The Daily Prep: Winter Preparedness Tasks

I’ve been traveling but am home now, a few tasks to accomplish as the weather has definiely changed from mild to extremely cold.  The only snow that we have gotten has been sporadic but in this area we are one front away from getting dumped on by the feet.  A few key tasks that I have on my agenda today are:

  • Drain all gas cans, refill at pump.
  • Run generators, make sure that I turn them off by cutting the fuel source instead of just hitting the off button.
  • Charge devices in vehicles, the jump start / extra power packs.

I typically try to rotate through my gasoline, at any given time I’ll have 25 to 30 gallons on site in containers but this time I got lazy and all of them need cycled through at once.  The annoying thing about it is actually holding the can up while it slowly dumps into my truck’s tank, although I have started migrated towards safety cans which have a better flow rate.  These cans are much more robust but that comes with an extra cost obviously.

The generators are definitely something that I need to conduct regular maintenance on, they are my short term / power out SHTF solution.   Being that I have a wood burning stove I wouldn’t really need them to heat the house but keeping all of the meat that I have in my freezers cold as well as running the lights (via a transfer switch) is definitely a must have.  In my mind I could probably run the generator for the house around 4 hours during the day in an outage and then shut it down for the evening.  Hopefully we won’t have to test that theory but having options is a good thing.

With respect to the powered devices in the vehicles, we all have variations of a jump start pack in addition to the standard jumper cables.  These devices will drain over time if not used and especially in the cold so I try to dig them out every few months and plug them in until back to green status.  Quite honestly I’ve never seen anything jump a vehicle as well as another vehicle and standard cables but once again it’s nice to have options just in case.

With that the sun is just beginning to expose itself over the mountains, time to get started on the chores and finish another cup of coffee.  Better to do the extra work now and not have need for the efforts in the future than to unexpectidley get in a tight spot without recourse.

 

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