FOOD STORAGE when THE GRID GOES DOWN!

there are many things that we take for granted in our day-to-day life and we really don't ever think about them until something goes wrong what would you guys do without refrigeration if you didn't have any refrigeration it would put you into panic mode wouldn't it [Music] in your frigidaire cold pantry there's a place for all your food fresh and frozen canned bottled and wrapped newborn and leftover yes these youngsters just got out of school and they're making a beeline to their favorite fountain it's the automatic twin juice fountain in the 1955 westinghouse refrigerator it's the most convenient refrigerator ever made the store easy reaches the new kelvinator 457 the one automatic defrosting refrigerator that puts everything at your fingertips [Music] if you guys have been following us you know what if you're not following us why aren't you go ahead and subscribe right now and hit the bell for notification too but if you've been following us we have been doing a series i'll say it's kind of a series on what to do in an off-grid situation i talked about you know how are you gonna cook what are you gonna do without air conditioning you know things like that the question that we get every single day it's probably our top two or three questions that we've gotten asked in our whole entire time doing this is what do we do for refrigeration so i thought this would be a great video to go over the things that we have done things that we implemented things that we tried and worked and things that didn't work because there were a lot of things that didn't work and there's a lot of things that did work so i'm going to go over a lot of these different things to maybe help you guys in your journey just in case because when we did move out here we looked back into history just to see what they did and all the different means that they took to preserve things and prevent them cooling them down preventing them from spoiling and then this is what we found in the beginning the hunter gatherers would go and forage for their foods they would gather seeds they'd gather nuts they'd get greens right now i'm gathering some pine needles to make pine needle tea since it's very high in vitamin c to make for a tea but you know if they were lucky they would catch a rabbit or get some type of meat if they'd go hunting so they would forage and doug and i call that kind of hunter and gather we call it fod food on demand so here on our homestead if we want a chicken basically we just go out we get our chicken and that's what we're gonna have so it works out good because you know in the beginning when we moved out here many many years ago we didn't have any refrigeration at all and it was like you know i want a chicken what am i going to do i don't have a freezer because a lot of people will get your fryers and you'll go ahead and you freeze them all well what if you don't have access to that you can still have them just use them when you need them food on demand [Music] a lot of you guys might think this is kind of silly or funny but you want to know a lot of this is really common sense you know just going out we've been kind of conditioned to you know get our animal raise our animals and then you butcher them and then you put them in the freezer but really you know how have people done this for thousands of years i mean when you were hungry you would go ahead and you would you know process your chicken or go out and get your dinner for the evening and you would go ahead and fish or do whatever and it really is kind of common sense and we don't think about it because we have been doing it the other way where you go to the store then you have to freeze it for a while you know just for convenience purposes but really if you just kind of go back to how they used to do it this is pretty simple and easy [Music] another way that when actually we started doing this when we first moved down here is if you find a stream a running stream or a creek right now this area here is kind of um drying up a little bit but if you had an area that has running water you need a container make sure that it has a lid on it this is one of my temco's i love it it's totally airtight it's a temco 20 gallon but you know anything you could put a trash can or anything because you don't want any rodents or anything getting into you know what you have in here you can put your things you want to keep cool if you had any cheeses you know whatever you need to keep cool and then you would just stat it in the water just so and then the running water will help keep it cooler so that's another option too now the next way you guys can keep your things cool is to kind of make a mini root seller because doug and i really wanted a root cellar but when we first moved out here you know we didn't have a root cellar we didn't have really any way to keep our things cool so what we did was we dug a hole in the ground the biggest big is like a trash can like this and we put it inside of the hole and we wanted to make sure that there was enough room on the bottom and on the sides that we were able to insulate it now you can insulate it with a few things you could go ahead and get some straw some wood shavings or like sand because those are all good insulators so when you dig the hole in the bottom you want to put a little bit of that sand or the straw and all throughout the sides pack it in there really good and then you want to put it into the hole just to the very top because you want to make sure you're able to take the top off and then inside it you can put all your things you want to keep cool just like that and then over the top you know you can put a board or a big blanket like a you know anything like that just so it'll keep it cool and then that way it's in the ground and the ground will kind of be it's like thermal regulator and kind of help with it when you want to keep things cool so there's another option mini mini root seller now we worked up to a bigger root seller so let's go look at that [Music] so now this is our root cellar that we have now it's made out of insulated concrete foam an icf and actually i still have some of my squash my wrapa kante squash from last year down here i store all my stuff that i need we're in the process of remodeling and moving things around in here getting ready for all the harvest this coming summer but your root cellar if you're going to think about making one or getting one you want to be at least 10 feet into the ground this root cellar stays between 40 and 50 degrees which is a perfect kind of like it's my walk-in refrigerator and i love it because i can keep everything down here and actually in the summer months when it's boiling hot if you guys didn't see my video i did talking about air conditioning i think it was the last one that i did this is a great place to come down and cool off i know our dog molly we come and open the door and she bolts down here and she'll come and just lay down and go splat on the ground and hang out here so it's a really cool place it's sort of like our little air-conditioned building and it keeps all my stuff nice and cool [Music] now this brings us to the way we use refrigeration for many years because when we moved down here we emulated what the amish did to use as their refrigerators and what they would do is they would get these old chest freezers but they would be ones that weren't working any longer so they didn't have access to electricity they were just a box a nice insulated box and the good thing about a chest freezer so if you had to choose between like an upright freezer and a chest freezer the chest freezers are going to be much more efficient because when you open it because you know that saying heat rises and the cool air falls when you open it the coolness is going to stay down if you have like an upright freezer and you open it the cold air just comes out at you so this is much more efficient so what we would do is you get these five gallon buckets and you would fill them with water and you would freeze them so the amish have a place either a neighbor that they use their freezer and then they freeze buckets in or there's also a person who has an ice house where they have a few freezers in their barn and then they'll freeze them and they charge you you know four dollars or so for a bucket and then you get the ice since it's a solid chunk of ice and you keep it in this bucket then we would get them and then you just put them inside so you put your bucket inside and then usually there's these you know little baskets or whatever in there and you can put your food in there you can put food at the bottom food up at the top and it stores a lot actually it holds quite a bit and then the solid chunk of ice would last a very long time usually over this i would cover it with a quilt to help insulate a little bit more and then we started off in the barn we're in the barn right now i kept it in the barn but it got pretty warm in the summers so i ended up bringing it into the house and we did it this week for many many years unfortunately over the time you know your eyes is melting the bottom is getting wet i was leaning forward a lot you're cleaning it out it kind of got to be you know it got it got old kind of quick but this is a good option for a lot of you guys if you are wanting some type of off-grid type um refrigerator the thing you have to do is get ice keeping our eye out and you know we're always trying to uh willing to try new things um so what we did uh run across at the resale shop the other day was this ice box from the 1800s it's the late 1800s early 1900s ice box it's called a thermos and they built them in wisconsin all original material uh it has the brass hinges and door latches and it's metal on this side here as you can see it just opens up like any other fridge about 48 43 degrees in here on the other side is where we keep the ice that's a bucket of ice we just put it in yesterday it's still plenty cold you know we got to kind of think outside the box um no pun intended yeah i mean you don't have to be a slave to the system you know so this is our 1800s icebox works just fabulously just like anybody else's icebox [Music] moving right along so the next thing i want to show you i'm in my outside kitchen right now and we just got this propane refrigerator a few years ago and it was a game changer i can't tell you guys it was amazing basically this is a propane refrigerator it's run on a propane tank like you put your um gas grill on one of those smaller ones and what i like about it is also it's a three-way so you can do it on a pro propane gas or you can do it on a 110 12 volt so or you can actually have a plug-in if you have electric so you can do it anyway so if you were going on a trip or you had a car battery or you have a propane it would work that way the one thing i guess i would say against it is you can't put it in your house since it's on propane it needs to be outside you need some airflow so i have it in the outside kitchen and this thing is great let me show you so basically you know you can keep your things there's plenty of room to put things in the door you have things here you put your drinks it even has a little freezer the only thing that it does not do well is is when it's very very cold outside so in the middle of winter when it's freezing cold it might be you know zero degrees 10 degrees things inside of it will freeze so i don't use this refrigerator when it's the very cold months of winter because it's cold i have a whole outside area that you can use as your refrigerator i use our back room kind of where the seam of the door is and i'll set my things back there so if i have some cheese or if i have some drinks i'll set it there if we have snow i'll put it in the snow as an insulator i use it that way also so sometimes we got to think outside the box and use what we got and i want to say something really quick about this the unique the company you know we had a piece in there that broke they're really easy to work with they just sent it to us they were so wonderful and i like companies like that that they stand behind their product and they're really easy to work with and they have a very wonderful highly rated product and i can't say enough about it so i really like this product so now let's talk about one thing that probably anybody can do which is simple and easy and i did this for a couple years too is to use a cooler now this great big cooler i know a lot of you guys have seen these really big ones i really liked this cooler a lot because there was an area that right now i have dirt in here so uh you can open it this way you can open the whole way and what worked out good with this is i actually got some old you know refrigerator shelves that i stuck in there so that i was able to put my ice at the bottom then i had a shelf and then i could put all my things in here and it worked out great so i would use this i kept this in the outside kitchen and i used this as my refrigerator for a long time and it worked out great now they have the yetis you know if you guys have a yeti they're extra thermal insulated and they work very well if you're putting some ice in there they will last a lot longer especially if you put a hot like a harder block of ice i know a lot of people will freeze the water bottles that works amazingly that you can put in there um but the coolers are excellent and i know a lot of people will also get a cooler you know you can get a big one a couple small ones and then you have a box and you can get that insulation um a lot of people will even use that you know like the foam insulation or they even have that insulation that they use for garage doors and that might be the outside part and then you can set the cooler in there and then that way you're getting extra insulation that'll keep it for a longer amount of time now the amish around here they have something called an ice house and i know a lot of them will use the outside of you know what we use for the insulation for a garage door so it has like the outer like i guess siding and then it has that foam and then inside it you know they have a nice locking door and they will cut ice out of the pond so in the winter months when it gets cold enough and the ice is you know a few inches thick then they'll cut it out and they fill the whole thing with ice it is packed so tightly with ice it will make it from winter let's say january or february all the way through the year and then that way they can have nice cool things all throughout the summer months so you guys need to think about how to learn how to do water bath canning or pressure canning learn about how to cure or salt your meat things like that learn how to ferment watch some of my fermenting videos or get my new fermenting cookbook that has over a hundred recipes go to off grid with duganstacy.com and you can check that out it's going to the printer right now and learn some of these you know techniques so that you can preserve a lot of your food so this stuff that you're growing or maybe you're getting at the farmers market or you know from community supported agriculture if you're part of one of those you're able to preserve your foods and then that way it will be shelf stable you can keep it in a cool place and then that way you'll be able to use those foods to get from one season to the next get some books start learning start teaching yourself this summer is your summer to really educate yourself and empower yourself and some of these techniques that we have lost from just a couple generations we all may need to come back to start doing these things once again so empower yourself try to get some of these things be ready you never know what's going to happen always be prepared and i can't wait to see you on the next video have a great one see you later [Music] you

Channel: OFF GRID with DOUG & STACY

Views: 326,336

Keywords: Off Grid with Doug and Stacy, Doug and Stacy, Doug, Stacy, Off Grid, off the grid, off the grid living, off the grid homes, off grid living, off grid cabin, off grid with Doug and Stacy, off grid solar power system, off grid house, off grid homestead, off grid solar, homestead, homesteading, homesteading for beginners, homesteading off the grid, cooking from scrtch, self sufficient, growing food, how to grow food

Id: HZaX9ux5vWo

Length: 16min 51sec (1011 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 14 2022