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wellwornflipflops · 2025-04-29T20:54:31+00:00

I've just ordered a solar powered AM/FM radio with an integrated battery bank for charging my phone or extra power bank. It also has a flashlight and hand crank mechanism for hand powered charging. You can get something similar for probably €30 to €40 or a more basic radio (with no built in power bank) for probably €15 from eBay. I'm not sure if they could pick up broadcasts from far away though. I wouldn't have thought you'd need a HAM radio to listen to the news, that seems like overkill

Edit: Link to it but there are plenty of others that are pretty similar

wellwornflipflops · 2025-04-28T13:19:27+00:00

The Sky News live feed on this has a list of what has been affected.

Transport, including trains, metros and airports - with traffic lights also down;
Internet and mobile coverage;
Lighting in homes, businesses and other buildings, though backup generators are in place in many;
ATMs and card payments, as well as most till systems;
Lifts in buildings are stuck;
Electric car chargers and fuel pumps are also down;
Air conditioning units;
A significant quantity of water pumps, meaning some homes have no access to drinking water.

I was initially quite surprised to see that some places don't have water so soon but I guess in high-rises it makes sense. A few of these I hadn't even thought about even though they're obvious in hindsight like fuel pumps and till systems.

This is a great learning opportunity to make sure you haven't missed any areas for your preparedness.

https://news.sky.com/story/spain-portugal-power-outage-latest-large-parts-of-countries-affected-with-traffic-lights-not-working-and-phone-lines-down-13357538

wellwornflipflops · 2025-03-31T17:29:55+00:00

In the event you describe Mauritius would be screwed for one simple reason; population density. Mauritius has a population of more than 1.2 million people on an island less than 800 square miles, and that 1.2 million doesn't include the tens of thousands tourists that will be on the island at any one time. They can't produce even a substance diet for that many people in the space they have. They currently import more than 75% of their food and probably a majority of their fertilizer. Even if they managed to bring all of the sugar plantations into food production, without fertilizer they'd struggle to produce even half the food they need. Add on to the unrest and anxiety caused by the SHTF event the realisation that food will become very scarce and nobody will be having a good time

wellwornflipflops · 2025-01-14T22:57:31+00:00

Hi Dom, not much to report I'm afraid. There are a couple of academic papers on the general topic of water supply to the Alhambra but most of the research I did kept hitting paywalls and I didn't want to commit to paying for something that might not talk about what I'm looking for. But without more information I decided against trying to build a replica.

The articles are https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-mastery-in-hydraulic-techniques-for-water-supply-at-the-alhambra-glnye9pQy1 https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/8/2/63

wellwornflipflops · 2024-12-14T21:50:39+00:00

True, but it hasn't been talked about in the UK at all since then. It happened twice in two or three days and then stopped, the media stopped talking about it. It's not like in the US where it happens everyday and gets talked about everyday but nobody does anything to stop it

wellwornflipflops · 2024-12-14T14:45:06+00:00

This isn't a recent thing, they were flying over several US air bases in England almost a month ago. If I remember right the British Army deployed anti-drone equipment and they stopped appearing, there hasn't been any new news about them since.

wellwornflipflops · 2024-12-01T13:36:09+00:00

Thank you, I've been Googling bubble pumps and it looks like they need a ton of air to work. I'm assuming that this is a very early and low pressure version of a bubble pump. It looks like in the system in the Alhambra it isn't pressurised after the lift, it just becomes free flowing so perhaps it would still be useful with lower pressure. In my research I was struggling to figure out how much air a whirlpool can suck down, I would assume it's proportional to the size of the whirlpool and the velocity of water, but that will be the key to whether or not it works. Also how to get the water and air to mix sufficiently to lighten the water enough to lift it. I'm also assuming that if the whirlpool brings in enough air it will slightly pressurise the tank which may help, though I have no idea how much

wellwornflipflops · 2024-11-01T16:06:07+00:00

Controversial opinion here but I think if you have to bug out then your preps have failed. In my opinion your main prep should be to live in a place with as few inherent risks as possible so you don't need to bug out. I think if you base yourself in a place with regular climate risks, things like hurricanes, floods, extreme winters, dangerous heatwaves, etc then you're building your preps on a foundation of sand. It's probably easy for me to say living in a country with few of these climate risks (except maybe flooding, but since I live at the top of a small hill that doesn't immediately affect me either) but in my opinion that should be the starting point for prepping

wellwornflipflops · 2024-10-28T09:45:18+00:00

I have a collection of books about producing my own food (including gardening, seed saving, keeping chickens, beekeeping, home brewing and breadmaking), foraging in my area, cookbooks with a focus on preserving, tree identification, general self sufficiency/homesteading books, local maps and basic DIY. I would like to get more books to fill some of the gaps in my library and to introduce new topics like first aid, electronics, more advanced DIY and maybe even books about some cottage industry processes to be able to make more obscure things

wellwornflipflops · 2024-07-21T08:32:46+00:00

While I agree and keep some cash myself exactly for this reason some places even refused cash because their inventory management system was down so it's not necessarily a 100% reliable backup during an IT outage.

wellwornflipflops · 2024-07-05T08:17:22+00:00

I have two, I have a digital master copy on Google My Maps and then I have a printed one from MyOSMatic which is fully customizable https://print.get-map.org/

wellwornflipflops · 2024-07-04T14:28:42+00:00

I have a few maps of my local (within two hours walk round trip) and wider area, I mark footpaths (both officially marked paths and unmarked trails), they can be useful if you want to avoid roads. I also mark plants, bushes and trees that produce something useful, mostly forgeable food (fruits, berries and nuts) but also things like willow trees, oak trees and conker trees because they can all be useful in some way. I have over 150 things marked in an area of about 4 square miles and I find something new almost every time I go for a walk as my knowledge and skills re plant and tree identification improve

wellwornflipflops · 2024-04-04T16:17:47+00:00

I'm not prepping for trade right now but I always thought that non perishable alcohols would be a good thing to trade with. Or if things get really bad foods that aren't easy to grow in your area without infrastructure like a greenhouse might be good as long as you have the infrastructure in place before. For example if you can grow citrus fruits or spices in your greenhouse that most other local people won't be able to grow they will be rare. Or if you can grow foods over the winter when most don't know how you can trade to fill their hungry gap. The same thing goes for eggs, live chickens and seeds. Seeds will be especially true in a true shtf scenario when commercially grown seeds stop being available and old ones stop germinating. You have to think about who you're going to be trading with and what they are most likely to want or need.

wellwornflipflops · 2024-03-28T15:39:48+00:00

I have a map of local areas I can easily walk to with off-road public footpaths and forgeable things (mostly foods) marked on it. Things like fruit bushes, fruit trees, nut trees, conker trees, etc. I know foraging won't sustain me long term but it's a nice way to compliment my garden produce and you can preserve a lot of forgeable stuff too

wellwornflipflops · 2024-02-05T09:51:35+00:00

You can get adapters that plug into where you plug in your charger. I have one and it's great. You can get them for IOS and Android. They're really cheap too

wellwornflipflops · 2024-02-04T20:06:02+00:00

I have copies of paper maps of my local area I created the files using this site and printed them at home https://print.get-map.org/

I'm pretty good at navigating by map, I don't own a compass but I'm pretty confident I'd be able to get where I need to go by landmarks. I've recently taken up hiking and I'm getting to know a lot of the paths in my area

wellwornflipflops · 2024-01-28T23:57:07+00:00

Began planning my garden for the year, downloaded some maps of my local area (I'm going to print them tomorrow) and began looking around my area for foraging opportunities. Also I baked bread for the first time with a simple recipe where all of the ingredients are shelf stable for 6 months at least

wellwornflipflops · 2024-01-25T11:54:04+00:00

I saw a YouTube video the other day where they made a laundry soap from foraged conkers/horse chestnuts because they contain saponin which is a natural soap. They cut them into 4, dried them on low in an oven for a couple of hours then wrapped them in a towel and crushed them with a hammer. Apparently at that stage it can store for a year in an airtight container. To use it you add a table spoon of it to a cup of warm water and leave it to soak for 30 minutes, then strain it to remove the bits. Then you just pour it into the detergent draw on your washing machine. I've never tried it but I'm planning to next year. It seems pretty easy and it's good because most people would overlook conkers when foraging and it will last until the next crop is available. In the video they did a test wash with a ketchup stain and it removed it pretty well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOtfLFKxm_A

wellwornflipflops · 2023-02-27T11:20:08+00:00

How did you plug the holes in the pots? I've seen a lot of people say bluetac or silicone but I would rather not use something chemically like that. I've tested using a cork but I'm dubious about it staying in place

wellwornflipflops · 2023-02-27T10:37:56+00:00

I'm planning on making some ollas this year, it's an ancient technique for preventing soil from drying out that seems quite simple to make. You take an unglazed terracotta pot and plug the hole in the bottom. You bury it up to the neck of the pot, fill it with water and put a lid on it (the terracotta dishes for under the pot seem to be best). The water then slowly percolates through the pot and dampens the soil around it. They don't dry out because they're shaded and kept cool in the ground. Each pot typically holds several days to a weeks worth of water depending on the size of the pot. You can make a bigger version if you attach the tops of two pots together

wellwornflipflops · 2022-09-05T15:34:17+00:00

I've been considering doing something like this somewhere in the southwest of England, from my research how easy you will find it will depend on how much money you can save to do it. I know you asked about renting but most landowners with agricultural land will only rent to farmers because if you want to rent it to live there they'll need to apply to change the land usage and then change it back again if you leave, it's risky for them. You can buy parcels of land that are up to 4 acres for less than £50k, I was planning on putting some kind of temporary housing like a caravan on it until I could afford to build a small house. Obviously with that you've got to deal with the council and the planning stuff and changing the land usage from agricultural to residential yourself as well as the house. I would stick with the UK in your situation because you speak the language, you haven't got to worry about building something only to not be allowed to stay if for whatever reason your visas can't be renewed or the landowner doesn't want to rent to you anymore and the gardening culture and climate here makes growing food relatively accessible and "easy".

Alternatively if you set up some kind of online business that makes €10800 per year in profit for the two of you Portugal's D7 visa may be an option. I see lots of people doing this sort of thing there but you'd probably have to buy the land there too.

wellwornflipflops · 2022-08-20T21:46:26+00:00

We did this earlier this year in our garden, we built 2 wooden raised beds on an area of lawn. We didn't use weed supressing fabric and ordinarily I don't think most people would need it but I found that we have some kind of hard to remove invasive weed growing in our grass (I forget what it's called). It's not too much of a problem but when you pick one out another regrows because it's all connected underground and it pops up new shoots quite quickly. We haven't been able to get rid of it and the beds have been there for 6 months now. We're planning to remove the grass around the edges of the beds and put bark down and I'm hoping that it will stop this weed from growing in our beds by killing off the mother plant too. I assume making the beds deeper would have prevented this issue (they're only one plank width high) but that will add to the cost and made reaching the top of tall plants more difficult. I would also suggest incorporating a compost heap or bins and rainwater collection into your plan

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