Sure we could live without gasoline and propane — but it’s a lot nicer not to have to. In this podcast, Salty and I talk about our three fuel preps to prevent running short on energy during a crisis.
Fuel: Heat for the house is good
This is a lot like the model warming Salty and Spice when the electric is out: A wall-mount unit designed for homes and needing no electricity.
There’s a lot of things to like about this prep. It keeps us warm during temporary power outages, such as after winter storms. It’s a standard, safe home heating system, not some jury-rigged thing that’s likely to break or cause a new problem. It’s also a long-term solution, in that we could keep the house livably warm for at least one full year even if the clock started at the worst part of the year (late spring or early summer, before the annual refill).
The winner of all these laurels is …(insert drum roll)… A ventless propane heater in the house, hooked to a big backyard fuel tank. We do pair it with a nearby carbon monoxide monitor. It’s a safe design, but any time you’re doing combustion in the house such a monitor’s a good idea.
A stock of 20 lb propane tanks is a portable, flexible fuel solution
Many people already own one or two of these to power the backyard grill. It is a great cooking prep, since nearly anything can be cooked on it, and it’s even a stealth prep. Who thinks anything odd about having a backyard grill?
Power your grill or your portable heater. Store tanks as long as you like; it doesn’t go bad as gas does.
Having extra bottles makes this fuel prep more powerful. Please don’t store the spare bottles in the basement, though. Propane’s heavier than air, so if a valve gets cracked open or a leak develops, it can fill an entire basement with toxic and explosive gas. Be it suffocating someone going downstairs or catching a spark and making a Big Bang, there’s no good ending to that story.
You can also get little heaters that run off of these bottles. We have one for The Place, in fact. I wouldn’t feel as comfortable sleeping with one of those running as I feel with the ventless heater designed for that purpose, but I’m glad to have it around. If it makes you nervous you can always warm the place up before sleeping.
Salty’s Pro Tip: Most areas have a gas supplier that handles tanks for a variety of purposes: acetylene and oxygen for welders, compressed air for tools and scuba divers, carbon dioxide for dry ice production, etc. These places can usually fill propane tanks while you wait. Why not just exchange at retail outlets? The gas fill places give you a more generous fill; the exchange tanks are usually only 75 or 80% full capacity.
Gasoline cans on a rotating schedule
Don’t go cheap on the gas cans. They’ll last forever if they’re good, and they’ll keep oxygen away from your gas and reduce spills and odor. You’ll want a good funnel, too.
Gasoline in good quality air-tight five gallon cans is really useful. Too bad it’s not really stable too! We’ve adopted an idea we heard from Jack Spirko. It starts with buying high quality, really air tight, five gallon gas cans. Five gallons is about as much as I can reasonably handle — it takes a long time to dump a five gallon can through a funnel into a car’s gas tank, and holding a bigger tank that high for that long would be a problem for me.
We filled one tank a month for a year, labeling each with the month of its filling. You fill them as full as you can — oxygen is what degrades the gas most quickly, and really full tanks have less air space and so less oxygen. In the second year and thereafter, every month you pull out one can, use it up (in lawn mowers, cars, whatever) and refill it with fresh gas.
We’ve gotten a little behind from time to time, so can report that 14-15 month old gas is still perfectly good fuel, even when it’s been kept in the Missouri range of “spit shatters when it hits the ground” cold to “could bake a cookie in the back window of the car” hot.
Spice’s Pro Tip: Put the gas cans outside the house in a shed or garage, but don’t bury them in the back or you won’t want to bother to dig one out each month. Line them up against a side wall near the door.
There you have it; three fuel preps that we’ve found useful already. Just don’t buy all your propane tanks at once. It Reeaallllyyy makes the neighbors wonder about what kind of fish fry you’re planning.
Use Sta-bil for long term gasoline storage. Use a shaker siphon to quickly transfer gasoline to an automobile or other gasoline operated machine. There is also a product, PRI-G that is supposed to be able to restore degraded fuels but I haven’t used it.
Thank you for your comment.
Sta-bil is a great product, but it comes at a cost and if you regularly rotate your gas and keep it sealed in an air-tight container it really isn’t needed in my experience. In containers where air can get to the gas like gas tanks? Absolutely.
In my experience, we’ve gone 18 months with gas in our cans with absolutely no issues… cans that have gone from 130 degree’s above zero to 20 below…
I recommend, however, a shorter rotation, no more than 1-year, and it is CRITICAL to limit the amount of oxygen exchange by buying air-tight metal cans.
I use Sta-bil in any gas that will go in a small engine. Years ago we had trouble with the ATV (many years, it only had three wheels) if it sat for as little as three weeks. After using Sta-bil, we never had that problem again. Its not just the gas in the can you have to worry about, its the gas in the gas tank and carburetor too.
Have a question. What about using dry nitrogen gas to purge the air out would this help with storage like it does with food ? Anyone tried this?
I haven’t tried it, but my chemistry classes suggest it would work great. I’d use a different hose end; there might be additives in the gas that blowback would put on the hose. The gas will break down with or without oxygen though, so it would only buy a few months.