Thursday, February 05, 2009

Speaking of being prepared...

I really have been thinking about how unprepared we would be if the power went out for any length of time. If the power went out now, we would be really cold! On the news I saw some people from Kentucky explaining how they were burning their wooden fence to keep warm and planned to move on to the kitchen cabinets or 'anything made of wood' if they had to, until the power came back on. At least they had a stove to burn that wood in, though I had to wonder why they didn't have some wood to burn in it. I guess they never expected to use it. At least they had it - we don't even have that. When we built our house, a fireplace was an added expense we couldn't afford, and we've never gotten around to adding one or felt we could justify the expense.

We do have quite a bit of food around here, so we wouldn't starve, at least not right away. We could even cook on the grill, at least for a while - since we don't have a wood cookstove. (Yes, mom, one of those would be nice. I like yours)

Fresh drinking water might be a problem if the water stops running, and since I drink a lot of water every day, that really concerns me. I'm thinking this Big Berkey water filtration system I just read about on my dad's blog would be perfect. It's supposed to provide safe drinking water no matter how bad the water is, and from what I can tell, the filters are good for thousands of gallons, over 10 years worth of water filtering. And it doesn't need any power to work. So it's exactly what you'd need during a power outage.

Mom & Dad have had a reverse osmosis system for several years now, and we've talked about getting one of those - just never actually did it. Now, I'm thinking we should just skip that step and move right to their back-up system.