws, and connect the stove to the stovepipe. You go out in the yard, grab some scrap wood, some newspaper and start the fire. The whole house fills up with smoke and your whole family is now over at the old man's house. What do you mean it has to be high enough to create a draft and draw? He had tried to explain that to you, but he is just an old ignorant hick and you are a mid level management college graduate in the high tech world. You extend the chimney another 20 feet, fasten it together with screws, brace it off the building and now your fire is going gang busters. You did get a thermometer to measure the temp of the chimney so it doesn't either go out or burn your house didn't you? Well the old man said that if you touch it with a damp cloth and it sizzles, it is hot enough to turn it down a bit and under no conditions do you let it get red hot. 6 hours the living room is too hot, the bedrooms are freezing, and the stove needs to be refueled. You do have an ash shovel, ash bucket, and ash can don't you? The ashes contain hot coals that will smolder for up to 24 hours and can set your house on fire. You get a metal pail, some garden gloves, and a garden trowel and take the ashes out of the stove and place them in an old metal barrel out back. You reload the stove, watch it for 2 hours while the rest of the family sleeps and finally get a few hours sleep yourself and wake up to a freezing house. The old man explains that you need hard wood and bigger chunks to hold a fire all night and that the doors and windows in your house are letting the heat escape and that the stove will not heat your 3500 square foot house. He gives you a wheelbarrow full of wood and helps you cut down a couple trees and helps split the wood. You proudly take it into the house, place the wood in the burning stove, and the stove fills up with smoke and the fire goes out. He did mention something about seasoning the wood, whatever that means, and any wood you do cut will only be ready next year and 4 people with guns are looking at your house with smoke pouring out of the chimney and think you should share your heat and supplies with them as they are cold and hungry. You sneak out the back door with the little food you had in the house and join the old man and your family in his comfortable wood heated house. He politely informs you that you are a stupid sheeple, but he will take care of your family. they have been friends of his for years and he likes your kids, and you can stay if you behave yourself.

Prepping and getting the bugs out of things is an option, scavenging and expecting to make an instant success with your actions is not. You could just as easily used getting water, planting a garden, preparing to defend yourself,bugging out, pick your own scene.

 

Dead on.

Very well- written post!

Consider what's going to happen when the average non-prepper steals a milk cow and tries to eat it.

Hey, all ya gotta do is kill it and cook it, right?

 

Love it!
There are very distinct advantages to have been raised a hick.

 

Hope they like tasteless, grisly tough sausage grade maybe, beef. In reality, without power for the equipment the milkers will get mastitis, followed by nasty infections and die off within two weeks. Then they can trap and eat the buzzards....

 

And here's me thinking that the fallacy about scavenging anything post the apocalypse, is that it will free for the taking????

It's like the old saying...."where there's a will....there's relatives". Likewise, with 'apparently' abandoned scavengeable resources. Don't be surprised if scavengeable resources will be contested resources, and may be defended by those who got there first. You had better have the protocols, procedures and policies, and organisation and tactical smarts in place for exploring, exploiting, and if necessary, defending scavengeable resources...just remember such activity may be considered looting, and if there is even any suggestion of 'law', even vigilante 'law', there may be life threatening consequences to scavenging / looting. YMMV

 

Get on youtube and look up RMS or rocket mass heater stoves there are some good videos and lessons.
First like a rocket stove the heat creates a draft so it self feeds to a great degree there are some subtle engineering concepts so watch a few of these videos.

My advice for a punch through for your exhaust pipe is to use cement board or durock or hardiebacker board. Use multi layers sandwich together you can bolt them to pinch between the inner and outer window frame.
I do like the sand bed that holds the heat, acts like a capacitor holding the heat and slowly releasing it over time. The idea is to fire it and let it burn down and the heat in the bench or wall of block and sand release the heat so your not always burning wood so it is more efficient.

 

ochit, that"s the whole point, now you have hundreds of options and the time to do them now, if you wait until after something happens, your options will be very limited and any one bottleneck will cause everything to fail.

 

I already have my wood stove.
Unless you already have a chimney and a stove pipe to the chimny just laying around you're not going to get a lot of use out of a wood stove.
If you have to scavenge with thousands of other people you're probably a good as dead, you'll just out last the bulk of the mass die off by a few weeks at best.
Then how long before you burn up your fuel?
I have a wood pile that's getting bigger every week at least during the warmer months.

 

Or growing your own food.
Is some one going to steal a bunch of plants, trees, dirt, a tiller, tractor, fertilizer, irrigation, tools, seeds, land?
I'm starting with fruit and nut trees, because that's what I know about agriculture, which isn't much. But got to start some where.

 

people will steal anything so yes, LOL.

preparations include applied knowledge or previous experience a stock of seeds they can be frozen in your freezer, balanced fertilizer, and insecticide i`d opt for liquid Sevin and soil if your soil is poor the ability know or test your soil. standard gardening will be a disaster guerrilla gardening of plots in hidden spots, mimicking the Johnny Appleseed story or hide your edibles among inedible plants.

I recommend buying books with color pictures of American edible plants beware of mushrooms because even professional and highly experienced pickers have been poisoned by mistaking mushrooms as edible types.

 

Some good points to that story. Friends are always a good thing but real life experience is priceless.

 

You'd be amazed how many folks don't know that some wood stoves actually have an oven and can cook on them as well.
My daughter learned to cook on or wood stove and baked pies in the oven . She's really great cook. So is my son for that matter.
Learning the cook on a wood stove takes much more attention and practice sense there are no automatic controls and fuel must be maintained regularly during the process , but these are thing one must learn by doing and learning their on stove . Slight variations one stove to another or even the same stove in a new location, different length/diameter stove pipe or damper location.
Different woods and their moisture content .
All my wood stove installations use a dog leg in the stove pipe configuration ,it reduces the losses and the stove works more efficiently . In the mountains I used a fraction of the wood my neighbors did in basically the same size homes . I used my stove for cooking so I was using less gas as well.

 

you can cook anything on top of a stove that you can in an oven or in a fire with a dutch oven. when looking through garage sales or goodwill and salvation army look for a dome lid that will fit on top of your dutch oven that makes the top an oven I put biscuits on top and they cook off in 15 to 30 minutes depending on heat.

fried bread bit of oil biscuit dough rolled into handball size and packed into a frying pan it you want monkey bread or pull apart bread use white or brown sugar & butter on the bottom put a lid on top. same with cake mix or cornbread. Making pineapple upside down cake is a breeze like this.

 

Tangine works really good to, I use one to cook any kinda slow cook meat /stew type dish in the winter.. might as well as the stove is going anyways.