- 3 days ago
Hector Vladimir
Category
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TechTranscript
00:00Hello, today is Wednesday, December the 31st, New Year's Eve.
00:05It is a cool morning, about 29 degrees Fahrenheit right now.
00:10I would like to today record the much-anticipated and awaited book.
00:15This is not a book, this is an audio recording, of course.
00:18More of a condensed audiobook on Living Off the Grid, the strategies of Living Off the Grid.
00:24As you may know, I have already written and also made a podcast about the rationales to live off the grid.
00:33Those are basically your reasons to want to and go ahead with an off-the-grid lifestyle.
00:40I've spent considerable time and resources on that book and those recordings.
00:45I will put the links on the show notes or show description that you can find and go to.
00:52That would be a precursor to this recording.
00:57So I would highly recommend you go there and read or listen to that book,
01:02which is, again, Living Off the Grid, the rationales, that's book one.
01:06So to begin, I'd like to just explain what this part of Living Off the Grid is all about,
01:13this recording, this book.
01:15These are basically, again, the strategies to an off-grid lifestyle to actually live off the grid.
01:22These are some steps, not all of them, of course, that would take a lot longer than this recording will be.
01:29But these are basically some of the strategies that I have thought about and also practiced over the last 10 years or so.
01:37Again, many of them are lived experience, practices, actions, decisions, trials that I have done over the years.
01:45And a lot of them work very well.
01:48Some of them don't work as good in many occasions, many instances.
01:52And some may or may not work exactly the same for you, of course.
01:57Every situation will be slightly different.
02:00Many will be very different.
02:02For example, depending on your global positioning location, your home location,
02:08your sites where you reside, your state, your city, the weather, the climate in your area may be a lot different than mine.
02:17So the strategies may vary, but a lot of them can be adjusted to your location.
02:23And I will try to also include several scenarios, locations, several situations, especially when it comes to weather conditions.
02:33So, again, these are some strategies to actually live disconnected from the very harmful and abusive utility services that I have mentioned in the past,
02:44which are connections to your water, service, connection to your food, service, or sources,
02:50connections to your energy, the providing of shelter, and also telecommunications.
02:57I will focus on those mainly, mainly because those are the most costly and therefore harmful,
03:04not only to your finances, but I believe to your health, to your freedom, to your likings,
03:10meaning your preferred way of life, the preferred things that you would like to be doing,
03:15are all hampered, are all harmed, I believe, by these connections,
03:20many of which are forcible against your will.
03:24Compulsory.
03:25All of these connections, many of them, most of them, I believe, can be attained freely.
03:30Not only freely, as far as cost, but also with your full control and will,
03:37without your will being forced or being cornered, being highly manipulated by the entities,
03:43I call them the entities that provide these services.
03:47And I will go through those that have gone through those in depth,
03:49as far as what those entities are, what services they provide,
03:53and how their services and the cost for these services are abusively high,
03:59not only high, but abusively so, and they, again, are harming, harming your finances,
04:05your freedom, your freedom of choice, freedom of expression, even your physical freedom.
04:11They, at the very least, curtail your physical freedom,
04:15your freedom to do exactly what you want with your time, with your resources,
04:19with your efforts, your money, they don't only curtail that,
04:22but they manipulate and force you to basically enslave yourself economically,
04:29at work, as a wage slave, to provide those entities with a huge amount,
04:35a huge percentage of your wealth, your resources, your funds,
04:39and not only that, but your time.
04:41Over a lifetime, it's unspeakable, the amount of resources and efforts and time
04:47and energy that you will provide, you will hand off to these entities.
04:53And living off the grid are, again, strategies to free yourself, mainly.
04:58To free yourself, free your time, free your finances, your economic resources,
05:05your time resources, your energy and physical material resources, freedom,
05:11and to free yourself, so you can use those as you see fit for you and your loved ones
05:17and your family and friends, people around you, even people far from you
05:22that you may or may not know so much.
05:24You can impact those people as well with greater control over, basically, over your life.
05:31You will have more control over all of the resources that are there for you,
05:37that should be there for you, available, freely available,
05:40because you are a human being deserving of basic services and resources
05:45that are necessary for life, happiness, and comfort.
05:50Not only just life, you shouldn't have resources that are freely available
05:53only to keep you alive, like if you were in a life support machine.
05:57No, you should have resources freely available for you to thrive,
06:02for you to feel comfortable and happy, healthy, and to do and make and build with.
06:08So it goes beyond the very basics for life.
06:11It goes into health and happiness as well.
06:13Those resources should be available to you without you being forced
06:17to continuously and perpetually pay for them.
06:21So with that quick introduction, I will jump into strategies
06:25as to how to live a disconnected or off-grid lifestyle.
06:30I will skip over the definitions of what off-grid is,
06:34of what disconnected means, of what the utilities actually mean.
06:40All of that stuff is already included in my earlier precursor book and recording.
06:45Check those out so you can learn what the grid is,
06:48what the advantages of being off-the-grid are.
06:51There are many.
06:52And basically, it took an entire book to go through those.
06:55And the reasons why it is advantageous, hugely, immensely advantageous to live off-the-grid.
07:03And this is through not only reasoning, but also lived experience,
07:08not only by myself, but by many other thousands and thousands of individuals
07:14just here in this region of the world, the United States,
07:18but also around the world, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people
07:22are enjoying the benefits, the freedom, the power of living off-the-grid.
07:27And I would like to share those benefits with you
07:31by telling you some of the strategies, some of the steps,
07:35some of the technologies that are required.
07:38And some of them are optional, but many of them are required to live off-the-grid.
07:42With that, here is the recording.
07:46Hope you enjoy, share, and like if it's something that you value.
07:51And make sure that you do share with friends and family and others
07:55if you find it valuable.
07:57Thank you very much.
08:00Welcome back.
08:00I have organized this book into basic needs that people, humans, you and me have,
08:07and how to take care of those needs, to satisfy those needs while living disconnected from the grid.
08:15And those needs, of course, are a few basic needs.
08:19The most important, of course, we have a lot of needs as people,
08:22but I will list here the basic biological, physiological, and psychological needs
08:28that most of us have, that all of us have, I would think.
08:31And apart from air, breathing air, of course,
08:33is probably the most important resource that we need,
08:37the most important need that people have.
08:40You cannot go more than maybe a few minutes without taking a breath of fresh air, clean air.
08:45And as of right now, luckily and thankfully, that is freely available.
08:49It is so abundant and so basic that, thankfully, they haven't,
08:54those people that would like to make money off of your needs,
08:57haven't figured out a way to force you to pay for it.
09:01As of right now, so I won't discuss that basic need.
09:05But the next most important basic need that people have is water.
09:10Drinking water, there is no need to explain why you need it.
09:13I mean, we're made of the thing, so we need to be consuming it,
09:17perhaps pointing to our fishy past, our fishy ancestry out of the waters.
09:23So we need to constantly be replenishing our bodies with water.
09:26As I said, we're about 70-plus percent water content in our bodies.
09:32So we need a constant supply of clean water, and that should not be curtailed.
09:37That access to that water should not be curtailed by payments, money, funds, wealth,
09:42by your prestige, your social status, your nationality, by race, religion.
09:48Nothing should curtail your access to water.
09:51The water that you and I are made of and that we need to drink constantly has been here around long before we were actually a living organism.
10:00It has been here before life itself.
10:03Fresh water is fresh water.
10:06You can drink it straight from its source with very little, if any, harm through contamination, etc.
10:13It can be relatively easily cleaned and disinfected and filtered and consumed.
10:19Even water that is not perfectly clean could be consumed relatively safely.
10:25And your access to that should not be curtailed.
10:27It was, up until not too long ago, something that should not be charged for as a custom,
10:34basically as something that most people agreed with.
10:37But now that has changed.
10:39Water is considered now a commodity to be bought and purchased,
10:43especially here in places that have modern economies that have evolved to sell just about everything,
10:49to block access to it by selling it to the people that have the necessary funds to buy it,
10:55basically curtailing it, limiting it to only the people that have the funds to buy it.
10:59So you're cutting out whoever doesn't.
11:01And that is not only immoral, but sinful if you want to bring in religion and faith and all that.
11:07However, we have gone away from that.
11:10The merchants are in the temple.
11:12They are selling basic life-giving needs such as water.
11:16And unfortunately, our access to water is even more limited, especially that of clean water.
11:22Those have been given away, basically, by our governments to multinational or large, bloated, corrupt corporations,
11:32such as Coca-Cola, Nestle, Pepsi-Cola, and others.
11:37And those companies pay very little for large amounts of water, access, and to rights to basically sell it to you.
11:44While most of us, just mere residents, citizens, are curtailed, very heavily curtailed,
11:51even forbidden from taking water from bodies of water, natural bodies of water that people have nothing to do with,
11:58meaning that they have not built or made lakes, rivers, ponds, and underground wells
12:06or underground pockets of water, reservoirs.
12:09Those are largely off-limits, especially in areas throughout the modern world.
12:15And that is outrageous.
12:17If you ask me, it's unspeakable.
12:19And we must demand to have the right to access that water, that life-giving water.
12:25However, you should not have to have a job and an income to live.
12:30Not having a job should not be a death sentence.
12:33And you should not have to depend on others that work and have an income to live.
12:38That's not only sinful, but immoral, and it's outrageous in all kinds of ways.
12:43Think about it for three seconds.
12:45If you have any kind of reason, you will come to the same conclusion.
12:48You should not be sentenced to a death punishment because you will not, cannot work and make an income.
12:57There is a repertoire of reasons why people will not, could not, and choose not to work and make an income.
13:05You may also work without an income.
13:07You may also work with very little income.
13:09You may also be exploited and get barely enough to where you can barely purchase even life-giving water.
13:15And that should not be a limiting factor.
13:18Your income level or your ability to make an income to begin with.
13:22Again, if you think about it for three seconds with half of a brain, you will have to come to that conclusion.
13:28Otherwise, you are basically an ogre.
13:31A pig-headed, psychotic, crazed, sick monster that has no kind of sympathy for any other person.
13:39And unfortunately, our modern economies are filled with these people, where they have zero care to what happens to the next person, their neighbor.
13:48And they hoard and charge for everything they can so they can get a Maserati or a six-bedroom mansion or a pool in their backyard.
14:00The grid has no limits, no bounds, seemingly, especially here in the Americas.
14:05So the first strategy to living off the grid with your water resources is to collect it, to gather it, to, as they call it, harvest it from nature.
14:15First and foremost, a direct way to harvest water is through rain.
14:19Of course, rainwater is among the cleanest.
14:22It goes through a filtering process naturally when it evaporates and falls back to Earth.
14:27Especially if you live away from any kind of polluted city, rainwater is the most clean source.
14:33You can have rainfalls throughout most of the habitable places on Earth.
14:40You can collect it with simple items such as buckets, holes in the ground that collect water.
14:46You can collect them with just about any item that will hold water that is watertight.
14:52You can expand on that, make the collection area of your water collector a lot larger, a lot more covering, that collects a lot more rain in less time, collects more water.
15:05If you live in an area that gets little rain, that's exactly what you want to do.
15:09You want to collect as much as possible in the short time that it does rain.
15:12And you can get intricate.
15:14You can stay simple.
15:15You can stay basic.
15:17And you can be very advanced.
15:18You can collect water from your home's roof through a gutter system to channel that water to a huge or large or even a medium-sized bucket tank.
15:29I myself had a 2,000-plus-gallon collection tank.
15:34And I channeled my roof water, runoff water from the roof via a gutter and some piping right to that water collector.
15:44It stayed full.
15:45This area gets plenty of rain.
15:47And you can do the same.
15:48You can do something less, a lot smaller, collect less water.
15:52I collected too much water to where I was not able to use it because we do get enough rain here throughout the year in this area in the southeast U.S.
16:00And, again, you can put out a bunch of 5-gallon buckets in one area, maybe about 10, 20 of them, open them up when it rains.
16:08And you probably will get enough water for weeks to months just with that one rain instance and collecting of that water.
16:16You can treat the water with basic chemicals such as chlorine, chlorox, 8 drops per gallon of unscented bleach.
16:26Look that up online, see exactly what the treatment level is.
16:31The treatment strategy is with chlorine.
16:33You can treat it with other chemicals.
16:35Of course, very little chemical is needed because, again, you will be consuming that so you don't want to overpower or contaminate that water with a bunch of chemicals, with a larger amount of chemicals.
16:46So you've got to be very careful not to put too much chemical.
16:49You need just enough chemical to keep bacteria at a low level in that water so it can last a long time.
16:55Make sure that your containers are extremely clean, as clean as possible.
16:58And make sure you collect the water in an area that is not polluted by air pollution.
17:03Of course, when the rain falls, it's going to collect whatever pollution is in the air and stay in the droplets, and that's what you're going to be drinking.
17:10Of course, there are other strategies to cleanse that water, to filter that water.
17:16A simple filter could be just a cloth filter, just a piece of cloth, and just run the water through it and put it in a container as it goes through it.
17:25Of course, you would have to clean that piece of cloth.
17:28Several layers probably would be better, most likely will be better than one.
17:32The type of cloth, of course, matters.
17:34The thread count, how small the items that could pass through are.
17:38And, of course, they've got a repertoire of different types of filters that you can purchase, you can get with basic items.
17:46You can just have a sock or a few socks as a filter.
17:50You can have a few cotton t-shirts as a filter.
17:53You can get a lot more intricate and spend some funds and money on very advanced filters made from some stones or minerals.
18:03Salt is a good filter, I believe.
18:06Also, some minerals, like some stones are good filters.
18:11So, find out.
18:12There's too many types of filters to go through.
18:15There are also filters you can purchase available from your local store, hardware store.
18:22Walmart, Home Depot, Lowe's, Ace have pitchers that you can filter water with.
18:28Of course, you have to spend money on the filters, but even then, even when you spend money on filters, it may be a lot less than spending money on a water connection.
18:38Cities and municipalities have found ways to charge very high prices for water, and they have been allowed by your government to do this.
18:45There's very little most of us can do, other than just petition and hope for the best with the way your government makes decisions.
18:53So, the next best thing is to just cut off and not get a water connection, a utility water connection, usually from your city, your county, your municipality.
19:04And, again, those are pretty high, per my experience, and per reports, credible, very credible reports.
19:12I have put some of those in my last book about living off the grid, book one, The Irrationales.
19:17And, from my experience, I remember paying hundreds of dollars every few months.
19:22I would say over $100 per month, and this was years ago.
19:26This was about close to 20 years ago now.
19:28I remember paying over $100 per month for water connection for a small family from the city.
19:34That, in today's money, probably would be about more than double that, maybe about $250 for a water connection at an apartment building.
19:41Let me know what your experience is with that, if you do live in an apartment or other place where the water is painfully high in cost.
19:49But, I'm willing to bet it's over $150 or more in a lot of places, mainly large cities per month, which is criminal for a very basic need.
19:59And the water that you do get from them is usually not clean, not something you want to be consuming off the tap.
20:05It still needs to be filtered and treated before consumption.
20:09So, a lot of people choose to just buy water, thinking that it is somewhat better or a lot better.
20:15But, in fact, most of the water most people buy is straight from the tap as well.
20:19Maybe filtered, but straight from the tap.
20:21Like bottled water you get at Walmart and Kroger and other supermarkets is mostly from a tap somewhere and slightly filtered afterward.
20:31So, don't think you're drinking pure water from those places.
20:34The next strategy for water being off the grid is to collect water from a body of water, meaning from a pond or lake or from a river.
20:44You can pump it out of those places, right to your container, right to your home if you live close to one of those bodies of water.
20:53You can pump them manually.
20:54They have manual pumps.
20:56They have motorized pumps, electric or motored, meaning with a small combustion engine.
21:02Mostly electric is probably the best way to go.
21:04They have many quite durable battery pumps.
21:07Look them up online.
21:08And you can pump water out of those bodies of water, of course.
21:13The water may not be completely clean.
21:15Some may be clean enough.
21:17So, do some testing.
21:19Check it out.
21:19Do some trials.
21:21Drink a little bit.
21:21See how you feel.
21:22Check the water out with a magnifying glass.
21:24Look for particles, moving organisms.
21:27You may want to boil your water before consumption to kill off most of the living organisms that may be in there.
21:34You may want to filter your water, of course, before drinking it, especially if you get it from a body of water that has been collected there over time, usually with sometimes with no flow.
21:45That's just a recipe for collection of contaminants.
21:48The bodies of water, especially in low places, especially around cities, are likely contaminated with motor oil or one of the many fossil fuel contaminants that are always on roads, on cities, on driveways, on the ground that's built from vehicles and other sources.
22:07They will eventually run into these water collection points in low-lying areas, ponds, creeks, rivers, lakes.
22:16And you can a lot of times see those with a film of sheen on the surface of the water, multicolored sheen, shiny surface.
22:25Stay away from that if at all possible.
22:28There may be ways to filter that out, clean it out, but they're quite costly and expensive, and you may not get all of it out of the water.
22:34So if you see contaminated water with films of oil, motor oil, and other types of contaminants, mold and foamy film on top of it, or crawling with life forms, you may want to leave that water source alone.
22:49Go to the next one.
22:51You can pump water out of these cleaner bodies of water and collect them in containers, whether it's tanks, bottles, containers of some sort.
23:01Make sure your container is, again, clean, durable, and preferably made of plastic.
23:07Plastic is many times tough and light, and it doesn't rust.
23:12There may be some metals that are suitable for collecting water, like aluminum and other metals, such as brass or whatever else you may have available.
23:21Copper, maybe as long as it is clean.
23:23And also, it's spill proof, relatively safe to carry around and to store.
23:30Again, stored water should be treated, especially if it's not absolutely clean.
23:35Look for treatments, directions, options, and recommendations to make water potable or drinkable.
23:43Another option is to truck water in.
23:45If you have a pickup or any other kind of truck, you may go out into a body of water that may be away from you, collect the water, store it in a container, bring it back to your place of living.
23:58That is an option.
23:58And then clean and treat the water as needed.
24:01And that will do it for strategies on how to live off the grid with water.
24:06There may be others.
24:07Look for the ones that work for you, depending on the area that you live.
24:11Of course, if you live in the high desert, it's going to be a lot more challenging to find, get, store, clean, and use water than if you lived right by the river where it rains a lot.
24:21Or if you live close to where it snows a lot.
24:24Snow is water.
24:25It's just frozen.
24:26You just get a pack of it and let it thaw out.
24:28And it should be pretty clean.
24:29It's just like rainwater, more or less.
24:31And it may need just minimal cleaning, filtering, and treating.
24:35So again, depending on your area, your conditions, the climate where you live is, how challenging or easy it may be to collect, harness, and access, and use water.
24:46And don't forget to petition your community, government, if the water is abusively high.
24:51Of course, there are strategies to lower your water bill, use less water.
24:55But even when you use less water, a lot of places, they still charge you about the same.
25:00So make sure that you petition and protest when water is abusively costly.
25:07We'll pick it up in the next episode with the next basic need with strategies for it to live off the grid and maintain access and use freely to that need or resource.
25:20Thank you very much.
25:21Thank you very much.
28:00should not be allowed. Somehow it has. In modern economies, food is extremely limited, even
28:07prevented from access by your ability to pay. And that should not be the case. Since that is the
28:15case in most modern economies, you have to gain that access back. At least you should and you
28:22should want to have access to that life-giving resource that is there free for you. So basically
28:30there are people that want to stand between you and your access to food. And they have been doing
28:35that for generations now with their hands stretched out into your face, asking you for funds for you
28:42to access the life-giving resource that is sitting beyond you and the person wanting to get funds from
28:49you for you to have access to that food. Think of it this way. A salesman is standing between you and
28:54a chicken with his hand stretched out, telling you that you should pay for that chicken because that
28:59chicken is in his territory, is in his land, belongs to him. He already ate chicken. And if you want to
29:04eat chicken, you have to pay him or her. That is the situation that you are placed in since birth.
29:11And you need to find ways now, or you should want to find ways to get out of that predicament
29:17to where you can have access to that chicken anytime you want, as it should be. Why? Because it is a
29:24life-giving resource. And your life should not depend whether you can come up with money or not.
29:30So first, growing food, plants, vegetables, fruits. It is a science. It is a skill that takes books to
29:41learn, of course, to perfect and to develop to a high degree. But most of us have the basic knowledge.
29:49Most of us that are developed adults, especially, have basic knowledge about the world and our
29:55environments, about how food is grown, how plants grow, how water, earth, seed could be combined,
30:03basically fruit-giving plant or food-yielding plant grow. And in time, it will yield or bear fruits or seed
30:13or a root that you can consume that has the nutrients, vitamins, minerals that you need,
30:19such as a plantain tree or an apple tree, an orange tree, a lemon tree, grapefruit tree,
30:27a pineapple plant, a potato plant, a yucca plant or cassava plant. I mean, there are countless types of
30:36trees whose fruit, seed and root you can consume, of course. You need to know about these. They have been
30:42passed down for generations since the beginning of time. And most of us should have the knowledge to
30:49grow plants. Most of us live in areas suitable for plant growing, yet we don't take advantage of it
30:55because we simply don't have the freedom, the space. We simply, many of us, most of us don't have the
31:01knowledge or kept from that knowledge or discouraged from that knowledge. And that is a travesty that
31:08should change if you are indeed in that predicament, which is not only dangerous, but also unhealthy.
31:14And bonding meaning keeps you in bondage or as a slave to those that know how to grow the food and
31:21charge you to grow the food for you. The same thing goes with farming animals, pigs, sheep, rabbits,
31:27chickens, turkey. You can farm animals as well. Goat, sheep, again, animals that you can eventually
31:34consume after you slaughter them or harvest them as they call it. And you should have access to these
31:39two types of food, plant and animal, which basically constitutes agriculture. You can learn to a high
31:46degree, become an expert, a professional farmer, agriculturist, botanist. You can grow food on the ground,
31:53on the earth, on other materials, on water. You can grow plants in your backyard, in an empty field.
32:03There is a lot of places where you can grow food, not necessarily your own land or land that you have
32:09purchased or own. So do consider that. You don't necessarily have to own the land. You can borrow it.
32:16You can grow in a piece of land where there is no one there watching or living it or constantly
32:22guarding it. Again, there are many areas of the world where people live that you can grow food,
32:26all kinds of food. Depends on the area, of course. Depends on the climate, the weather,
32:30the amount of rain and sun that that area gets. So you should study that. Become familiar with
32:36types of food that you can grow, how to grow them. I won't go into details on how to do that.
32:40Plant a seed in the ground, basically. Wait for it to grow and pick the fruit or seed or root
32:47once it's ready. It may take months to over a year, sometimes more than a year, two years,
32:55to harvest fruit or seed from a tree, from a plant or a root. But it is a lot more secure than
33:06depending on someone else's goodwill and someone else's acceptance of your funds that may or may not
33:12be there. You can farm animals for food. You can farm animals in your backyard, somebody else's land,
33:19rented land, borrowed land, some open field, open land with no ownership. You can hunt animals that are
33:26wild, that are living in the wild, that need no farming. They grow on their own. They multiply and
33:32grow on their own. You can harvest and hunt those animals. Deer, boar or wild hog. There are many,
33:40many wild hogs here in the U.S. and other parts of the world that are basically fair game, sometimes
33:46year-round. And I hear it's okay eating. It's pretty good eating. So check it out. Also, preserving food
33:56is also a skill you must learn because a lot of times you have to harvest more food than the one you can
34:02consume right away. More food than the one that you can readily consume. So you have to, that meat that is
34:08now dead and not being maintained fresh. You have to conserve it, pre-serve it. There are many ways
34:14to preserve food in the past. There used to be spices and salts that were used. Now in modern days,
34:20it's mostly refrigeration, mostly freezing. And for that, you need energy. You need to have access to
34:26a freezer or at least a refrigerator. That takes funds, resources, and energy to have and to maintain.
34:33So I will go into that a little bit later on refrigeration. You can keep meat under ice,
34:38not necessarily all the way frozen, but cold enough so it can last longer than perhaps a few days.
34:44But freezing the meat solid through removing heat from it with a freezer is the best and longer
34:51lasting option. As long as you can keep that freezer running, which now with electricity is
34:57something that is a lot easier to do. Maybe it may be something that you choose not to do because it
35:02is so energy intensive, but it is an option. You may preserve your food with minerals such as salt,
35:09and you may go back to ancient techniques of preserving food with cinnamon and other spices.
35:16You may choose to do that. Check it out, find out about it, see how it's done, what you need to purchase,
35:21what items, what ingredients, spices, etc. And you should be able to preserve meat, especially.
35:29The strategy to have fresh meat is not necessarily the best, but a good strategy, I would say,
35:37is to let the meat preserve itself. Keep the animal alive, whether it's farm animals or game,
35:44and slaughter harvested when ready, when ready to consume shortly before, maybe less than a day or two
35:51before. I have seen other ways to preserve meat is also to dehydrate it, to let it dry,
35:57and you may want to find details about how to do that exactly. But I believe cutting the meat in thin
36:03slices or steaks and letting it dry out in the sun, given that you do have access to sunlight, warm sunlight
36:10is one way to dry out the meat. Again, minerals may help the hydration process and the drying of the
36:18meat. So find out about those details and good luck preserving of meats. Same thing with vegetables,
36:24there are ways to preserve the vegetables. Best thing is to consume as soon as you harvest or collect
36:30the vegetables and fruits or shortly after. Refrigeration is one option, energy intensive option,
36:36and drying it is another option. But also by putting spices may be an option, I'm not really sure about
36:44that one. But the best option is to consume as soon as you harvest or shortly after. This applies again
36:50to fruits and vegetables. Fruits may last a bit longer since usually, sometimes, many times fruit
36:56have a protecting layer that preserves the inside like peel or skin, they call it sometimes. And you may
37:05keep fruit around for days to sometimes weeks with no problem. So check out the details on how to preserve
37:12food such as veggies, fruit and meats. I would like to discuss a few simple technologies to preserve
37:22food. First of them is the icebox, which of course would replace a conventional refrigerator, electric
37:30or gas refrigerators. There are LPG or propane gas refrigerators out there in addition to the
37:36conventional electric plug-in refrigerator. So an icebox is nothing but a cooler. Basically,
37:42a container that is, of course, watertight and insulated. It would have to have some sort of
37:48insulation so it would hold the temperature better than just a simple container. Likely double walled
37:54and with some sort of foam or insulating material in between the walls of the container. More like a
38:00cooler. So an icebox refrigerator is nothing but a big cooler, a large cooler where you can just
38:06replenish with ice. The ice would either be on the bottom most likely of where you store the food,
38:14where the ice sits on the bottom and the food sits on top. Maybe with some sort of racking system or
38:20shelving system like a grill, metal grill or some other platform that readily transfers the cold
38:27temperature of the ice to the food being stored. So the only thing I can think of is basically thin
38:33plastic or metal. Metal, I believe, is probably more effective at transferring the cold temperature.
38:40And most likely a grill would probably be the best idea. And keeping your food there, of course,
38:47it's not going to freeze the food. The food will only get as cold as the ice and no more than that.
38:53So it won't be cold enough to freeze, but it will be cold enough to slow down the decomposition process
39:00or preserve the food at least a day, two days, three days, sometimes even more if you keep the lid
39:08sealed shut for this icebox. Refrigerators back in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and even the 1950s,
39:17a lot of them were iceboxes. That's where the term icebox comes from. It's basically a refrigerator.
39:24Sometimes they did look like a refrigerator, sometimes like a chest freezer, but a lot of times with
39:30sliding or swinging door, refrigerator, single door, double door, and they had ice within the
39:37refrigerator. That's why they called it an icebox. There was usually an ice block that was delivered
39:43via service routine or daily service. Not daily, maybe perhaps every few days, every three to four
39:49days. There was an ice block delivered through your doorstep by a ice person or ice delivery person.
39:55That was their job. And you purchased this service for a monthly fee, weekly fee, however it was
40:01arranged. And this ice block was placed on the bottom of your icebox, which was basically an early
40:08kind or type of refrigerator. And you kept your food cool, not extremely cold or frozen, but cool.
40:14And you can do the same in modern times today. You can do the same now. You can have, let's say,
40:20a small refrigerator and just put ice blocks. It's kind of hard to come by ice blocks unless you have
40:27a freezer and freeze an ice block yourself. An ice block, of course, is going to last a lot longer.
40:32And its temperature, its cold, cold temperature is going to be a lot longer lasting than a bag of ice,
40:38for example, that has ice nuggets, smaller chunks of ice pebbles, whatever you want to call them. And
40:44the block is solid. It has no space in between the smaller chunks, so it can lose the cold or gain heat.
40:54So it lasts a lot longer. Of course, you have to have a way for that melted water to drain out.
41:00Sometimes you just collect it in your icebox, such as, you know, when ice melts in a cooler,
41:06just the water collected on the bottom. The water stays cool, so it does help to keep the water in there.
41:12So the temperature is kept a bit longer if you do keep the water, rather than draining it out.
41:17But of course, whatever is in there is going to be a lot more humid. So that's something else to
41:22consider. You may want to drain the water out if you want to keep your food slightly less humid and
41:27with less condensation, I guess, inside. But that is basically a primitive and basic electricity-less
41:33technology for refrigeration. And also you can consider a LPG or liquid propane gas refrigerator.
41:41They are out there. They're out there for sale. And you may consider one of those for purchase.
41:46Yes, they are a lot more expensive than your conventional plug-in electric AC power refrigerator.
41:52And they are a lot less available. You have to go to a specialty store, specialty seller or provider
41:59to get that. Usually online, you can have one delivered to you for a fee. So it's going to cost you
42:04a lot more. Last time I looked for one, it was a couple of thousand dollars for one medium-sized LPG
42:11refrigerator. I've never had one, so I can't really tell you details about the operation and how
42:16well they work, perform and last, how long they last. Any safety concern, I would believe there may be
42:22slightly more safety concerns. With gas lines, especially if you keep it in your living area,
42:28such as your kitchen, you have to worry about gas lines and gas tanks, which are of course potentially
42:35flammable and even explosive. So those are all factors to consider for refrigeration. The next and
42:42last technology, basic electricity-less technology I'd like to discuss is the refrigeration method called
42:50the terracotta refrigerator, which are basically two terracotta pots. The terracotta pot is basically
42:57a pot made of terracotta, which is the material that is kind of like, it's a type of stone, but it's
43:02quite fragile. You can't tap it too hard. You can't let the pot fall. It'll break and shatter. So you have to
43:09get two pots, one large and one pot that fits more or less inside of the larger pot. And in between the two
43:16pots, you have to put a material such as sand, cotton, or any similar material. I've seen people
43:22probably where they use sand, thin gravel, and cotton I've seen them use. Perhaps there are other
43:29materials, dirt that you can use. It's a material that can readily soak in water and allow it to drain
43:37and evaporate. Terracotta also does soak in the water and it does sweat and evaporate. That's why
43:44terracotta is used. I can see it used also with maybe concrete pots or stucco pots. That material
43:52readily absorbs water and allows it to evaporate. And the concept behind it is cooling through evaporation,
44:00basically what refrigerators do to cool. They cool the air within the refrigerator and even the freezer
44:07by extracting the heat from that enclosure through evaporation, basically by allowing a liquid to
44:16evaporate and absorb that heat and release it. So for that, refrigerators of course have a series of
44:23high pressure valves that spray the ammonia or other chemical or other gas that it may be circulating
44:30through its system, which is basically a series of tubes. And as it evaporates when it is pressured,
44:38when it is sprayed basically through this high pressure valve, it extracts heat. And that heat is
44:44then dumped by that same tubing on the outside. And I have explained how refrigeration works. Do look for
44:53that video. Perhaps I'll put that link on the show notes for this show. But that's the same concept used
44:59in the terracotta pot refrigerator or cooler. It's more like a cooler because it extracts heat very slightly
45:05and it maintains a cool temperature, perhaps to be used for keeping vegetables cool, keeping items that
45:12need to be cool, cooler than the outside temperature, than the ambient temperature. Not necessarily for
45:18keeping food cold or freezing. It won't work for that. And it also needs to be in hot and dry
45:24environments. That's where it works best. Humid environments, I've tried it and it does not work.
45:29And this terracotta pot, of course, there's a larger pot that goes on the outside. A smaller pot goes on
45:34the inside and in between you put the material such as sand and you place the smaller pot within the larger
45:40one with the sand in between, of course, and it's going to allow you to have a small space all around
45:47with sand where you can pour water in and soak the sand in with water. I would try different amounts
45:54and see which amount works the best and check it out. You can build it within minutes if you have the
46:00correct materials and the pots. You can put a lid on the smaller pot where you put the food. You can line
46:06it with some sort of fabric or any kind of other material, plastic, to keep food clean and keep it
46:13cooler maybe. There are some materials probably that allow it to remain cooler. And voila, you have a
46:19basic electricity-less cooler where you can keep perhaps medicines if you live in a hot area. If you
46:26don't use air conditioning or don't have air conditioning available, these are all options. The
46:32icebox and the terracotta pot, those are both two electricity-less technologies that I want to discuss.
46:40And those are for food preservation. Another technology I'd like to discuss very quickly,
46:46actually I will leave that for the next episode because it deals with shelter and here I'm focusing
46:53on food preservation. Thank you very much.
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