When the grid goes down, everyone scrambles to find ways to get access to whatever electricity they can from solar panels, battery-powered devices, and generators. You probably already are stocked up on things like non-perishable food, firearms, and essential medical supplies.
Yet what about times when the grid goes down and stays down for days, weeks, or even longer?
Do you have the powerless items, tools, and supplies to survive a prolonged grid failure? If you’re not sure, you might want to look through this list, to see if there are any tools and items you need to add to your survival strategy.
Wood Cutting Tools
The longer the grid is down, the more valuable wood-cutting tools become. Having a hatchet, a wood-cutting axe and a splitting maul on hand gives you the ability to process wood into usable chunks.
This ensures that you can always make a fire to do things like boil water, cook food, and stay warm. Because in reality propane tanks and camp stove fuel cells run out much faster than you might think.
A good hatchet is also a great survival tool. It can easily double as a hammer or a cutting blade for bush crafting. It can also help you make quick work of butchering a deer or a feral hog. Especially when time is of the essence in warm weather, and you need to break the animal down into pack-size pieces to haul back to camp quickly.
In addition to correctly handling wood-cutting tools, you also need to know how to start a fire, and especially how to maintain it. Also, remember that wood can be used to build log houses or smaller shelters. Learn all about its uses in The Lost Ways 2 (it’s very affordable and still available in physical format).
Fire Extinguisher
A good fire extinguisher is a critical safety item to have when the grid goes down and you need to maintain a fire for functional purposes. If you’re not an avid camper, you and other members of your group might not be used to keeping a controlled fire for cooking and boiling water.
Accidents happen and can be very damaging if you keep that fire close to the house or in the garage. Having multiple fire extinguishers on hand in key locations will help you put out accidental fires before they can cause harm or compromise your shelter.
Water Filtration and Purification
If the grid goes down, it will take the municipal water system with it, leaving you with just the water you have on hand. Once this dwindles, your only means of staying hydrated will come from natural sources that you’ll need to filter and purify.
Having a LifeStraw or similar device, and water purification tablets for everyone in your group is a good starting point. Clean, BPA-free, food-grade storage containers and a safe place to store them let you keep water on hand for boiling and bathing.
Having clean tarps, funnels, and even fine-mesh paint strainer bags will give you the ability to collect rainwater and relatively clean flowing water. These simple things make quick work of removing bits of tree bark and larger particulate matter before boiling.
Pro Tip
Although the solutions I’m offering you are effective, I personally choose not to be put in a position where I have to react, but to prepare in advance with reserves of clean water. I’ve built up a significant stock, which I constantly renew to ensure the water hasn’t deteriorated in any way.
I’ve tried many methods to achieve independence in this regard, and I’ve concluded that the best one is the same method our brave soldiers use on the toughest battlefields in the world.
The Water Freedom System, as it’s called, is a project I treated as a personal challenge—and I managed to build it quickly, without fancy tools or advanced technical skills.
It’s simple, affordable, and extremely effective. Since installing it, I haven’t used anything else to get clean water fast. I recommend taking a look here and seeing if it fits into your prepping plan. If you ask me, it will definitely change the way you think about storing water for SHTF and beyond.
A Small Woodstove & Insulated Stove Pipe
If the grid goes down in the wintertime you need a way to keep your home or shelter at least modestly heated. Unfortunately, homeowners’ insurance makes it prohibitively expensive to have a wood stove or fireplace in normal times. Chances are good your current home’s chimney is not set up to support adding a wood stove.
Being able to have heat indoors without it burning down the house, smoking you out or killing you with carbon monoxide is trickier than you might think! Having a small rocket stove or a DIY wood stove is a good start.
Some simple stove pipes with a 90-degree elbow pipe and an insulated stove pipe will let you shunt the smoke from the wood stove out a window. You can then fill the gap in the window with plywood, and a double-walled insulated chimney collar will keep the insert from burning.
This is the sort of DIY wood stove kit you can keep unassembled in your garage to stay compliant with your homeowner’s insurance during normal times. Yet ensures that you can have sustainable means of heating your home in a disaster, that installs in just a few hours.
Charcoal or Wood-Fired Smoker
In the case of a prolonged grid failure, you’ll need to source fresh protein by hunting game, and a charcoal or wood-fired smoker is the best way to preserve excess meat. The problem is that those improvised smokers you see on fake wilderness survival shows rarely ever work.
You need a proper way to seal that meat away from flies and passing rain showers. It also helps to be able to precisely regulate the heat and flow of the smoke so that you’re actually drying the meat into jerky without simply cooking it.
These powerless smokers are slightly different than the propane smoker or the grid-dependent wood pellet grill on your deck. The good news is that they’re relatively inexpensive and easy to use.
If you don’t want to invest in a smoker you might not use for weekend cookouts, you should at least have two dozen cinder blocks, expanded metal grates, and sheet metal to create an improvised one. Trust me the stuff they make out of sticks and tree bark on TV is not the way you want to go.
Fermentation Crocks
If the grid is going to be down permanently or for more than a month, having a few fermentation crocks will do more than help you preserve food. Fermentation crocks in particular let you pickle most vegetables and make things like sauerkraut in large batches.
Not only does this give you a big supply of preserved food. Properly fermented foods also have more probiotic value, which supports gut health and the immune system.
Since you’ll be able to preserve large batches of food, you can even trade the excess to other people who aren’t as well prepared. Setting up a barter system where you’re trading away sauerkraut and pickled beets to hungry neighbors to get the things you need is much better than being forced to barter with firearms and major valuables.
Sourdough Starter Kit
The ability to capture wild yeast and maintain a sourdough starter will ensure you can make belly-filling bread when the grid goes down. However, there’s a lot of art and science to maintaining an active starter, and not all natural forms of wild yeast are palatable.
Having a sourdough starter kit with stabilized yeast on hand, lets you make the most out of the flour and other grains in your prepper stores. You can get a simple kit with a sterile container and everything you need to get it working properly for very little. They tend to have a shelf life of 2 to 3 years with proper storage. Once activated, you can maintain a sourdough yeast culture indefinitely.
Of course, the breads you can produce with it aren’t just belly-filling for you and your group. Quality, flavorful bread will become a highly valued commodity for bartering the longer the grid stays down.
Cast Iron Dutch Oven & Frying Pan
When the grid goes down, you can technically cook over an open fire with regular pots and pans. However, they’ll be prone to scorching, and pans in particular ruin easily.
Yet old-fashioned cast iron can take a lot of punishment. It has a centuries-long proven track record of cooking food and boiling water over an open fire.
Ideally, I recommend having at least two cast iron Dutch ovens. You can reserve one for making soups and stews over an open fire. Then you keep another one for baking and as a backup for boiling water.
You can easily bake bread, muffins, and even roast meat in a cast iron Dutch oven. You can even bury it with coals to keep your food safely roasting while you’re away from camp, or to minimize the smoke signal of your camp’s fire.
A Bulk Amount of Salt
If you can’t smoke meat or ferment vegetables in crocks, then salt is your last, best means of preserving food. It’s a method of preservation that’s centuries old, and costs very little. Since it’s a rock, salt never spoils.
So, you can keep an enormous amount of it in a sealed bucket for decades if necessary.
The volume of salt you need is typically 3 to 5% of the weight of the meat you need to preserve. This is better for thinner pieces of meat less than 1.5 inches thick. You can also add a small amount of sodium nitrate into the mix.
This “Pink” salt will help preserve the color of the meat and boost the effectiveness of the ordinary salt.
During the Cold War, the U.S. military a superfood designed to feed the entire population in the harshest conditions. It cost millions to create, but you can make it at home for just $0.37/day.
In the right conditions, it can last for decades, keeping your family fed for only a few dollars.
Salt was and still is a key ingredient, not just for flavor, but for preservation, making it vital for long-lasting survival recipes. You can discover the full list of ingredients and many other long-lasting recipes here.
A Solar Oven
If the grid goes down from a flood, hurricane or similar natural disaster, you might not have the ability to make a fire. This is a time when having the supplies to make a solar oven comes in handy. On a day with good sun, you can even use them to simmer water and heat up canned food to make it more palatable.
There are fancy solar oven kits you can buy online that are well worth the money. In a pinch, you can even improvise a solar oven from an old pizza box, shiny aluminum foil, and self-sealing plastic wrap.
The Amish community makes extensive use of ovens like these, as they are experts in powerless solutions. The Amish have even developed refrigerators and air conditioning systems. These solutions work flawlessly and help community members lead a very safe and even comfortable life, free from dependency on public utilities.
You can see how these ideas are put into practice and how you can implement them in your daily life using The Amish Ways Book. Why this book? Because you have the opportunity to learn from one of them. The author was born and raised within the community! In this book, as well as in the Academy, he reveals Amish secrets that have never been shared before!
Hand-Crank Flashlight (or Manual Rechargeable Lantern)
When the power goes out and batteries become a limited resource, a hand-crank flashlight gives you reliable light without relying on anything that runs out. These flashlights work by turning a crank that charges an internal battery or capacitor. In other words, you can generate light anytime, anywhere—just with the strength of your own arm.
It’s a small item but incredibly valuable when you need to check the perimeter at night, search for something in your shelter, or simply move around after dark without wasting precious batteries.
Some advanced models even include USB ports so you can charge your phone in an emergency. Even if you don’t have signal, your phone can still serve as a backup flashlight, a map, a calendar, or a journal.
>> The Cheapest Way to Buy Emergency Radios in America
Waterless Toilet
One of the most overlooked problems in a prolonged blackout is… what do you do with waste? Modern plumbing relies on electric pumps, and if you’re not connected to a septic tank, you could be in for a nasty surprise after just a few days.
A waterless portable toilet with a composting system gives you a clean, safe, and reusable solution. It helps keep your shelter sanitary and odor-free, and the resulting compost can be used to fertilize non-edible plants if needed. Most importantly, it drastically reduces the risk of illness and contamination—a very real danger when the grid is down and basic sanitation systems fail.
Final Thoughts
When the grid goes down, there are a lot of powerless items that have the power to help you survive. Simple things like a portable wood stove, cast-iron Dutch oven, and fire extinguishers have immediate use potential, to get you through the grid being down for a few days.
If the grid is going to be down for weeks or you’re staring down the barrel of a prolonged disaster, food preservation items become must-have items. This includes things like a charcoal/wood-fired smoker, fermentation crocks, and salt.
Of course, the longer the grid is down the more wood you’ll need to harvest and process. That’s where things like a hatchet, ax, splitting maul, or even a hand saw become necessary survival tools.
The biggest mistake you can make is neglecting the importance of water. Make sure you have access to a stable and safe source of clean, healthy water. This portable water generator can help you in any circumstances. Find out what it involves and how you can set it up at home or even at your bug-out location.
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7 Powerless Items You’ll Need After An EMP
This Is How You Will Survive The Next Big Blackout (Video)
These 20 States Will Go Dark This Summer. Do You Live in One of Them?
When a Strike is Imminent… Do This First
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