At home when the grid is down

These pages are about keeping a household going when power, gas or water service stops for days or longer. Heat and light take up several of them: a heater built from a candle and clay pots, oil lamps made from things already in the house, logs rolled from old newspaper, a rocket stove for cooking outside, and a small can stove kept in the car for a winter breakdown.

Water has two pages. One builds a filter from a pair of food-grade buckets; the other covers disinfecting water with plain household bleach or pool-shock granules at the doses the CDC and EPA give. Sanitation has two long ones, on human waste once the toilets cannot be flushed and on trash when collection stops, and another shows how to wash clothes by hand. Cold frames made from PVC pipe stretch the growing season, and a guest account describes a year spent living out of a car in Los Angeles.

Anything that burns indoors or in a vehicle can give off carbon monoxide and start a fire. Those pages carry the warnings, and a battery-powered CO alarm belongs in any room where a flame is lit.