Let me kick this article off by saying that I am in love with heat shrink plastic window insulation film. In the past I’ve struggled with insulating windows by using window insulation tape and taping up clear plastic. To tell you the truth, I absolutely loathed the idea of putting it up because it’s so difficult to make a tight seal and even if you are able to make a tight seal, you can’t see out of the window very well because it’s full of wrinkles and it’s just not that clear.

This time we decided to do it up right and install Frost King window insulation kits. This stuff is so much fun to install that when we were finished installing it, I was left wishing that we had more windows to do.

How To Install Heat Shrink Window Insulation

You don’t have to be a bonafide handyman to install window plastic insulation. You don’t even need many tools. Below you’ll find the tools and supplies that you’ll need for this job.

• Window Insulation Kit
• Utility knife
• Scissors
• Small bucket of water and a rag
• An electric hair dryer

Video Instructions For Insulating Windows For Winter

Once you’ve got the necessary tools and supplies rounded up, you’re ready to begin a fun and rewarding home improvement project that will really pay of in terms of energy savings.

1. With a slightly damp rag, wash the entire window sill to make sure that the tape has a clean surface to stick to. Here’s a tip that wasn’t included in the instructions. In the kitchen, no amount of wiping was getting the window sills clean enough for the tape to adhere properly. I assume that this is because of the greasy residue that is often left behind while cooking. After washing the kitchen window sill with soap and water, the tape stuck really well. The most important thing to remember about this step is if the tape doesn’t stick really well, it will pull off when you start heat shrinking the do it yourself window film.
2. Apply the double stick tape to the entire perimeter of the window seal making sure to press firmly to ensure good adhesion. The instructions for the Frost King insulation for windows that we were using said to wait 15 minutes to give the tape time to bond with the window sill.
3. Measure the window that you will be insulating making sure to add about an inch to each side so that when you stick the plastic insulation film to the double stick tape, an inch of the film hang over the outer perimeter of the tape. Then cut out a piece of this energy saving window film using the measurements that you just took. We used scissors for this because we didn’t want to accidentally cut into our carpet with the utility knife.
4. Carefully remove the top covering of the double sided tape to expose the sticky side for the plastic insulating film to adhere to. Here’s another handy tip. We found this to be the most difficult part of the project. For some reason we had a really difficult time getting as hold of the edge of the tape’s covering without pulling up the entire tape. We found that using the sharp edge of a utility knife, it was easier for us to get a hold of just the covering of the tape.
5. Hold the plastic window film up to the freshly exposed double stick tape and press one corner of the window, press the film to the tape. We found that it was easiest to firmly adhere the clear plastic window insulation to either the right or left side of the window first. Then we did the same to the top edge. Then we applied gentle pressure to the bottom and other edge of the film to stretch out as many wrinkles as we could before pressing these edges firmly in place. Don’t worry if you don’t get it really tight or you can’t get all the wrinkles out. You’ll see why in a minute.
6. Next, you turn your hair dryer on at its highest setting and use it to blow heat onto the clear window film. Move the hair dryer around just like you were drying you hair and you’ll see the film start to shrink and get tight. This was my favorite part! As if by magic, the film will tighten up and the wrinkles will vanish right before your very eyes!

After applying this product to our windows we could feel in immediate improvement. It was quite obvious that no more cold air was leaking through our windows. In my opinion this is the best way to insulate windows because the product makes an air tight seal and after using the blow dryer the film was wrinkle free and actually clear enough to see through!

I love this stuff and I highly recommend it. Now, I just can’t wait to see how much doing this saves on our daily electricity consumption. I’ll be providing more information about how much it actually saves us in a couple of day. If you’re interested in seeing the results, click here: Ways To Save Money On Electricity.

We lived off the grid for many years but we recently purchased another house so that we could document the process of making this old home energy efficient and show you all how to make your home green even if it’s not off the grid.

We’re working with an old 1979 manufactured home that is using around nearly 3600 kilowatts of electricity per month and doing some DIY energy savings improvements on the house to bring down that power bill. Our goal is to eventually take this house off the grid but until then, we’ll be collecting data about how the improvements we make to the house impact our total energy consumption.

The More The Merrier!

Instead of just making our home more energy efficient, I’m challenging you all to join us and make changes to your own home to make it more energy efficient. We’re reading our power meter on a daily basis and recording how many kilowatts of electricity we use each day. Then we’re reporting the results of our efforts in this article.

Here’s a handy form that I’ve made up for keeping track of our home’s daily power consumption. Feel free to print it out an use it to keep track of how much electricity you are using in your home.

Let Us Know How You’re Doing

Of course I’ll be keeping you all up to speed on our results but I’d love to hear from those of you who chose to join us. If you like, I’ll even report your results here at BooneyLiving.com as well.

Send me an email at patty@booneyliving.com or leave a comment on in the form at the bottom of this page to let me know how you’re doing with this challenge!

Since the only source of heating in our new project home is a forced air electric furnace, we decided to take a close look at the heating ducts to see if we could make any improvements to them that would reduce our heating costs.

When my husband crawled under the house, he made some shocking discoveries! Our home is a double wide manufactured home and if you know anything about these types of homes, you know that when they are transported on the highway they are separated into two halves to make them narrow enough to fit on the road.

When they are delivered and set up, the two halves of the home are connected to each other and a big flexible air duct called a “crossover duct” is used to connect one half of the home’s heat ducts to the other. When my husband inspected our crossover ducting, he was shocked to find two bowling ball size holes in it. I’m afraid to even guess how much of our heating dollars have been going towards heating the crawl space under the house. I’m sure it was a lot though.

After poking around under the house for a bit longer, he discovered that the HVAC plenum (the metal duct that connects the furnace to the homes ducting system) had some big holes in it! Well, they weren’t actually holes. The problem was shoddy workmanship of the person who originally installed the HVAC air duct system.

My husband said that it looked like they measured the plenum incorrectly when they were making it and instead of correcting it, they just installed it the way it was figuring that no home owner would be crazy enough to actually crawl under the house to discover the defect. The way it was set up, there wasn’t an air tight connection between the plenum and the duct work. This meant that when the furnace blower kicked on, a significant portion of the heated air didn’t make it into our heating ducts. Instead, this air was leaking under the house and heating the crawlspace.

After he made these discoveries, we headed straight to the hardware store to stock up on some duct sealing supplies. In the list below, you’ll find the supplies that we purchased as well as their costs.

• One gallon of HVAC mastic – $11.95
• One roll of fiberglass duct sealing tape – $6.45
• One roll of foil duct sealing tape – $11.99
• One paintbrush for applying the HVAC mastic – $1.48
• One pair of heavy duty rubber gloves – $4.09
• One 10″ x 25′ flexible crossover duct – $42.99

The total cost for the supplies to seal the heating ducts only came to $35.96. If you add the cost to replace the crossover duct, the total cost was $78.95.

Why Sealing Ductwork Is Important

In a forced air heating or cooling system, the furnace blows air under a considerable amount of pressure into the heating duct system. This pressurized air flows through the HVAC ducting looking for a way out. If your home’s duct system is built well, the only place for the heated or cooled air to escape is through the heating vents inside your house. If it has leaks in it, the air that you are paying to either heat or cool will escape through any hole it can find. Since heating and cooling ducts are often located in crawl spaces, basements, and attics, you are paying to heat or cool areas of your home that you don’t normally use. This results in less treated air coming out of your vents and increased heating and cooling costs.

Using The Right Tools For The Job Is Important

I know that it seems perfectly logical that if you have leaky ducts, you should buy some duct tape to seal them up but this just isn’t the case. When most of us think of duct tape, we think of the gray cloth backed tape that is famous for being able to fix anything. I find it quite ironic that, duct tape isn’t really that great when it comes to actually fixing leaky ducts. If you use it to seal your leaky ductwork, it’s inevitable that it will dry out after a few years and fall off or start leaking again.

That being said, there is some premium aluminum foil duct tape that is actually designed for sealing ducts. You can use this specialty foil tape for sealing small leaks in heating ducts. Keep in mind that if you choose to use this tape to seal small leaks in your ductwork, make sure that you clean the area well and that it is completely dry in order to get the best adhesion from the tape.

This foil tape is better than the cloth backed duct tape but duct seal putty or mastic is even better. This is especially true when you have a gap of over and 1/8th of an inch that you need to seal. This is where the fiberglass duct sealing tape comes into play. This stuff looks like the fiberglass mesh tape that is used to hide the seams when applying drywall

To seal these larger gaps, you’re supposed to spread out a layer of the mastic, embed the fiberglass mesh tape into the wet mastic, and then apply a top coat to completely cover the fiberglass mesh.

Applying duct sealing mastic is a bit messy but it’s water based so it washes off easily. My husband actually preferred it to the foil tape because he felt more confident that the repairs he made to our ducts would last longer by using it. One of the characteristics of this product is that mastic never actually hardens so when your metal ducts expand and contract, they are less likely to develop leaks than if it actually dried solid.

Summary of The Repairs We Made

We replaced the damaged crossover ducting, we sealed the leaky plenum, and we sealed the joints that connect the ducts to the registers that deliver treated air into the house. I’m not sure if this was the correct way but to seal the heat register joints, my husband just took handfuls of the goopy mastic and smeared it across the joints. This is the only way that we could find to seal these areas because we had to remove the register and snake our arms down inside the ducts to slop the mastic on the joints.

Hopefully taking the time to seal our leaking heating ducts will pay off in the form of a significant reduction in our homes total energy costs. I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t since there were some areas that were obviously leaking pretty badly. They’re not leaking now so that expensive electrically heated air will no longer be heating up our crawlspace.

Disclaimer: We’re certainly not experts in HVAC. The steps outlined in this article are the steps that WE took to seal the ducts in OUR house. If you are concerned about making sure that this kind of repair is done perfectly in your home, hire an HVAC professional to do the job. The purpose of this article isn’t to teach you how to seal ducts but rather explain why it is important to do and what supplies we used to seal ours.

Want Some More Of The Good Stuff?

Thanks for taking the time to read this article. Be sure and check back on the progress of the BooneyLiving Energy Conservation Challenge. In the meantime, if you’re interested in conserving electricity, you might want to read this article: How To Reduce Your Alternative Energy Costs

The purpose of this article is to document our real-life energy conservation case study and show you how we were able to take this old house and convert it into a green home that is very energy efficient. We’re calling this case study the “BooneyLiving Energy Conservation Challenge“.

Unlike most of the articles here at BoonelyLiving.com, this one will be constantly evolving so it will be important for you to check back often. As we make improvements on the energy efficiency of this old house which result in us using less electricity, I’ll pop back into this article and bring you all up to speed on our progress. When we make a particular change to the house, I’ll also write a new article that describes how we actually did what we did so that you can do the same.

Some Basic Information About The House We’re Using For This Case Study

The house is a 1979 double wide manufactured home. The total square footage of the house is 2492 but 500 square feet is an unheated attached workshop. All of the windows are the old drafty single pane type. All of the appliances are electric and fairly new with the exception of the furnace. We have no idea how old it is but it is also electric and it is the forced air type. The only energy saving measures that were in the house when we bought it were compact florescent light bulbs.

We Knew It Would Be Bad But Not This Bad

We bought this house as a project to use for our case study on improving the energy efficiency of an old home and we expected that the first few power bills would be high but when the mailman delivered our most recent bill we were shocked! If you can believe it, the bill was $414.60!!! Can you believe that?

The bad news is that it’s no fun to have to pay a power bill that is over $400. The good news is that this means there are probably a ton of things we can do to lower our costs. This is after all what we were hoping to be able to do with this house. Make the changes and report the results to the readers of BooneyLiving so that they can make similar changes and hopefully experience similar savings to their power bill.

A Look At Our Most Recent Power Bill

We’ve been living off the grid for the past 8 years so as you can imagine, it was quite a shock to us when we saw this bill. If you’ve read my article on how to read an electric meter, you know that the power company bills you for each kilowatt hour that you use. According to our most recent bill, our home consumed 3676 kwh’s of electricity over the last 34 days! That means that we’re currently using an average of 108 kwh’s per day.

Now granted, January is one of the coldest months of the year so we should expect to pay more during this time of year but I think we can bring our daily power usage way down.

To get a jump start on lowering our power bill we’ve recently done the following things:

• We lowered the temperature on the water heater from 160 degrees F to 125.
• We turned off the heated drying setting on the dishwasher.
• My husband crawled under the house and took some time doing repairs to the heating ducts. Click here to learn more: How Duct Sealing Can Reduce Heating and Air Conditioning Costs.
• We thoroughly cleaned out the furnace blower and motor.
• We replaced the furnace filter.
• We lowered the setting on the thermostat to 65 degrees which even feels a bit hot for our comfort level.
• We lowered the temperature setting on the clothes dryer from high to low.
• The pump house for our well had a small electric space heater running in it all the time to prevent the pipes from freezing. We installed a temperature sensing switch that will automatically turn the heater on if the temperature falls to 38 degrees F and off when it gets to 50 degrees F.
• We disconnected the little auxiliary water heater that is under the kitchen sink. The purpose of this appliance was to provide instant hot water for beverages like coffee, tea, or hot chocolate.
• We installed window insulation film on our drafty single pane windows. Here’s a link to the article where I explain how to go about doing this project: How To Insulate Windows and Reduce Heating and Cooling Costs.

How We’ll Be Measuring Results For Our Case Study

My husband made a spreadsheet to keep track of how many kilowatts we are using each day. We’re manually reading our meter everyday and we’re tracking this data in a spreadsheet that we’ll use to graph the impact the changes we are making are having. In order for this data to be meaningful we’ll need to collect it over a long period of time. If the temperatures next month are warmer than they are this month, it wouldn’t be entirely fair to assume that any decrease in our power consumption was entirely because of the changes we made. It could also be because the outside temperatures were lower which would mean that the furnace wouldn’t be running as much. To make sure that we have meaningful data for our case study, we’ll be tracking our daily power consumption for at least a year.

I’ll add a chart to this article after collecting data for a couple of weeks so you can check back and see the results of our efforts. Be sure and check back frequently to read about any new improvements we have made to the house and what the results of making those changes were!

Please Join Us In The BooneyLivng Energy Conservation Challenge

The more people we can get to join in on this challenge, the more impact we’ll have on the planet and our dependency on fossil fuels. Click here to learn how you can join me in this challenge and do your part to make the world a greener place for us all to live.

We love our lifestyle but we’ve recently been presented with the opportunity to grow and learn even more about living off the grid. This will allow us to share even more helpful information with the readers of BooneyLiving.com.

Let me tell you about our new adventure. We bought another house! We still own our old cabin that we cut our teeth on when we first went off the grid and we’ll visit it often but we’ll be living in the new house.

Why Did We Make This Move?

We decided to make this move for a few reasons. One is that the new house is much larger than our little house on the prairie is which means that we’ll have more room to stretch our legs but that’s not the real reason for making the move to our new home.

I keep saying “new home” but it’s far from actually being new. While it’s new to us, it’s not actually new. It is actually a 30 year old manufactured home. All of the appliances are electric, it’s not insulated very well and we quickly learned that it is currently a real energy hog.

Some of you may be wondering why we chose to buy a home like this if we are concerned about conserving energy and living green. My husband and I actually decided that buying a house like this would make an amazing case study that we could document here at BooneyLiving.com.

Many of our readers are concerned about conserving energy and would like to live off the grid but they don’t have the means to do so. As we document the process of transforming this old house from an electricity glutton to a “lean mean green machine”, our readers will learn great tips that they can use to lower the power consumption at their own home.

As you may have guessed, as of right now the new house is on the grid which will take some getting use to since we’ve been off the grid for so long. This is another reason we chose to buy it. Not so that we could live on the grid but so we could document the process of taking an old home that is quite inefficient in terms of the amount of energy that it uses and convert it into an energy efficient home that will eventually be either off the grid or tied to the grid for backup power.

Don’t Worry, We’re Still In The Boonies

The new house is very similar to the old cabin in the sense that it is situated in the forest so we’re still living in the Boonies which was very important to our family. The old cabin was about 35 miles from town and this one is about 30 miles from town. We were even lucky enough to find a home we’re the property boundary butts up against public land! This means we pay property taxes on 5 acres but have instant access to thousands! This will be ideal for the kind of recreation our family enjoys!

Making this move was very exciting for our family and I’m especially excited to be able to provide a real life case study of the process of making our new home as energy efficient as it possibly can be. Be sure and check back soon because I think you’ll find my upcoming articles very interesting if you’re concerned about living a green lifestyle and saving money on your electricity bill!

I hope you’ll continue visiting BooneyLiving.com and please do tell your friends about what we are trying to do here so that they will pay us a visit as well!

This got me thinking that a lot of people probably don’t realize that choosing to live off the grid doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to give up the miracles of modern technology. Living off grid means different things to different people but it doesn’t have to mean that you spend your days wandering around the woods barefoot with your hair knotted up in three foot long dreadlocks while surviving by eating nothing but twigs and bugs.

Most of us “off gridders” really enjoy using our modern electronic devices to keep in touch with other like minded individuals, learn about living off the grid, or in my case, write about it in my blog. We have learned that we don’t have to give these luxuries up in order to live a green lifestyle. We just choose to power them in a different way. Instead of buying our electricity from the local power company to charge them up, we choose to live a life of self-sustainability and generate our own electricity to run our electronic gadgets with.

Over the years, we’ve picked up a few tips for getting the most use from our electronic devices on the least amount of electricity and today I’d like to share a couple of tips for powering a computer in off the grid settings.

When You’re Living Off The Grid, Less Is More

I’ve said it before here at BooneyLiving.com and I’ll say it again today. One of the key principles of living a green lifestyle is learning to use less electricity. When it comes to electronic devices, there are several things that you can do to get by with less power.

Let’s talk about how those who chose to live off grid can continue using a computer. The first tip is to think smaller. What I mean by this is instead of using a high performance gaming desktop with a huge monitor that consumes a ton of electricity, consider using an energy efficient laptop such as a Macbook Pro that will run for a long time between charges. Making use of devices that use rechargeable batteries is one of the key principals of learning to live off the grid in style.

In addition to buying a laptop with amazing battery performance, you can also adjust various power management settings like the intensity of the screen’s backlight to get the best performance from your laptop’s battery. You can use your laptop while it’s charging and when the battery is fully charged, you can unplug the charger and run off of battery power. Doing this will consume less energy and place less of a demand on your alternative energy system.

Here’s a tip that I find to be quite handy. Whenever possible I like to take advantage of alternative opportunities to charge up my laptop battery. For example, if I’m sitting in the emergency room waiting for my accident prone husband to get stitched up, I’ll plug my laptop in and take advantage of the opportunity to let it charge up while I’m at the hospital.

As portable electronic devices become more and more popular, I’ve noticed that a lot of places offer courtesy charging stations. I highly suggest that you take full advantage of these opportunities to charge your laptop for free whenever possible. Once you get in the habit of looking for these opportunities, you’ll be amazed at how often you can charge your devices up while you are out and about. Doing this means that you can use them at home and they won’t consume any of the precious energy that your solar panels or wind turbines produce.

Another trick you can use is to buy a power inverter and install it in your vehicle. Then when you are commuting to your job or driving around town doing errands, your laptop or other portable electronic devices can be charging up.

Are you starting to get the point? The point that I’m trying to make in this article is that you don’t have to ditch your laptop for a hand carved abacus if you want to live off the grid. With a little creativity, you can minimize the amount of electricity that your portable electronic devices requires to run. Think of it as having your “green” cake and eating it too.

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I sure hope you enjoyed this article. If you did, please take a minute and let your friends know about my website by clicking on the Facebook Like or Tweet buttons located just below the title of this article.

If you did actually enjoy this article, you might enjoy reading some of my other articles. A couple that are really popular right now are How to Quiet a Generator and The Doomsday Preppers TV Show is My New Favorite. If you’re so inclined and you have the time, I highly suggest that you take a minute and check them out.

Today we’ll be taking a look at this matter and I’ll share some tips with you that you can use to start storing water for any emergencies that might come up.

Water storage is one of those emergency preparedness items that is often overlooked because we have become so accustomed to being able to get water from any faucet whenever we need it. The reality that we are faced with is that during natural disasters, there is a very real possibility that you won’t be able to turn on a faucet and get water when you need it. Even if the water continues to flow, there is a good chance that it will be contaminated and unusable.

How Much Water Should You Store Per Person For Emergencies?

According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), at the very least, every family should store a minimum of three days worth of drinking water for emergency situations. This means that you should store at least one gallon of water per day per person. Keep in mind that this recommendation is the very minimum amount of water that they suggest storing.

When it comes to storing water for emergencies, I’m of the opinion that more is always better. Many emergency supplies are costly and it can be difficult to come up with enough money to buy them but water is cheap and easy to store so there really shouldn’t be any excuse for not storing plenty of it.

One thing that many people forget about storing water is that when it stops flowing, your pets will need to drink too. Be sure and store enough water to supply your pets and/or livestock with enough water to sustain them during an emergency.

How Long Can You Store Water?

One of the easiest ways to store water is to buy bottled water because when it is commercially bottled, special precautions are taken to prevent any contaminants from entering the water that might limit its shelf life. If you aren’t storing bottled water and you are filling your own containers for water storage, you should rotate your water supply every six months.

How To Store Water At Home Properly

One of the easiest ways to store water is in empty two liter plastic soft drink bottles. If your family drinks soda, buy it in two liter bottles instead of cans and each time you empty one you can clean it out and store water in it. Here are the recommended steps as provided from FEMA for properly cleaning and storing water in two liter soda bottles:

1. Wash the empty bottle out with dish soap and thoroughly rinse it out. Don’t forget to wash the lid as well.
2. Prepare a sanitizing solution by mixing one teaspoon of non-scented liquid chlorine bleach to one quart of water.
3. Pour the sanitizing solution in the bottle and shake it up really good and don’t forget to sanitize the lid.
4. Rinse the sanitizing solution out of the bottle with clean tap water and don’t forget to rinse the lid.
5. Fill the sanitized bottle with tap water that has been commercially treated with chlorine or well water that you have added two drops of non-scented liquid chlorine bleach to.
6. Tighten the lid while using caution to prevent the lid from touching something that might contaminate it.
7. With a permanent marker, write the date that you prepared the water.

Why You Shouldn’t Store Water In Milk Jugs

Many years ago my husband’s mother learned a tough lesson by trying to store water in old milk jugs. Unfortunately, the plastic that is used to make milk jugs will deteriorate over time and break open. Jeff’s mom learned this lesson the hard way when her emergency water storage containers started breaking open and leaking water all over their storage room.

For this reason, I knew that it was a bad idea to store water in empty plastic milk jugs but while reading about storing water for emergency situations on the FEMA website, I learned that the milk proteins from the milk that was packaged in the jugs can’t be completely removed. If you try to store water in them, the milk protein residue creates an environment that bacteria can grow in.

Where Should You Store Water?

For long term water storage FEMA recommends that you store it in a “cool dark location” to maximize it’s shelf life but let me give you a bit of added advice that could come in very handy. Never store water above storage items that might be ruined if the container happens to leak or break open.

Don’t Forget The Garden!

Many people forget to store water to use for watering their gardens. If you’ve spent countless hours tending to your vegetable garden, it would be a real shame to watch them all wilt away and die while you are waiting for your water to be turned back on. You can store water for your garden in old 50 gallon plastic barrels as long as you have some way of getting the water out of the barrel. Make sure that you have a hand operated pump so that you can get the water out of the barrels and to your thirsty vegetables.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this article on emergency water storage today. This is just one article in my series of emergency preparedness articles. Some others that you might enjoy reading are:

• The Importance of Having a Good Survival Cache
• Don’t Skimp On First Aid Supplies If You Live In The Boonies
• Top 11 Survival Items I Carry When I’m In The Woods

Sources: fema.gov/plan/prepare/water.shtm

Earlier this morning I was thinking back to the things that presented the most challenges for us and I was reminded of how difficult it was to maintain our standards of cleanliness. In visiting with other families who followed a similar path, they conveyed that this was a challenge for them as well.

If you make a clean break (no pun intended) from the power grid with the intention of building as you go, you won’t have many of the “conveniences” that you’ve come to rely on. These conveniences may include: a washing machine, a dishwasher, a big hot water heater, and a nice tub or shower.

When we took the plunge and went off grid, we had to do our laundry in town, we got our hot water from the 5th wheel’s little 6 gallon water heater, we washed our dishes in the sink in our 5th wheel, and we showered in the 5th wheel’s tiny shower.

At first, our new lifestyle felt like an extended camping trip but we soon realized the importance of maintaining proper hygiene standards. We weren’t equipped well for this when we first started out but we were able to manage to keep things clean by following some strict rules.

• Rule #1: Keep plenty of hand sanitizer available – This really came in handy because it could be used to sanitize our hands when our little hot water heater was working to reheat the water in the tank.
• Rule #2: Keep sanitizing wipes on hand – These wipes are really nice because you can grab one in a pinch to wash up with.
• Rule #3: Learn to conserve hot water while showering – We quickly learned that even though we only had a 6 gallon hot water tank, we could take nice showers by turning the water on while we were getting lathered up. Then we turned the water off while we were washing. When it was time to rinse off, we turned the water back on again. You would be surprised how long 6 gallons of hot water will last using this water conservation technique.
• Rule #4: Teach your kids that towels are still clean after showering – It took us a while to convince our children that if they washed up well in the shower, their towels would still be clean after they dried off. We learned that you can save a lot of money on laundry if you get in the habit of hanging your towels up after showering so that you can use them again before putting them through the laundry.
• Rule #5: Always wash your dishes in hot water – Many of you have probably “made do” by washing your dishes in cold water when you were camping but this isn’t ideal for removing germs and bacteria. We had limited hot water available due to the small size of our hot water heater so we learned to heat up a big pot of hot water on the stove to provide an extra supply of hot water while washing our dishes.
• Rule #6 – Don’t lower your hygiene standards – We learned that it was important for our family to insist on maintaining good hygiene standards but we saw others who moved up to the mountain to live off the grid who didn’t do this. At first they were clean but as time went on, they let their standards for cleanliness slip a little here and there until eventually, they didn’t seem to have any standards at all.

Just remember that if you do actually move off grid without having all of the conveniences that you are used to in place a head of time, you can AND SHOULD still do all that you can to maintain high standards of cleanliness. Proper hygiene and sanitation is good for your morale and it will also help prevent the possibility of becoming sick.

Before you leave, why not take a minute and read about how we were able to set up a homemade solar shower. You can read that article by clicking here: Check Out Our Simple To Make Homemade Solar Powered Water Heater Experiment.

If you live in the boonies, it will take longer for help to arrive if you find yourself in need of emergency medical attention. Depending on the nature of the emergency, the outcome of the victim can vary significantly depending on whether or not you are properly prepared to provide first aid while you are waiting for the ambulance to arrive.

The farther you live from town, the better prepared you need to be. Being “prepared” in this case means both having a well stocked first aid kit as well as making sure that you, AND YOUR FAMILY MEMBERS, know how to administer first aid when it is needed.

I Don’t Think Many People Are Properly Prepared

I recently did an informal poll and I asked 10 people that I knew to list the items that they had in their first aid kit at home. I was quite surprised to hear that most of the people that I asked didn’t actually have a real first aid kit. They had some basic supplies like band-aids, and antiseptic but that was about it. If these people were to have a true medical emergency in an area like the one that I live in, they wouldn’t be very well prepared to provide first aid while they were waiting for the ambulance to arrive.

We live in the woods so I imagine that it would take an ambulance at least 20 to 30 minutes to arrive if we had to call them. That’s if the roads were dry, they actually had EMT’s available to dispatch to us, and they didn’t get stuck behind a traffic accident.

Volunteer EMT’s Provide Unique Challenges To Rural Families

One thing to keep in mind is that in many rural areas like ours, the local ambulance company is staffed by volunteers. This usually means that they aren’t always sitting in the ambulance waiting anxiously for the next call to come in. Instead, they carry radios with them. When there is a need, 911 operators will page them and the volunteers who are able to respond will. This means that if you live in a rural setting such as ours, you should expect it to take longer for the ambulance to arrive.

Living way out in the country is a great lifestyle but it does mean that you need to make some basic changes. One of the changes that should be at the top of the list for anyone who lives out in the country is to error on the side of caution and stock up on more emergency medical supplies than you think you’ll need and get some first aid training from a qualified instructor.

Thanks for stopping by BooneyLiving.com. Before you take off, you should read my articles titled: The Doomsday Preppers TV Show is My New Favorite Program, or The Importance of Having a Good Survival Cache.

Today I’ll be writing about how to get your car unstuck when you’ve slid off the edge of the road and you can’t get enough traction to get your car or truck moving again.

Tip Number One – Don’t Panic

When you’re stuck, it’s really important to stay calm. Cooler heads will prevail in a situation like this. If you stay calm and take the steps outlined below, your chances of getting out are much better.

Tip Number Two – Carry a Good Shovel With You

If you do any driving in the snow you should always carry a good shovel with you. I’m not talking about one of these little foldable army surplus shovels either. I’m talking about a real shovel that has a solid handle and good point on it. You might think that a snow shovel would be ideal to carry but this just isn’t the case. When you’re stuck in the snow, you want a heavy duty digging shovel that has a point on it because you might have to use its tip to break the ice up so that you can get some traction.

When you realize that you are stuck, don’t make things worse for yourself by spinning your tires. This will only serve to dig the ruts that have a grip on your car deeper and deeper. The longer you let those tires spin, the more difficult it will be to get unstuck.

Instead of spinning your tires, carefully get out of your vehicle making sure to look both ways for traffic so you don’t get hit by an oncoming vehicle. Then walk around the car and assess the situation. Depending on how far off the road you are, you may have to do a little digging or a lot of digging. The idea is to remove the piles of snow that are holding your car in place so that you can get moving again.

If you slid into a snow bank head first, there will likely be little piles of snow on the back side of your tires. If you try to back up to get unstuck, these piles of snow will act like tire chocks and prevent your vehicle from backing up. Take your time and use your shovel to remove these little snow berms and your chances of getting out go way up.

Now take a minute and look under the car. If there is a bunch of snow packed under your vehicle, you’ll often have a problem getting out because when you try to back up, the snow will catch on things like your transmission, transfer case, or axles. This is where the longer handle of the shovel comes in handy. Having a long handled shovel will make it possible for you to slide the shovel under your car and remove any snow that is preventing your vehicle from backing up.

If you’ve done a good enough job of digging the snow out and you’re not having to back up a hill, you should be able to back out now.

Tip Number Three – Carry Sand Bags In Your Trunk

You can buy tubes of sand at your local home improvement store that serve double duty during the winter. The first thing they’ll do for you is provide extra weight for your vehicle so that you will get added traction over the axles. The second thing they can do for you is provide the necessary traction that you might need to get your car or truck unstuck.

After you have taken the time to dig out any snow that your car is hanging up on, take one of the sand bags out of your trunk and cut it open. Then sprinkle it just behind each of your tires that get power when you push on the gas pedal. If you’re in a front wheel drive vehicle and you’re trying to back out of a pile of snow, you’ll want to sprinkle sand just behind the front wheels and in the track marks between your front and rear tires.

Some people will carry course kitty litter in their trunk instead of sand and they claim that this works too. I imagine it would but I’ve always carried sand in our cars because it weighs more and I want the added benefit of getting more traction over my vehicles axles.

Tip Number Four – Carry Some Carpet Scraps in Your Trunk

You can get some carpet scraps for free from your local carpet store and they can be really useful when you’re trying to get unstuck. After taking the time to dig the snow away from your tires and under your car, place these carpet scraps behind your drive wheels. I’ve found that jamming them behind my tires (carpet side down) and then stomping on them to lock the fibers of the carpet into the snow usually works best for me. Now when you try and back out, your tires will have a dry surface to grip onto so that you can free them from the icy clutches of the snow.

Tip Number Five – DO Rock The Boat

You’ve probably heard the expression, “don’t rock the boat” before. While this may be good advice while boating, a little rocking motion may actually help you when your car is stuck in the snow. Sometimes I’ve been able to free my stuck car by shifting from forward to reverse and then back to forward so as to cause the car to rock back and forth. I make sure that I do this gently to prevent damage to my transmission and prevent me from getting stuck worse than I already am. Note: Use this tip at your own risk. If you damage your transmission or clutch, it’s on you if you choose to do this. Don’t send me a repair bill if you break something in your car.

While we’re talking about the hazards that the cold winter months can present, you might want to take a minute and read, Got Frozen Pipes? What To Do before you leave.