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| Animal Farm Do-It-Yourself-- Homesteading & Self-Sufficient Living |
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07-29-09, 12:18
| #1 (permalink) |
| Researcher  Join Date: May 2009
Posts: 296
  |  Living Off the Grid: A Dozen Skills to Get You Through Living Off the Grid: A Dozen Skills to Get You Through From the Discovery Channel website: http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/colony/o...id/living.html How Solar Cooking Works As those appearing in the show “The Colony” know, you don’t need an oven to cook a good meal. All you need is sunlight. The sun’s rays can heat food anywhere from 180 to 400 degrees Fahrenheit (82-204 degrees Celsius). In other words, a solar cooker can kill harmful microbes and make food and water safe for consumption. Read more about his simple technology and how it’s being used. How to Start a Fire Without a Match There are many different ways to start a fire without a match and plenty of different methods to make it happen. It all depends on your location and the materials available. HowStuffWorks has a whole slew of cool ideas, using everything from a soda can and chocolate to making a fire plow. See detailed illustrations and instructions in this article. How to Build a Shelter We all know that shelter is one of the most basic needs in any survival situation. Yes, it protects us from the elements and wildlife intruders, but perhaps provides psychological comfort, too? In this article from HowStuffWorks, author Chuck Bryant shows the basics of making a shelter using on-hand materials. Read more… How Emergency Power Systems Work In this article, learn how emergency power systems can help in almost any situation. Topics include understanding your power needs and goals, working with the resources you have and showing the difference between an inverter and a generator. Read more… How Hand Powered Generators Work There's one way to generate electricity that never runs out of power and is easy to carry: a hand-powered generator. It's the “gadget” that can power all your other travel gadgets – but for those living in “The Colony” – it’s essential. Learn how they work, how to use them and even how to make your own. Read more… If I kill an animal, can I eat it raw? Let’s envision for a moment that you haven’t eaten for a few days and you don’t have the resources to build a fire to cook an animal you just killed. Can you eat it safely? If not, are there some animals that OK to eat and others that aren’t? Read this HowStuffWorks article to find out. What’s the universal edibility test? There are more than 700 varieties of poisonous plants in the United States and Canada alone, so how can you tell which are edible and which are potentially toxic? Use the four steps outlined in the universal edibility test and you may prevent potential disaster. Read more… How can I tell if a bug is edible? Ever accidentally swallowed a bug? Some of us might have joked about it (“Mmmm … protein,” you say). But all over the world, people eat insects every day. It’s called entomophagy. In a survival situation, how do you know which bug is edible – nutritious, even -- and which can make you sick? Read on to find out. 5 Ways to Snare Dinner in the Wild If you are used to being in remote places, you might be pretty adept at recognizing telltale signs of nearby animals. Droppings, tracks by a nearby watering hole, chewed up plants. But we’ve got 5 really cool tricks for snaring dinner, using fairly easy-to-come-by resources. Read on… How to Find Water in the Wild To maintain good health, the human body needs a minimum of two quarts of water per day, according to U.S. Military Field Manual 21-76. In a survival situation, that might be tough. There are some basic ways to find, filter, collect and store water, however. We’ve got the answers here. How to Send Smoke Signals Let’s put it this way: The Boy Scouts of America still teaches smoke signaling. So if it’s easy enough for a 12-year-old boy to do, you can learn the skill, too, right? Learn how to send specific messages in one-puff, two-puff and three-puff style. Read on… Top 5 Everyday Items You Can Repurpose in a Survival Scenario Whether you’re living in “The Colony”, just survived an airplane crash or are caught in a freak winter storm, there are five basic items that might come in handy in a survival situation. The first one on our list? You might be wearing it right now. Also Discovery channel has a new series called The Colony which airs every Tuesday at 10p.m. ET/PT here's a summary of the show taken from http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/colony/about/colony.html What would you do in the wake of a global catastrophe? How would you find food? Water? Shelter? The Colony is a controlled experiment to see exactly what it would take to survive and rebuild under these circumstances. For 10 weeks, a group of 10 volunteers, whose backgrounds and expertise represent a cross-section of modern society, are isolated in an urban environment outside Los Angeles and tasked with creating a livable society. With no electricity from the grid, no running water and no communication with the outside world, all the volunteers have to work with are their skills and whatever tools and supplies they can scavenge from their surroundings. Experts from the fields of homeland security, engineering and psychology have helped design the world of The Colony to reflect elements from both real-life disasters and models of what the future could look like after a global viral outbreak. Over the course of the 10-week experiment, the Colonists must work together to build the necessities of survival, such as a water-filtration system, a battery bank that powered their electricity, a solar cooker, a shower system and a greenhouse – and even some niceties (a coffee maker!). |
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