Saving money to buy preps

[Geordie_Rob]

Mort, until a gas leak at my home last year, both the gas & electricity meter were installed inside the house. Now the mains gas is outdoors. If the utility company sent somebody around to cut the supply, I'd simply deny them access until they had a court order & a copper smashing the door down. Although in today's ever increasing police state, I'm sure that would come sooner rather than later. Telephones & Internet access can already be remotely shut off here aswell Mort, however not being able to get online wouldn't risk my family freezing or not being able to cook during a period of low supply. We do have back up options for both of course, however I'd rather keep these for when there is really no choice rather than when the utility company decides I've used enough already.

Dev, my concerns were also about remote access to the meter & either terminating or limiting the supply my house uses. These came a close second to the health concerns you read of on the Internet.

For the avoidance of doubt, my position for the health risks are I really don't know which camp to believe. The safe or dangerous camp. Because of that, I'm going for the side of caution just now until there is more evidence pointing in either direction. I've been in a position where I was popping pills for my skin condition that my doctor said were safe for over 10 years. Now the recommended dosage has been cut by 1/4 & the current thinking is it increases your long term risk of cancer. Like I say, these were hyped up as safe, risk free & generally all singing, all dancing when they 1st came on the market. Now they're prescription only & only after blood tests every 12 weeks to show there is no damage caused. Because of this previous experience, I'd rather wait & see for smart meters than dive right in & regret it.

Scythe, nice to see you back mate. With regards to your solar idea, it's actually something I've considered. Although I don't own the house (council rented), I actually want to get a mains install put in. The council are very supportive as their property suddenly becomes very green (box ticked on some form or another no doubt), however have made perfectly clear they won't put a single penny towards it. It has to be self funded as the free install companies won't touch council houses. As an alternative to this, I was looking at a small scale diy setup. A few panels on the shed, a bank of batteries inside the shed linked to an inverter & then a cable running to the house to power some appliances. For this though, I'm not sure it it would ever be a positive thing financially. If it was, it'd take years to pay back rather than a couple of months for the bulbs. Obviously mains solar also takes years, but that supply's free electricity & also the feed in tarrif payments to cut the payback period down. Something not available on diy jobs.

I've looked at the smaller solar phone chargers & that. It's something I want to get as part of longer term preps so if anything did happen, I could try to wean my kids off gadgets rather than have them cut immediately & altogether. While some argue that gadgets (iPads, consoles etc...) are a bad thing, I think they're good for child development as it gets them thinking for problem solving, increases reaction speed & I think helped massively improve my daughters hand/eye coordination when she played the nintendogs game on my wife's ds when she was about 18 months. For the weaning comment, I mean keep it as an entertainment item rather than because they're addicted to it. They both read a lot, however no light in the evening = no reading. They also play board games together but no light in the evening = no games. At least with a solar charger they could top up the battery during the day & play during the evening. By the time the electrical components packed up altogether, hopefully they'll be more used to the idea of limited resources compared to now in these times of plenty. Obviously any sort of emp & we'd be buggered, but I'm happy to take that chance. But going back to saving cash, if I did buy them, I'd definately use them now rather than keep them hidden in a cupboard somewhere.

No gas? How do you heat water for washing? Or do you have an electric shower? We have a gas powered combi boiler & the shower is linked to the hot water supply so we pretty much need the gas I'm afraid. But thank you for the suggestion. We do indeed have an open fireplace (currently blocked with a metal plate & an electric fire - never used, just because my wife thinks it looks pretty) however there is also a mains gas pipe runs down the chimney from the boiler from the old gas fire that replaced the original coal fire. We are looking to have this pipe removed as its now redundant, however I still favour the wood burner rather than the open fire purely for safety. I'm happy to lose a bit of heat output in exchange for a physical barrier between the flames & my kids. For the wood to power it, my work friends boyfriend works as a joiner in a small furniture factory & they do dumpy bags (1 cubic metre bags to those not familiar) of mixed wood offcuts for £20. Some of it is cheap pine, however mostly it's good chunks of hard wood. I think a couple of bags should see me through the winter & supplement (if not mostly replace) the mains heating nicely. The house is very well insulated already & I plan on getting the chimney insulated aswell if we do get a wood burner installed. I want to get secondary glazing put in (we already have allegedly d rated double glazing in the house) but the additional secondary glazing will be more to cut noise from outside than to save heat. We have cable broadband along with our tv package & the fixed phone comes as part of the package. What we spend on the broadband & phonecalls though, we save from our mobile bills. At 1 point our mobile bills were getting on for £50 a month each. Now it's down to between £5 & £10 per month each on pay as you go. I also have a mobile wifi dongle @ £15 a month, but I use that for when I'm at work so it pays for itself in the sense of I'm not using my mobile phone bill for data.

Air rifles. Looks like that's all i'll be allowed since I don't think my shotgun & rifle application went well. The copper (well police staff, not even a proper copper) was hostile from the start during the interview & pointed out that the police view me as "anti-police" due to the fact I've reported what I thought were bent coppers abusing their powers. Never been charged with any offence & only been arrested for a driving offence - later the charges were dropped when I took the driver improvement course, but that doesn't seem to matter to the group of thugs in the black paramilitary uniforms with blue & white battenburg patterns on it. The gun club I'm at still says I have nothing to worry about as they wouldn't of even bothered coming to do the home vist if I was going to get rejected, but I'm not holding out much hope. For feeding my dog with rabbits, there's not many farms or open grass areas around here (I know a few places infested with rabbits but its public land rather than private) so that's a none starter. What we did save a lot of cash for dog food on was mixing between wet food & dry food. Originally she got tinned food from the supermarket daily. Then we added a bit of mixer biscuits. Then we went to the complete dry food every other day. Now she gets dry complete food constantly (her bowl always has food in so she can get it whenever she likes) but we give her meat or fish aswell every few days. She gets that & also any meat scraps left over from meal times from us. It's substantially cut the amount we spend on food (one sack of complete food from aldi is about the same price as 12 tins of dog food, but the sack lasts for about 3 months) & at the annual vet check she is always fit & healthy despite getting on a bit now. If you switch to any sort of dry food though, make sure you increase the amount of water available to the dogs as they'll drink a lot more than they do now. Food for us, I'm hoping my allotment really repays what it's cost me this coming year. I've been a G.Y.O. type for about 6 or 7 years now & with this allotment it's massively scaling up what I've done previously. It's a good job my wife & kids eat plenty veg. It's cost about £800 to get it where it's at now (including rent last year when I got this current plot too late to grow any summer/autumn harvest veg) + its costing me £105 for 3 tonne of local authority compost delivered for my raised beds, so I really need a few years produce out of it in return now otherwise I'll have to consider letting it go as a financial failure. I'm sure it won't come to that though, I have faith in my growing skills.