Advice & suggestions welcome!

greenspun.com : LUSENET : TimeBomb 2000 (Y2000) : One Thread

First, I'm banking on not having running water & electricity for some time...long enough that the dirty clothes will pile up. Please offer specific suggestions on what you are doing to clean clothes, wring out & dry (during the winter).

Also, any idea how long a small propane cylinder will last (hours) and approximately how long a can of gas (for Coleman gas stove) will last?

Thanks so much!

-- I'm (with@titude.now), June 23, 1999

Answers

A small propane tank (I forget - 18 ounce?) will light a double-mantle lantern for about 20 hours on minimum light, 5 hours maximum. It will light a single-mantle on minimum light for about 30 hours.

It will cook 1 cup of beans (soaked 8 to 10 hours in 5 cups water) to eating consistency 7 times. (That is, seven DIFFERENT containers of beans!) Cook on the lowest heat the stove will do without flickering.

-- bw (home@puget.sound), June 23, 1999.


Put clothes in a bucket, barrell, tub or whatever add liquid detergent ( it will dissolve in water better than granular) Use toliet plunger to agitate clothes Put clothes in another bucket for rinsing and then wring out by hand or invest in a wringer. Wear plastic gloves or you will have infected, raw bleeding hands. Hang clothes up to drip dry.

-- Carol (glear@usa.net), June 23, 1999.

A commericial mop bucket with wringer (from Sams or an office supply store) will work for squeezing the water out after washing...Thanks to whoever put this great idea on a few weeks ago...

-- BiGG (supersite@acronet.net), June 23, 1999.

Sportmans guide at www.sportmansguide.com has a nice little unit that will wash six pounds of clothes via manual pressure and agitation for 39 bucks. Might make life a little easier.

-- M.T. Jewell (av8r_99@hotmail.com), June 23, 1999.

local salvation army sells bundles of clothes for $3 and has 50% off sales on occasion. bales usually have 60-70 items, usually t- shirts/sweatshirts. that is 2.5 cents a shirt. wear a shirt 3 days ro more and you have a year's worth of shirts, laundry-free, for under $4. storage space is not a problem for us.

but I don't expect laundry to be a problem. I did mine without detergent all through college to save money and I did my own by hand when I was in travelling overseas. not a big problem if you have plenty of water. our place has a stream if we're too lazy to use the hand pump.

I recommend securing your water supply, and not just for laundry.

worst comes to worst, just stop washing altogether. the stink won't kill you.

-- Gus (y2kk@usa.net), June 23, 1999.



"worst comes to worst, just stop washing altogether. the stink won't kill you."

No, but the germs might. Wash hands regularly under these conditions. A few of the large bottles of hand cleaner/disinfectant might help.

-- besureto (wash@your.hands), June 23, 1999.


I too worried about laundry. So, I bought a 'Wonder Washer' (just put the phrase in a search engine), hand crank 5lb washer (small, but takes care of most things). It is a pressure utilizing washer so needs very little water to work. Then, I went to ebay & purchased 2 antique wringers to use (approx. $30 apiece). I then went to kmart & bought wood clothes racks (the expandable kind that I used years ago) for about $7-8 each. Hope this helps, good luck!

-- Sammie Davis (sammie0@hotmail.com), June 23, 1999.

For wringing out clothes - put a hook on a 2x4. Wedge the 2X 4 on the backside of two adjacent trees. Twist.

There is a "rocker" washer that is used in third world countries. I have seen a picture of it on the web somewhere. It is a big tub with rockers on the bottom. Guess you can step on the rockers to create agitation in the washer. You could probably also put them in a lidded barrell and roll them down a hill. (just kidding.) Still have to rinse, though.

-- marsh (armstrng@sisqtel.net), June 24, 1999.


At some point, depending on availability of water, everyone's tolerance for unwashed clothes will probably increase by default. Cool weather will help....

-- Tom Carey (tomcarey@mindspring.com), June 24, 1999.

Lehman's sells both the rocker and the wonder washers c

-- Chuck, a night driver (rienzoo@en.com), June 24, 1999.


A 5 gal plastic bucket with a hole in the center and a plumbers helper....or an old time butter churn. Check with a local janitorial supply for a squeeze hand clamp "wringer" or if they would get you the roller type. You can get a metal tub at the hardware store and use a wash/scrub corragated board. Put up a clothes line and have plenty of clothes pins.

It will be the undergarmets that are of greatest concern. Outer garmets would not need a wash every day. Stock up on the undergarmets now esp for the kids, with some larger ones for next year. Try to have a backup/redundancy on all equipment for washing, cooking, protection etc.

As a kid on an Oklahoma farm during the depression my parents and grandparents were mostly self-sufficient. Not much money but enough to eat and to share. Grandma fed the hobos who rode the rails. The track bordered one side of the 40 acres. To clean clothes she used a big metal kettle out back. She kept a small fire under it and used a wooden pole to stir. She made her own lye soap and it was strong stuff. We had two big gardens and canned for the winter. A smoke house for the salted meat. All the common animals...horses, cows, sheep, hogs, chickens and grew all of their feed. Grandpa hunted small animals in the woods and would go to Polecat creek and "noodel" fish barehanded. A fish bladder was my childhood balloon. Most of the fish were catfish or carp. He used a pole at the lake nearby for crappie and brim and bass. Everyone in the family had their special "chores". Every Saturday was "butter and egg day" when we went to town for spices and treats and sometimes some swapping. I remember things like the Victrola wind up phonograph and the two hole outhouse and grandpa cussing the mules and the front porch swings and climbing the fruit trees and sliding down the cellar door. I helped grandma churn the butter and grandpa weed the garden. It was a good time and place for a young boy to be growing up.

Now I am retired and living in Phoenix and wishing I had Well's Time Machine.

The following is a letter written to Karen Anderson and was in my e-mail from Karen ....it will be on the Dear Karen website soon. In so many ways it reminds me of my own upbringing just before the war.

Dear Karen,

When I was a young girl (8 or 9) I spend a lot of time with my grandmother and grandfather. They lived nine miles from the nearest town. There was no television in their house, no phone, no indoor bathrom, no refrigerator, no electricity.
Basically...all you had was a house, uninsulated and without any modern conveniences. When we wanted water, we hoped that the wind had blown sufficiently to turn the windmill, which ran the pump, which filled the large tank outside. We kept an good eye on that tank. If it got low, we did not water the garden and took sponge baths.

How did we exist in such a place? Very nicely.

Refrigeration was an icebox in which we put a large block of ice, purchased once a week when we went to town. To cook, we used a wood stove, then later graduated to one that used kerosene. To iron our clothes, we heated a couple of irons on the stove and ironed with one while the other was warming up.

We had chickens, raised a few head of cattle, fished the creek for catfish. During the summer, we would go to a farmer's market and buy up bushel baskets of vegatables and fruit. Then we would can it all. Our storm cellar was filled with quart jars of food. We milked some cows and churned our butter. We braided our rugs out of strips of cloth from old clothes. We made furniture out of apple crates and quilted our blankets.

Money was in short supply, as it depended (not on social security or welfare) but on whether we got a good grain crop harvested, or sold some pecans, or bartered some calves.

For entertainment we would gather around a battery operated radio for a couple of hours in the evening. We lit up the room with kerosene lanterns a put a little wood in the fireplace to give up what heat we had. We played dominos and talked a lot. We sat out on the porch and listened to the sounds of coyotes across the creek, or watched the stars fall out of a very dark sky.

At night we went upstairs to the sleeping rooms, put on about six blankets, and huddled underneth. It was hard to get up in the morning, as it was sometimes very cold. But my grandmother knew how to arouse us all....she made the most delicious cinnamon rolls, and the aroma of those luscious treats plus the heated kitchen and a pot of coffee, drove us all downstairs. (Incidentally, we also carried down the "honey bucket"...our portable bathroom). That saved us a trip to the outhouse in the middle of the night.

So things were a far cry from "city life" (though at the time we were fighting a war and things in town weren't much better). We washed our clothes one day a week on a rub board with lye soap we had made the previous spring. We hung them out on a line to dry, then the next day we starched the men's shirts, and sprinkled them down for ironing..which took up the next day"s chores. No permanent press. Things were not easy...everyone had work to do. Today's teens might find it all a bit boring, until they found out how difficult it was to be lazy. We had a Y2k situation then too: what it meant was "You Too Kid". We never had time to get bored. We survived by hard work and ingenuity. Sometimes the weather was a problem, with either bad storms or drought. But we survived...and those days made a big impact on my life. They taught me that you CAN make it, under any circumstances.

I am glad I lived through that experience. That is why Y2K fears don't bother me a bit...I have some things inside of me that tell me I can survive..If I am willing to work hard, "lay up" for the lean times ahead, and learn what's really important about life and living. And maybe, because of having survived it all, I can be a steady rock for a much younger generation which has never had my privilege.

Mary in Alaska

-- rb (phxbanks@webtv.net), June 24, 1999.


In the mid- to late 1960s, twenty years into that WWII European recovery Decker keeps bringing up, I did my family's laundry in the tub (including lots of cloth diapers), treading as grapes. (Think Lucy!) After hand-wringing, the clothes were hung on lines over the tub (in the winter, outside in warmer weather). If I had had one of those mop wringers I would have been in heaven. No easy-care, man-made fabrics in those days, lots of heavy cotton, though, and TONS of ironing--ugh!

-- Old Git (anon@spamproblems.com), June 24, 1999.

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