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Hygiene and Sanitation in Difficult Times…

N. Neta

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Location: Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain

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posted 3 years ago

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In one of the last threads, Preparing for a short-term power outage, there were tons of good ideas… but what I missed is what to do about hygiene and sanitation…

I would love to learn from you - your top tips for taking care of hygiene and sanitation during a short-term crisis and even in a long-term disaster.

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Cristo Balete

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posted 3 years ago

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You mean like if the power goes out you can't take a shower? An electric water pump issue? Water heating issues?

Camping shower bags that hold a couple gallons of water are available. Some can be placed in the sun and heated solarly. But you have to shower before they cool off, which is sometimes 3:00 in the afternoon, long before quitting time.

Propane for heating water is your best bet because it can be stored for a long time. A little goes a long ways when heating water.

A wood stove heats water.

A small 200- or 300-gallon water tank up on a 4-foot platform so the water runs out by gravity flow, water hauled inside with large water containers provides household water for several days. The water should be constantly used and flowed through the tank to keep it clean, not just sit there for months until there's a crisis of some sort. Keep it potable.

I don't like storing water in plastic containers, like they suggest for earthquake preparedness. Storing water in those large 5-gallon glass containers that fit on drinking water coolers, covered in dark plastic inside a dark, cool building to keep any algae from forming, changed every few months.

An important distinction: Permaculture is not the same kind of gardening as organic gardening.
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Anne Miller

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posted 3 years ago

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While we were building our house, I set up a "dishwashing stand" outside with a garden hose, two sawhorses, and a couple of wide boards.

It also served as a place to wash our hands, etc.

I didn't bother with hot water but that would have been easy to heat on the camp stove we were using for cooking.

A shower was easy to hand from a limb of a tree. I take cold showers.

Trash was the biggest problem that took years to learn how to do it right.

All scraps go to the wildlife, I save all glass jars, Paper we burn, and plastic gets taken to town to dispose of.

If anyone wants to set up a "burnable system", this has some good ideas:

https://permies.com/wiki/119012/pep-nest/Set-system-collecting-burnables-PEP

We used a camping porta-potty inside the house.

Invasive plants are Earth's way of insisting we notice her medicines. Stephen Herrod Buhner
Everyone learns what works by learning what doesn't work. Stephen Herrod Buhner

N. Neta

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Location: Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain

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posted 3 years ago

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Anne Miller wrote:We used a camping porta-potty inside the house.

We installed a compost toilet and have a few huge bags of sawdust… although we live in a pine forest, and I think dry pine needles would work too… need to try those…”

Nicole Alderman

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posted 2 years ago

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We have a septic system and a well. Here's what we do during short-term (less than a week) power outages:

For Drinking Water: save all faucet water for drinking or quick last rinse of hands/dishes. Doing this kept us with running water from our taps for 3 days during a power outages. Our well has a 60 gallon pressure tank. We made it last!

For Toilets: we flush with pond water or rain water from our rain barrel. Our power outages always happen in winter. But we do still have water in our pond even in the driest of summers. If that dries up, there's a wetland we can scoop from a 5 minute walk from our house. We flush it by pouring water into the toilet bowl. We do this after someone poops. We've never had the septic system fill up

For Dishes on day 1: the first day of a power outage, I just don't wash dishes, in hopes that the power will come on the next day, and I can use the dishwasher!

For Dishes on day 2+: boil rain water on our wood stove to wash dishes. We never needed to drink the rain barrel water, but I don't feel bad about using it boiled to wash dishes. Once the power goes out, I put a teakettle and a pot with rainwater on the stove. I let that boil and use it to wash the dishes if the power outage goes beyond a day

Tidy the house during the day! After the power goes out, my first priority is to get all the toys and such picked up off the floor. It's a whole lot easier to walk in the house when there's nothing on the floor! It's hard to sweep and clean surfaces when it's dark. When it's bright, clean. When it's dark, use your limited light for eating, hanging out, signing songs, listening to the radio, etc.

For Body/Clothes Washing: I don't bother. Laundry can wait a few days. We can rag wash anything that needs to be cleaned. Three days isn't a long time to go without a shower.

If the power outage goes beyond a week, the plan is to:

For Bowel Movements: Poop in a bucket and bury it in the ground away from food sources. Much like people poop when hiking. If the power outage is due to a major disaster, like an earthquake, we start digging an outhouse. I have instructions saved in print form in a notebook. Pee goes in the garden, either directly (by the males) or via a jar for us ladies.

For Potable Water: boil stream/rain water over either rocket stove (made from bricks) or our woodstove. I do have portable water filters, too. I'm not sure if I need that for boiled rain water off of a metal roof.

For Cleaning Surfaces: I have giant Costco-sized bags of baking soda, as well as a gallon+ of vinegar, bottles of hydrogen peroxide, as well as insane amounts of hand sanitizer. Someone gave away free big bottles of hand sanitizer that a local distillery made during the pandemic. I'm thinking those will come in handy. I do most of my cleaning with all of this stuff, anyway. I also have extra bottles of Dr Bronner soap, and technically know how to make soap from ashes and oil...

For Laundry: I have a hand-tumbler washer and a clothesline (as well as a clothesline inside). Thankfully, I never had to wash diapers by hand--I had enough during our 3 day power outage to not need to do laundry. The kids are out of diapers now, thank goodness. I have washable pads. It is seriously not fun to wash them in the manual washer, but it does work. This would need to drain into the septic system, because it can't pour out into nature. We went two weeks without an electric clothes washer, and I did wash everything by hand. The most annoying part was wringing the laundry. But, it's do-able.

Other Cleaning Stuff: baby/hand wipes. I have natural handwipes that we have left over from when the kids were babies. They come in handy for non-water washing

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Paul Fookes

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Location: Gulgong, NSW, Australia (Cold Zone 9B, Hot Zone 6) UTC +10

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posted 2 years ago

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Hygiene and sanitation in difficult times are very easily managed with a little preparation. Think about the power going out for an extended period of time during bush fires, storms or floods.
The main things I need to do are to keep free of infections, fed and watered.
Think about the KISS principle (Keep It Simple Stupid)
We have a "Go Bag" containing:
small gas burner (ours is a jet boil). powdered milk, coffee, sugar 2 X wide mouthed cups and spoons
soap, medium towels and cloths. (we use dog drying towels because they are very absorbent and dry quickly)
Solar recharging torch and 2 cup solar hot water heater and solar cooker.

If water is an issue, the areas which can get smelly and potentially infected are ABC (Armpits, Boobs, Crutch) use a damp cloth maybe with a little soap and wash off with the other end of the cloth and fresh warm water. Warm water is better at removing grime from the body.
If it is a sunny day we use the Gosun solar stove for cooking and the solar water heater for coffee and cleaning.
Food either dried or tinned will last for ages. Or do your own - use and replace.

We store water in header tanks normally and have about a two week supply the septic is all gravity fed.

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Never retire every one thinks you have more time to help them - We have never been so busy

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Michael Cox

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Location: Kent, UK - Zone 8

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posted 2 years ago

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A compost toilet setup is an obvious backup. I like the "Humanure Handbook" approach, especially because it can be implemented really quickly in a SHTF situation. You need a bucket and some sawdust. It can live in the shed and be brought in when the water goes off.

As for having safe drinking water, a bottle of appropriate chlorine (eg bleach, pool chemicals etc...) can literally sterilise hundreds of cubic meters of water, provided it is reasonably "clean" (little or no suspended sediment). If you are dealing with a regional disaster affecting infrastructure (eg widespread storm damage and flooding) this can provide continues safe drinking water for you and your community for an extended period of time. You just need suitable containers to collect and then sterilise the water in. Some kind of crude system to separate water from sediment and you are set.

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Paul Fookes

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Posts: 2114

Location: Gulgong, NSW, Australia (Cold Zone 9B, Hot Zone 6) UTC +10

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posted 2 years ago

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Michael Cox wrote:As for having safe drinking water, a bottle of appropriate chlorine (eg bleach, pool chemicals etc...) can literally sterilise hundreds of cubic meters of water, provided it is reasonably "clean" (little or no suspended sediment). If you are dealing with a regional disaster affecting infrastructure (eg widespread storm damage and flooding) this can provide continues safe drinking water for you and your community for an extended period of time. You just need suitable containers to collect and then sterilise the water in. Some kind of crude system to separate water from sediment and you are set.

When I was in the military, I had a thing called a millbank filter which is a canvas bag with a triangular base to create a drip point. It is widely available from outdoors stores in the USA and UK. It takes up a very small space. There are a couple of pictures below.

You are on point about chlorine (household) bleach. When we were living in a remote area overseas, our water tanks were filled with river water that also served as a toilet, bath tub and washing machine.. We used household bleach at a ratio of 1 litre (US: 2.1 pints) per 13,600 litres ( US: 3,000 gal, about the same imperial) which gives a concentration of 0.0003 or 3 parts per 100,000. Wait 24 hours. The other thing for survival is a rolling boil for 30 seconds once filtered. Or a couple of hours sun exposure in a shallow tray.

Any filter is better than no filter so a piece of cotton cloth will do. Michael makes a really good point that large volumes of water can be managed this way.

Millbank-filter-.jpg

Is flat and easity storred with a Go Bag

Millbank-filter-in-use.jpg

Note the water seeping through into a collection pot

Failure is a stepping stone to success. Failing is not quitting - Stopping trying is
Never retire every one thinks you have more time to help them - We have never been so busy

John Duffy

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Posts: 224

posted 2 years ago

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Just a quick note about bleach as a sanitizing agent...Like Brylcreem, "a little dab will do ya." 100ppm is usually sufficient. Too much will play heck with your digestive tract and give you the dreaded screamin meemies...Best bet, let treated water sit in the sunlight for 24 hours and let the chlorine off-gas...Then, go have a beer;

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