Hi friends,
You know how I love little tidbits of helpful information, so I thought I’d start adding some preparedness and survival tips to my newsletter.
. . . particularly since I found a really cool one while researching simple ways to cook and heat things for the post-apoc survivors in our books.
We all know boiling water and staying warm can both be critical in a survival or disaster situation.
Enter the rocket stove!
You can make one out of a myriad of materials, but the basic design is a U or L-shaped stove that allows scraps of wood to be fed in on one side while lots of air is sucked past the wood and up the chimney side resulting in almost complete combustion of the wood by the time the fire reaches the cooking surface.
Simple ones can be made with discarded cans, #10 cans and large paint cans along with a couple of smaller cans for the fuel and chimneys.
In a pinch, keep a few cinder blocks on hand, along with some kind of grate to hold your pan. A few minutes of stacking the bricks so that the holes in the cinder blocks direct the air flow of the fire, and you can have water boiling in no time. (You do need an unusual H-type cinderblock for the center, or a few extra concrete slabs/bricks to make that center H-shape)
There is a lot of information out there, so I won’t try to summarize it, but now that you know what to look for, I hope you enjoy learning about the topic as much as I have.
What a fun experiment to try building one of the simpler options with the kids!
Have any of you built a rocket stove before? I’d love to hear what worked and didn’t work!
Stay prepared out there, and all the best,
______________________
Misty’s Writing Update:
Now that things are settling down a bit, we’re back to writing the second half of our fourth Storm book.
Thanks for the well wishes from everyone. After many weeks of not-so-fun pain, a final scan finally revealed that all of my troubles were from a host of little rocks trying to escape my body . . . yep, a bunch of kidney stones.
Crazy how such tiny things can cause so much trouble. 🙂
The good news is, once I finally get in for a procedure, I should be able to manage the condition relatively easily compared to some of the other chronic diagnoses that were being proposed.
It’s just made me that much more patient and empathetic for others going through their own difficulties. You’re not alone. 🙂
And since reading books has been an amazing distraction from the pain, I’ll just say once again: Enjoy reading this week!
— Misty 🙂
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