What is your status with your preps?

[Lightspeed]

I started a reply to this and its kinda grown like Topsy... its now more of a status report. Maybe some useful stuff buried in my rablings for someone though?

Here goes...

Food: Food-stocks now starting to be revolved. We live in a remote location and we now use that to our advantage by intentionally running every-day consumables to a low level, thereby forcing us to dip into stores.....which are logged and then replaced the next time we go into town.

Water: No major changes. We are now easily able to ride out unexpected disruptions to mains supply. Switching from mains to stored water and back again is now a procedure that is well practiced. Well now fully operational, with content estimates at 30,000L. We've discovered pipework that appears to connect between lower level of the well and the main house mains supply...we are investigating if a manual lift pump and isolating stop cock could be viably inserted so as to pump well water into the main house plumbing. For time being this is only an idea as well water has still not been analysed by public health lab, so is only used for irrigation clothes washing and toilet flushing.

Washing ( clothes) recovered and refurbed an very ancient tub washing machine ( 1950s vintage I reckon) worked perfectly when main washing machine was out of service due to water cuts in the summer. Lovely old upright spin dryer recovered at the same time and it too came in handy. Now I'm on the lookout for an old mangle like my grandmother used to use.

Toilets / waste: Dry toilet brought into service during water cuts and worked out fine. I expected problems with smell and flies but all was acceptable. Cesspit system did its thing quietly and without any intervention from me...hopefully it will stay that way for another 50 years or so.

House structure: This year I've been pretty busy. Groundwork and land drains refurbished. Façade and walls refurbished and re-coated. Replaced 4 windows with low tech serviceable double glazed units, fortification of external doors. Painting and decorating to keep things homely. Steel roofing working out fine. After a full 12 months with it in place, the house structure now much dryer, likewise lofts and roofing beams. Snow shedding last winter was impressive reducing the snow load considerably from what it used to have to take. Shit off a shovel is the term that comes to mins as snow is now shot a good 3 to 4 metres away from the house walls. As predicted lost temperature swings are more pronounced, but we've adopted a cold loft strategy so that does not cause any ill effect. In spite of what the doubters speculated, this roof is not noisy at all in rainfall. In fact the biggest noise we get from it is when it expands and contracts with heat/cold...and that's only realy apparent when outside the building

Heating and cooking: Chimneys swept. Main range services and flue re-sealed. Considerable energy put into refurbing the wood-store: reorganised stored wood for better management, added fresh stocks, repaired and refurbished roof, repaired gutters, new saw horse, new chainsaw, new chopping block ( stump). Converted sufficient wood ready for the whole season's burning. I still need a log splitter and circular saw, but have work-around for the time being. Overall fuel reserve is in growth.

Coms: Permanent remote multi-band HF antenna now in place and functioning well. Low power coms tested and proven between my station and preppers from English South coast to Wales and Northern Scotland. Lust summer some interesting experiments made with connection of hand held VHF/UHF equipment through our own internet node.... now family who are more than 100miles away can reach us on our walkie talkies even when the mobile network is down. Current project ultra low power resilient coms net using simple, low cost transmitters and simple low tech antennas.

Transport: Preventative maintenance of cars continues unabated with no expected changes to that routine for the foreseeable future.

Spiritual: A good deal of progress in this area... but only in the alcoholic sense:-)