Ironically enough...

 Given that it's been five months or so since my last post, I find it pretty ironic that the last one was about time management.

Short version: I'm pooped. We've been working on the cabin, in fact we've done a huge amount of work since the last time I posted anything, I'm just generally burnt out on the internet and the people who inhabit it. 

Anywho, as proof we're alive and have made progress, here's a snapshot from our security system--we have hardwired internet, cameras, a storage shed, air conditioning, a deep freeze, and a bunch of updates to the electrical system.

I'll post more at some point, but man... the internet is exhausting. I'm sure we're all feeling that way, but I tell you what, after 18+ months of this pandemic, I've had about all the internet I want or need for a lifetime. 

Let's talk time management... (Part 1)

 Alrighty folks... I alluded to this a lot in the last post, and I think it's time we talk about something that comes up surprisingly often: time management.

Amusingly (given the topic), I have too much to say on this for a single post, so this is just Part 1 where I explain the problem.  I'll do Part 2 shortly and talk about solutions and mitigations.  

One of the most common questions I get when people hear I'm building a homestead is some flavor of "but what are you going to do without electricity?" or "aren't you going to miss __________?". I think that this belies a really interesting problem in how people think about sustainability and self-reliance.

So I want to talk about the Amish for a moment.

Shut up, it's my blog.

Most people think that the Amish reject all modern technology, which is completely incorrect. The Amish are, generally speaking, excellent machinists and mechanics, and most Amish communities have a "telco shack" of their own where they keep cell phones, tablets, and other communications devices.  

The biggest difference between the Amish and most people reading this blog is that the Amish look at any new technological development with suspicion. Their default position is "this is probably bad for my community" and then the new technology has to prove it's not.  Compare this to the general attitude of society at large which says "new is better!"  

Think of how many products you see advertised where "new" is a key reason you should buy it. We tend to assume that new technologies are awesome, and then people who push back against that are asked to provide the burden of proof.

The Amish aren't Luddites, they're skeptics.  That's why they have cell phones--being able to communicate with loved ones or call for help is fantastic--but keep them in a phone booth, out of the home and out of their pockets.  That's why they have electric lights, but they keep them in the machine shop--you want good light when you're fixing a diesel engine, but in the home, there's nothing wrong with a more natural circadian rhythm that sends you to bed when you run out of light.

That's a lot of text, so here's a really cute pupper from our last hike:

Ok, so that's a lot of words to say something simple: choosing to live more deliberately, and choosing to opt out of some modern systems doesn't mean you need to opt out of all of them.

You know what's amazing? Not spending your whole fuckin' day just working up the willpower to get your ass out of bed.

I want to walk you through a very real scenario that happens to folks who try and do this. I say this both from experience and from knowing others in the same boat.

First, you start off with lots of energy and drive. You feel like you're doing well, and you make lots of progress quickly--you're out chopping wood and clearing brush, and your camp starts to look less like "camp" and more like "home".  You work long days--up just after dawn, brush your teeth, throw on your work clothes, and get crackin'.  If there's two of you doing this as a couple, likely one of you will get to work first thing in the morning while the other starts making coffee, maybe frying up a couple eggs or making pancakes.

This lasts maybe as long as a couple of months.  But every day gets a little harder and a little slower.  The mornings are cold, and your back is sore from yesterday's work. Yesterday, your back was still sore from the day before that.  Your fingers are dry and chapped from being exposed to the elements all day, and you keep adding more little cuts here and there... your shins are especially rough. Even though you wear pants, it seems like you're constantly finding new little sharp plants you didn't know were so damn common.  Why the hell do so many plants have thorns anyway? Did you choose to put up your camp in the middle of some kind of fuckin' thorn farm?

What ends up happening is that eventually you reach a point where your day looks like this:

6:30am - The sun comes up, the dogs rustle, the birds chirp, the humans go back to sleep

9:30am - The sun has been up for hours, one of the dogs wants to go outside, the humans slowly start moving, pondering the work ahead of them

10:00am - The dogs all want to go out now, so it's time to finally get up. One of you does. Maybe today it's you, because your partner got up first yesterday. Maybe it's your turn to stay warm. 

10:30am - It's time to find clothes and socks--do we still have clean socks? Are my shoes dry yet?

11:00am - The humans are finally dressed, now it's time to start on coffee. Somebody has to go outside and get some water, somebody needs to clean the French press. Are we going to have breakfast today, or are we just going to get to work? You don't even ask the question out loud--you both know the answer is coffee. 

12:00am - The coffee cups are finally empty, the French press only has a cup left but your bellies are full because you haven't been eating breakfast lately, so the coffee feels like a full meal. It's fine, you have to clean the stupid thing again tomorrow morning anyway, so who cares if you leave a cup in the bottom?  Time to work up the energy to go outside and get some work done

12:30pm - You finally get outside and get to work. Despite the slow start to the morning, this part is still fun. The sun is bright and shiny, life is awesome, and the puppies are adorable as they lounge in the sun, watching you haul something or other heavy and cumbersome around. 

2:30pm - You're starting to get hungry, and you're thinking about what you're going to make for dinner

4:00pm - Time to start on dinner. You both need to stop choring for the day because one of you needs to clean up the camp while the other gets cracking on food.  You need to do dishes before you can cook, so somebody's gotta go boil water again...

6:30pm - The sun is starting to go down, you can't get anything else done for the day, and food's just about ready. Time to settle in and enjoy yourselves for the evening.

8:00pm - Sure, it's early, but you're pooped. This was a long day, wasn't it? Time for bed.

Yes, I'm aware that sounds like a clinical depression diagnosis. What, did you think that trying to survive off your own skills and wits in the woods would be uplifting and fulfilling every minute of the day? I mean, it is uplifting and fulfilling on the whole, but nature is hard. Everything is hard when you're doing it yourself.  Everything you have to do is harder today than it was yesterday, and it's going to be harder tomorrow than it is today. 

That "hypothetical" day above (really it's anecdotal) feels like it lasts 14 hours, but you only get a few hours of work done. Those few hours aren't even pushing yourself that hard--you just don't have the gas left in your tank for that kind of push. 

Next thing you know, you're telling yourself "I've adjusted to this lifestyle, this is just how things are out here!", but all your projects are falling behind, and you're not keeping up with your basic needs. 

Alrighty, now I know that might sound a bit sad, so here's something fun and natural to tide you over till Part 2:  ever seen a coyote close-up?

Cute little guy, isn't he?

My word... has it really been four months?

 Apparently, like many things in life, updating a blog is a bit of a pain in the ass if you stop for a bit.  Stupid habits, and their need to be maintained.

The last four months have been a big time. As I write this, we're two days into the Spring of '21, so it's hard to believe that I last wrote a blog post while we still had snow on the ground. Of course, 2021 was a bizarre year in Southern weather--while we didn't have anything like what happened in Texas, we did get 12 inches of snow here in Nashville, and basically couldn't leave the house until it melted.  That was a hoot.

The puppies loved it, of course:

When I look at the photos, it's hard to believe this was just a few weeks ago:

We did have to make some hard decisions between sustainability and convenience, though.  I'll do a follow-up post about this, once I've finished this "hey I'm still alive!" post, because this has been a major subject of conversation in the last four months.  One example is that we swapped out the wood stove for a propane heater for now:

Unfortunately we hadn't stocked up enough firewood, so we were struggling to produce enough heat off the wood stove. We were also getting a bit too smoky in there, so we decided to just pull the wood stove out and plug the hole in the roof for now. We'll put one back in, but for now we're deciding between a better quality wood stove or learning to build a fireplace (and we're leaning towards learning how to build a fireplace).

On the utilities front, we made great progress though! 

Right? That's pretty uptown, ain't it? We've got a ceiling fan, electric lights, and a great battery bank on our solar setup now.  Not too shabby for a couple months' work!

If your brain went "wait, couple months?" then yeah... exactly. Hence why I need to do a follow-up talking about things like motivation and time management.  What, did you think living in the woods is easy? Shut up, city-jerk.

But not really, shit can be hard, man. This isn't all we've done, but it really does start to feel like it sometimes. Looking back on the last few months though, once the weather warmed up, we got a lot done really quickly.

For instance, we built a loft!

Holy storage space, Batman!

We also installed a sink that drains into a bucket:

Indoor plumbing comes later--for now it's just nice to be able to brush our teeth indoors.

And we built a new door:

We wanted a window, and the door we had was entirely too drafty, so we made a new one--two layers of OSB with insulation between. It's pretty snazzy.

We also decided to celebrate Spring by trying out something we saw online--a tankless propane water heater. Again, that follow-up post about time management will touch on this, but long story short, holy shit running hot water is amazing.

I think that about wraps up the updates... I have some great photos of hiking around on the land (we discovered some really amazing rock formations), and I have a couple of other posts planned to show off things we're working on--my woodland mesh network is becoming (in my opinion, at least) pretty impressive, so I want to show how that works.  Of course, I also want to talk about time management (as I've mentioned entirely too many times now), and I want to show off some of the larger purchases we're working towards.

But for now, I bid you farewell! Stay awesome, homesteaders and fantasizers, life outdoors continues to be awesome, even when it's a crapton of work.

Baby it's cold outside

 Ya'll know that winter is cold?

We got snow already! Sure, it was gone in two days, but it still lasted two days. That's longer than snow usually lasts in Tennessee, and it came a lot earlier than it normally would.

While this makes the humans happy, the dogs have mixed feelings on the subject:

It also turns out (and this shouldn't surprise anybody when I say it, but my dumb ass had to learn this the hard way) it's a hell of a lot harder to keep water warm when it's cold as balls outside.

So after completely failing to get a bath hot enough to wash comfortably, we realized we needed to insulate the tub, which is now adorable:

You know the saying--if it looks stupid, but it works, it ain't stupid. Head's up to anybody else who thinks bathing in the woods is a good idea (it is), you're gonna want to insulate your tub prior to November. You'll save a lot of wood for heating, and you'll save yourself the realization that you're a fuckin' moron.

On the upshot, we did get a new critter on camera--a bobcat this time:

Look at that big beautiful bastard. Gorgeous, isn't it? That's my favorite wildlife picture we've gotten since the bear came through.  It almost looks like a ghost because of the lighting, which I think is appropriate for a wild cat.

While I don't have a single photo of the events, Thanksgiving also went beautifully--cooked the whole meal over the fire, had the family come out and spend some time hanging out, and since we were outdoors the whole time and miles away from anybody we haven't already had contact with, we managed to be pretty responsible about it. 

On the whole, I think this photo sums up November 2020 on the Shackleford homestead:

If you give a mouse a cookie

So now that we have internet... what's next?

This is more of a question than you'd expect, because the internet is a 3/4 mile hike away from our cabin.  Even direct line-of-sight, it's a quarter mile away and up a big ass damn hill.

Plus, now the same place that has internet has a ton of electricity--with four hundred watts of juice, we can charge batteries and phones and tablets and laptops, but what are we going to do? Just sit in the grass while we wait?

Hell naw. Enter, "Cafe Telco".  The shack formerly known as Telco Shack has a whole new lease on life.  Check this bitch out:

Bam! Suck on my creature comforts.

See, Mrs. Shackleford sent me a text one day saying "Murphy TV?" and I said "...you're a genius", and she said "shut up and get to building, scrub."

So that cabinet holds a TV, propane stove, some basic niceties like coffee and tea, and has a chalkboard for the front.

Whole thing folds down to make a nice-sized table (it's 32" by 40") and it's plenty level and sturdy.

Now, when we're working or charging something, we can relax, like Mrs. S and the puppies here:

This development pleases the dogs:

We also upgraded the batteries in Cafe Telco, to a pair of big-ass 100 amp batteries:

And things are trucking along nicely:

Make power go

 Alright, so we can get internet, but we have to have someplace to put internet.

Problem is, the internet is only physically available in the furthest possible place on our land away from where we spend our time.  

But it's really good internet (better than we have in the city, in fact).

Enter, Cafe Telco, nee Telco Shack:

Doesn't have to be anything fancy--it's just to hold some batteries and a router and a few other pieces of miscellany.  So the weekend of Halloween, Mrs. Shackleford and I loaded up a bunch of plywood and 2x4s in the truck and drove out to the homestead to put up a 4x8 shack. 

Luckily, something small like this goes together quickly, so in the first day I was able to get the shack built out, and then had the second day to wire it up:

Those solar panels there are 100 watts each, at 12v.  They're joined in series and parallel to bring them up to 24v total, like this:

This isn't my first solar setup, so I was feeling pretty confident about the design. The 24v charge controller that I got will let me run up to 40 amps through it, and since each of those panels can only do 100 watts maximum, that means they're going to max out at about 8 amps, so the idea behind running the panels this way is that I'm currently at half my maximum input, and I can add another two pairs of panels before I max out my charge controller.

Obviously, because I was feeling pretty confident, I had to fuck up on the batteries.

When I was first setting this up, I just had two little 35 amp batteries--those little black fellas there.  I think they're golf cart batteries, actually.

Problem is, I've set up a BUNCH of 12v solar systems, and this was my first time doing a 24v system, so let me show you first what I needed to do.  This is pretty simple:

Right? Nothing fancy, just a simple series circuit with my two batteries. 

Here's what my dumb-ass did because I was in autopilot and wasn't thinking while I worked:

Whoops! That's a bomb.

So after briefly melting one of the battery terminals all to shit--see the end-result below--I corrected my mistake and radioed Mrs. Shackleford to have a good laugh about how I nearly done blowed myself up. 

See that melted terminal in the back, kids? If you ever want to discover how quickly you can move, just accidentally make an explosive arc-welder while miles away from any possibility of help or rescue. 

Good news is that nobody was hurt except for my pride (and possibly my retinas), and the Telco Shack was born. 

The next weekend, the co-op sent out a technician who did a bang-up job wiring the Telco Shack with gigabit fiber!

Hot diggity, we can work from the woods now!

How we discovered trees aren't routers

 So, when you think of Halloween, what comes to mind? Treats, candy, maybe a few adult beverages? How about rushing to the woods to build a shack, outfit it with solar power, and then get internet installed?

I should back up a moment...

So as anybody existing in 2020 or later should know (and if you're coming from an earlier time, I'd love to know how you got ahold of this blog--please send me a letter at Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Public Affairs, Washington D.C. 20505), this year has been something of a clusterfuck.

In fact, calling it a "clusterfuck" is probably too offensive to anybody who likes to fuck in clusters (I'm not hating; not my thing, but you do what makes you happy dude). So "dumpsterfire" is probably more appropriate. 

That sticker now adorns the box I keep my .22 in, because 2020 has two 2s, and my brain is a child.

In preparing for the dumpsterfire that was our election, and the ongoing shenanigans resulting from our country being run by the lowest common denominator, Mrs. Shackleford and I started thinking about what it would take to be able to ditch our city home and run away to the woods for good.

Water? Check.

Shelter? Check.

Food? We have a six month supply, and by the time that runs out we should be up and running with the garden and foraging.

...but what about employment?

See, we're not preppers. We don't think the world is going to end, we think the world is going to continue going largely unchanged except for the continuous downward spiral as unchecked neoliberal capitalism continues to flush us all down the collective toilet.  That means we don't imagine a future where Yellowstone blows up and wipes out the government and everybody's debts and we all just focus on fending off raiders and slavers.  We imagine a future that's just like the present, but shittier and with the government giving even less of a pretense of caring about anybody except the mega rich.

That means jobs. That means remote work. That means internet. 

Turns out the extreme north-easternmost corner of our land is close enough to the nearest power line that a local telecom co-op was willing to put up a fresh pole and run fiber optic to our... trees?

Shit.

Trees can't do anything with fiber optic. 

Join us next week as our intrepid heroes battle to bring a little bit of "grid" to their "off grid" adventure!

We had our first sleepover!

 For the first time since starting out on this project, we had company stay the night! My mom and kid sister came out and stayed with us.

While the Lady Shacklefords had some wine and cheese, I taught the Littlest Shackleford how to carve a pumpkin:

Things turned out pretty well! She was able to handle a power drill with a forstner bit just fine--super handy way to put fun circles and designs on a pumpkin.  If you try it out, just be sure to hold the pumpkin for the little ones.   And be careful with paddle bits--pumpkins don't have enough structural integrity to cause the drill to kick back, but paddle bits throw pumpkin EVERYWHERE.  A forstner is a lot easier to manage, since it doesn't make quite as much mess. 

I really like the way her stars-and-circles pumpkin came out:

A lot of my photos didn't turn out so well, but the pumpkins did! I made a point on this trip of bringing out the good SLR, and then put it under the back seat in the truck to keep it safe during transit.  By the time we arrived, I'd completely forgotten I brought the SLR and didn't remember until we were back in the city and I had a cell phone full of terrible photos.

I'd pretend that wasn't entirely my fault, but it was.

While we were at it, we moved the bathtub out back to take advantage of the new back door we cut in.  The back of the cabin is eventually going to be an enclosed greenhouse, like a conservatory. For now, it's a handy place to keep the bathtub out of the rain!

We picked a heck of a night to have family stay with us--it rained nonstop for 48 hours straight, and our creek flooded:

Nonetheless, the night must go on--and a bit of rain doesn't make all that much difference when you can relax and watch it from somewhere dry:

The weird paddle there, by the way, is the "don't scald your hair off" paddle.  When you've got the fire going, you can sometimes build up a layer of hot water on top of the bathtub.  This thermocline can be severe--the strongest difference we've measured is 120 degrees on top, and 75 degrees on the bottom.  Fahrenheit, of course. Sorry, as an American I don't use proper units for temperature. 

The baths went well. I think it blew Elder Lady Shackleford's mind that she could be in the middle of the woods, in a bath, with a cup of Earl Grey tea:

Pretty sure that was life-changing for her.

Now for the screw-up.

What, you thought this was going to be flawless? Nah, come on--this is our first time having somebody sleep over. 

And our cabin is 8 feet by 12 feet.

And we have three dogs.

And we had two people sleep over, not one.

You may, at this point, be doing the math and realizing that there were more bodies than places to put them. 

Funny thing is, my wife and I came to the same conclusion: "we'll just sleep in the hammock, and let the guests sleep in the cabin".  This seemed like a reasonable conclusion, and we barely even talked about it.

First problem was, our dogs sleep in bed with us, and won't sleep outside. Their line between "outside" and "inside" is really blurred because of the cabin lifestyle, but when we say "ok, it's bedtime" they all climb right up into bed.

Not usually an issue except that we forgot that Nisba, the hound, has a tendency to shove.  When she's really sleeping hard, she will shove with all four legs and push you clean out of bed (technically I should say "she will push Mrs. Shackleford out of bed, because she always does this with her back to me"; I've never been shoved out of bed this way).

So we have my mother and youngest sister in bed with three dogs, one of whom likes to shove the "lady of the bed" out of the bed. 

She shoved them both out of the bed during the night.

Our other "big dog" Tula is a Cane Corso, and she likes to lay on people. We joke that it's her way of keeping people safe.

After Nisba shoved Littlest Shackleford out of bed, Tula laid on her and stayed there through the night. So my mom is sleeping on the floor and my littlest sister is pinned under a dog bigger than her. Two out of four humans aren't having the best time of their lives. 

Meanwhile, out back, my wife and I tried to figure out how to sleep in the hammock together.  Ever tried sleeping in a hammock with somebody? No matter how much you love them, you will not like them during this experience.

Why not just set up two hammocks, you ask? Because we had to fit the hammock under the protection of the cabin. The rain didn't let up until well after our company left. 

So our night was spent climbing in and out of the hammock, my wife trying to set up a bed on the ground underneath it (significantly less than awesome), and genuinely considering just hiking back out to the trailhead to sleep in the truck (decided against it because of the storm). Finally, some time in the wee hours of the morning, I woke up and Mrs. Shackleford was nowhere to be seen.  Checking inside the cabin, she'd finally gone inside and was sleeping at the foot of the bed like a dog, with the dogs reposed regally, enjoying their newfound place at the top of the pack. 

Lessons learned:

1. We need to build a bunkhouse before we have more guests stay over

2. Our dogs are assholes

3. We should build a doghouse

Bonus spooky thing we woke up to:

That's not a small spider.  Hooray October!

Camping vs. Backpacking vs. Homesteading

 Howdy folks!

This week has been spent at the "city house" earning some money, hence why there's no fun progress pictures from the homestead, but we're headed back out today after work...

...Which got me thinking about an exchange I had a while back with a colleague.  I work with plenty of backpackers and avid campers, and my colleague (who is a huge backpacker) was shocked and appalled at my "kit".  He picked up my daybag once, and looked at me with these great big bug eyes like "you seriously carry this much weight?"

So that's something I want to talk about real quickly, because I'm not a prepper, I'm not a camper, and I'm not a backpacker.  Those are all very different things.  Me? I'm a homesteader.

Case in point, here's what it looks like when we're preparing to leave the "city house" to head back out to the wild:

And that doesn't even include the pile of stuff we already keep in the truck normally, like our medkit and tools, or the literal thousands of pounds of equipment and supplies we have out at the cabin waiting for us. Nor does it include the shelves and shelves of reserve supplies we have at the "city house" so that we can up and leave any time our bills are paid up and we can disappear for a while. 

See, we're not packing light. We're packing long-term.  

This is Mrs. Shackleford with a "light" load:

So what's the point of all this? I don't know, maybe I felt like rambling on a Friday and it's fun to pretend I have an audience. 

But seriously, if you're considering doing something like this yourself, here's some advice: ignore backpackers and campers.  Any review you're reading that complains about something being too heavy or bulky, ignore it.  Any video you watch where somebody uses the phrase "ounces make pounds", unsubscribe.

A camper wakes up at dawn and fixes eggs and bacon, then plays in the lake or the woods with their kids until making hotdogs for lunch, and settling in with some beer and s'mores in the evening.

A backpacker wakes up and puts the whole of their worldly possessions in their backpack and hikes off into the wild blue yonder (usually following a proscribed path somebody else more intrepid already made for them). 

If you want to do like we are, your day starts at dawn and you spend the first couple hours making breakfast and coffee, getting dressed, and getting all your shit together for the day. Then, you're going to work your balls off until about 3pm on whatever you're currently building, repairing, or upgrading.  Why 3pm? Because when 3pm rolls around you have no more than four hours of daylight left, which means you've got evening chore-ing to do: better make sure you have wood for the night, supper plans that you can finish before sunset, water for the bath, clean water in the filter bucket for drinking, entertainment plans for the evening.  You can't just go to bed at sunset and wake up at sunrise--hell, half the year, you've got more darkness than daylight. You need to have shit to do, son.  Check batteries, clean dishes, make sure there's no food left out that's going to attract animals. Make sure there's alcohol left so you're not just sitting around dead-sober waiting for sunup (this last part's optional, but I'm no teetotaler and don't expect you to be--as my mom said once, "I'm not going into the apocalypse sober, dammit").  Yeah, the evenings are the best part, because that's when you kick back and relax, but relaxing on the homestead isn't like relaxing on your couch at home--you're still working until well into the evening. 

Campers and backpackers are there for recreation. Backpackers especially are in it for sightseeing.  Also, there's nothing wrong with that! Hell, if you haven't done it, you totally should! We have some of the best sights in the world to see, so go out there and see them before they burn down or flood or get paved. Seriously. 

But if you want to build... If you're not sightseeing, but building a home, you need to remember Peter Zeihan's #1 principle of economics and logistics: moving stuff is hard.  Focus on getting a way to move things, and not just on your back. Into horses? Awesome. Get a horse.  Are you like me, and don't have a place to put a horse when you're not using it? Get a steel horse. They eat dinosaurs and shit pollution, but they can haul a hell of a lot more than you can.  If you're reading this five or ten years from now, and we have all-electric ATVs, change that to "they need solar panels that are made from toxic chemicals, and they support lithium mines in some of the worst corners of the world, but they can haul a hell of a lot more than you can" for the same dramatic effect. 

Once you've gotten over the moving stuff is hard hurdle, don't worry about all those YouTubers and dingbats online who say "you've gotta cut weight, brah."  Focus on getting the most durable version of something you can afford.  You're not hiking--nine times out of ten, you're gonna drag that sumbitch out to the woods once, and then after that, it never comes back out.  So who cares if the first time you drag it out there, it weighs a ton and you work up a cussing sweat? If you don't have to replace it for 20 years, you're good. 

Remember--this is fun as hell, but it's also a ton of work, so don't be shy about having what you want. And don't try to go all minimalist.  Bring stuff purely because it's fun. Bring a boombox, bring a chessboard, hell, bring your drumset if that's what makes you happy. Just solve transportation first, and then any time you see somebody flexing nuts about how lightweight their pack is, remember that while they're sleeping on the ground and eating dehydrated stroganoff out of the same cup they use to make their instant coffee, you're sleeping on memory foam and drinking a Malbec out of real glassware.

You're a homesteader. You're building a home, not sightseeing. Be good to yourself--you worked hard, and earned it. 

Actual advice: water

 Huh, would you look at that?

I made this blog purely as humor, to give some laughs to the good folks over at Hubski who've helped me rekindle a belief that the internet isn't a disgusting wasteland of assholes.  But then to my surprise, I got a bunch of real questions, like "how does your water filter work?"

With that in mind, figured I'd share this with you all. Just in case of apocalypse, this is by far the most convenient way I've found to make a residential water filter.  It's also under a hundred bucks right now in 2020--this isn't a Mother Earth News schematic that says it costs $23 but still lists the prices in 1976 dollars.  

Parts list:

• 2 x plastic buckets
• 1 lid to fit the bottom bucket
• 2 x plastic screw-in spigots
• About four feet of 3/8" tubing (your size might vary based on which filter you buy)
• Sawyer water filter kit, Lifestraw filter bag kit, whichever brand you can find (like this).
• Something to hang it from--trees work fine
• Some way to hang it (I'll give you a few ideas below)
• Optional but awesome: Star San foaming sanitizer (so you can periodically sanitize the "clean" bucket)

The basic idea is really simple.  The top bucket is left open, and is suspended high enough off the bottom bucket to give it good head pressure (most of these filters will take about 3 feet of head in order to function).  Don't make it too tall though! If it's too tall, then you'll spill water all over yourself when you fill it.

The bottom bucket is closed, and has a lid on it. Both buckets have a spigot installed (if you're a homebrewer like me, you can just sacrifice a couple of primary fermentation buckets--I had two spares handy, so I just used those; if you don't brew, the Ale Pail buckets I'm using are only $12 online). 

Connect 3 feet of 3/8" tubing to the spigot on the top bucket, then connect it to the threaded adapter that comes with your water filter.  Screw on the water filter in the right direction (it has a "flow" arrow on it to help), and connect the output tube that it came with (it'll be a lot thinner than your primary tubing because the outputs on these are pretty slow; a "fast" filter takes about ten minutes per gallon).

Either drill a hole in the lid of your bottom bucket, or if you're using an Ale Pail, use the airlock hole that comes pre-drilled. Then, thread the output tube of your filter into it.

If you can't find a filter kit that comes with all the tubing and adapters, don't worry, it's super easy to piece it together.  The white threaded adapter you see in this picture is just a garden hose to 3/8" hose barb. The screw threads on every brand I've tried are the same size as a garden hose, so it makes finding adapters really simple. 

Now all you do is open the spigot on the top bucket, close the spigot on the bottom bucket, and fill the top one with water. Gravity and science do the rest. 

Here's a few tips that I've picked up after using this for the last year:

1. Don't worry about a vent hole in the bottom bucket. The air pressure that builds up is actually really nice. You want the bottom bucket to be a more-or-less closed system so that you don't have to sanitize it too often, so ideally, your hose into the bottom bucket should be a pretty tight fit.  As the bucket fills with clean water, it'll build up pressure, which helps give you some nice water pressure out of the bottom bucket. The air pressure also keeps the bottom bucket from overfilling, so even if the bottom bucket is full, you can top up your "dirty" bucket. As you use clean water, it'll relieve pressure and refill itself. 

2. Don't sit the bottom bucket on the ground--have it elevated, so that it's easier to fill other vessels from it. In my setup, the bottom bucket is hung up too, and it has about 10 inches of ground clearance. Then, I put an 8" or so piece of tubing on the bottom spigot--makes it easier to fill tea kettles and other odd-shaped things without spilling.

3. These filters have to be cleaned out occasionally, so don't glue it all together or anything like that.  Once every couple months, you're going to need to blow out the water filter with clean water (you just flush clean water through it backwards to clean it out).  You'll notice when it's time because the filter slows waaaaaay down.

4. Brand is mostly irrelevant, it's more about what's available.  I've tried Miniwell, Lifestraw, and Sawyer filters.  I found that the Lifestraw is the most thorough--it leaves no "woodsy" flavor in the water--but it's also pretty slow.  The Miniwell is perfectly acceptable, but it left more "woodsy" flavor (you could kind of taste the local flora in the water) and that freaked my wife out.  The Sawyer is by a large margin the fastest-flowing, so that's the one I prefer.  It's almost as good as the Lifestraw in terms of flavor profile, so we've found this is our favorite.   This is also where almost all your cost comes in. The Sawyer and Lifestraw will both set you back $50-$60 depending on what kit you can find. The Miniwell is more like $35.

5. Yes, it really does work. In fact, we've tested the water pre- and post-filter, and we keep water testing strips with us so that we can periodically double-check our results.  No matter what filter we're using, we've been unable to detect anything harmful in our water (it's actually significantly cleaner and softer than our water in the city, which is already perfectly drinkable). 

6.  Ok, last one, but: make your top bucket movable.  I originally just used a ratchet strap to strap it to a tree.  This worked, but it meant that I had to lift up buckets and dump them in.  Now I've upgraded to a hanger I made that has a couple of bolts to hold the handle in place and keep it from slipping.  I find this much easier, because I can take it off the bracket, set it on the ground to fill it, and then lift it up when it's full.  Saves me a lot of creek-water-in-the-face type accidents:

There you go folks! I hope this helps somebody out in the future.  It's not a huge amount of running water, but you'd be surprised how much of your day can be done with a 5 gallon bucket.  We wash dishes, clean our hands, make tea and coffee and juice... it's really very "normal" feeling.  

It's very low-maintenance--we usually go through about a bucket and a half every two days, clean the water filter every few weeks, and Star San the bottom bucket once every three or four months to be careful--and having an essentially unlimited source of drinkable water takes a huge load off both your mind and pack-weight. 

If you ever need it, I hope your apocalypse is full of clean water and happy days. If you want to set this up as an emergency-preparedness kit, you can unscrew the spigots, nest the buckets together, and keep everything inside the buckets with the lid on. Since it all screws together in just a few minutes, this is an awfully handy way to never run out of clean water. 

That's no moon, it's a house!

 Continuing with our plan of "let's accelerate this thing", we spent the following months--as the poets would say--busting our asses.

We set up a table, and realized that having a level surface to put things on will really change your life:

We built a roof over our porch, swapped out our shed-style doors for a single, more solid door:

Why, we even got power and lighting up and running:

 

Yes, things were starting to look pretty cozy.

As time wore on, and we kept heading out to build, things actually started to look like home:

Naturally, watching us build things continued to be exhausting, and the dogs continued their duties:

Which brings us to today--all the rest of the posts on this blog are retrospectives, entered all on the same day to catalog the ups and downs (and really, really downs) that have brought us to where we are. Since I'm basically talking to myself at this point, I make no guarantees about when I'll post more, but I'll try to keep uploading new pictures and updates as we keep moving from "freezing to death in the woods" to "a comfortable homestead."