10 Books To Get While You Still Can

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

Think about how you solve problems nowadays. Your water heater starts leaking, so you pull out your phone and look up how to fix it. Someone in the family has a strange rash, so you type the symptoms into a search bar. You want to can this year's tomato harvest, so you pull up a recipe. We take all of that for granted because the answer is always a few clicks away.

Now imagine the grid is down. Permanently. How would you solve those problems with no Internet?

When a real disaster strikes, you won't be able to order a book from Amazon or run to the nearest Barnes & Noble. You won't be able to hop online and look up whatever you need to know. All of that accumulated human knowledge that feels so accessible right now simply disappears the moment the internet does. That's exactly when you'll wish you had certain reference books sitting on your shelf.

Below are 10 categories of books worth owning before you need them, with a standout title in each and a note on why it's worth getting. This list comes from the YouTube channel, City Prepping, which put together an excellent rundown of the books worth having when the grid goes dark.

You can watch his video and view the list below.

1. Medical: The Survival Medicine Handbook

If there's one category to get right, it's this one. In a true disaster, when an ambulance might be hours away or not coming at all, solid medical information could be the most valuable thing on your shelf.

The Survival Medicine Handbook by Dr. Joseph Alton and Amy Alton (the couple behind the Doom and Bloom channel) is written specifically for situations where professional help isn't available. It walks you through handling injuries and illnesses when you have to be the end of the line, which is a very different mindset from a normal first-aid guide.

For longer grid-down scenarios, pair it with Where There Is No Dentist. It was written for developing regions without dental care, and anyone who has suffered through a bad toothache knows how quickly that becomes a serious problem with no easy fix.

2. Food Preservation: The Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving

Storing food is one thing. Preserving it so it lasts is another skill entirely, and it's one of the first every prepper should learn. The go-to reference here is the Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving, the long-running canning classic that has sold millions of copies and shows up on nearly every list of recommended food preservation guides. It covers canning, pickling, and preserving in clear, tested steps.

Good supplements in this category include The Prepper's Cookbook by Tess Pennington, which centers on cooking from the kinds of staples you'd have stored away, and Meals in a Jar by Julie Languille, which helps you assemble ready-to-store meals. The key theme across all of them is rotation: you want to actually cook and eat your stored food regularly so nothing goes to waste and you stay familiar with it.

3. Gardening: All New Square Foot Gardening

When your food supply eventually runs low, the ability to grow more becomes priceless. All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew is where most new gardeners are told to start, and for good reason. It's practical, beginner-friendly, and makes efficient use of small spaces, which matters if your growing area is a suburban backyard.

Round it out with a few specialized titles: Gaia's Garden by Toby Hemenway for a permaculture approach, Carrots Love Tomatoes by Louise Riotte for companion planting (which plants help each other thrive when grown side by side), and The Forager's Harvest by Samuel Thayer for identifying and collecting wild food when your garden isn't enough.

4. Homesteading: The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It

Homesteading is gardening's more ambitious cousin. It's about turning your property, however big or small, into something that can sustain you. The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It by John Seymour is the title that consistently rises to the top. It's a bit more advanced and tends to assume you have some land, but it covers an enormous range of self-reliance skills in depth.

For a more approachable, suburban-friendly starting point, The Backyard Homestead is excellent. If you're keeping animals, The Chicken Whisperer's Guide to Keeping Chickens goes deep on backyard flocks. And the Foxfire series is worth having for its documentation of old-time skills and traditional ways of doing things that were nearly lost.

5. Survival and Prepping: When All Hell Breaks Loose

This is the broad, all-purpose survival category, and two books stand out. When All Hell Breaks Loose by Cody Lundin comes up again and again as one of the most recommended practical survival books, and the SAS Survival Guide by John “Lofty” Wiseman is the compact classic packed with useful field skills. If you could only grab one, the SAS guide is a hard one to beat as a starting point.

Beyond those, this category is deep: How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It by James Wesley Rawles, The Prepper's Pocket Guide by Bernie Carr for beginners, Prepper's Long-Term Survival Guide by Jim Cobb, 52 Prepper Projects by David Nash for hands-on learning over a year, and The Survival Mom by Lisa Bedford for getting a household ready.

6. Home Repair: The Complete Do-It-Yourself Manual

We don't often think of a repair manual as survival gear, but consider the reality of a prolonged grid-down situation. Something breaks and there's no handyman to call and no video to watch. You have to fix it yourself. The Reader's Digest Complete Do-It-Yourself Manual is a thorough, updated reference covering repairs and projects throughout the house. It's the kind of book you don't appreciate until the moment you desperately need it.

7. Self-Defense: 100 Deadly Skills

If things go sideways, being able to protect yourself and your family becomes a real concern. 100 Deadly Skills by Clint Emerson, a former Navy SEAL, gets strong reviews and offers practical, memorable techniques worth filing away in the back of your mind.

Pair it with Prepper's Home Defense by Jim Cobb, which approaches the topic from a preparedness angle: how to harden and defend your home if the situation calls for it.

8. Nuclear and Disaster-Specific: Nuclear War Survival Skills

Some threats are severe enough to warrant their own dedicated reference. With nuclear tensions weighing on a lot of minds, having solid information on this specific scenario is reassuring rather than alarmist. Nuclear War Survival Skills by Cresson Kearny is a well-known guide to surviving nuclear fallout, and the official U.S. Armed Forces survival manuals cover the subject from a military standpoint. These are books you hope to never open, but you'd be glad to have if you did.

9. Finances: Financial Peace and Rich Dad Poor Dad

People rarely connect finances with preparedness, but the link is direct: prepping costs money. Gear, food storage, and supplies all add up, and getting your financial house in order is what makes the rest possible. Financial Peace by Dave Ramsey is a strong starting point for learning the basics of getting out of debt and living within your means.

From there, Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki reshapes how many readers think about money and assets, and The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone lights a fire under anyone looking to get more aggressive about their goals. (Kiyosaki's Cashflow Quadrant is another eye-opener in the same vein.) Read the ideas, take what's useful, and don't get too hung up on the personalities behind them.

10. The Future: Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order

The last category is about zooming out and understanding where the world is heading, drawing on people who spend their careers studying exactly that. Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio lays out the big historical cycles that shape economies and nations. (Dalio also has a 43-minute video by the same title that's well worth the time.)

For balance, read it alongside The End of the World Is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan, who sees the coming decades a little differently. And The Sovereign Individual, written back in 1997, is a dry but fascinating look ahead, much of which you can watch playing out in real time. The common thread among all three is simple: the world is changing, and it pays to get ready for it.

Where to Start

That's a lot of books, and you don't need to buy all of them at once. If you're just getting started and want a place to begin, three titles rise above the rest: the SAS Survival Guide, When All Hell Breaks Loose, and The Survival Medicine Handbook. Get those three on your shelf first, then fill in the categories that matter most to your situation.

The bigger point is this. All of the information in these books is easy to get right now, which is exactly why now is the time to get it. Knowledge stored on a shelf doesn't care whether the power is on. Build that library while you still can.

You May Also Like:

• 30+ Off-Grid Skills You Must Learn Before The Collapse
• 7 Things for Gardeners To Do in The Winter
• 30 Hand-Powered Tools You Need to Live Off the Grid
• 20 Things to Do Before You Plant Your Spring Garden
• 25 Essential Kitchen Tools for People Who Love to Cook

The post 10 Books To Get While You Still Can appeared first on Homestead Survival Site.

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Family Divided: Politics and Religion

Family Divided: When Did Politics and Religion Start Coming Between Us? I remember a time when Sunday dinner was Sunday dinner. Grandpa might grumble about the news, Aunt Sue might roll her eyes at something on the church bulletin, and then someone would pass the potatoes and life would go on. Nobody left the table. Nobody stopped speaking for a year. These days, it feels different, and I know I’m not the only mother or grandmother who has noticed.

So when did this start? When did politics and religion turn from dinner table topics into dinner table dividers? I don’t think there’s one single answer, but there are several threads worth pulling on, and I want to walk through them with you today, mother to mother, grandmother to grandmother.

A quick look back at how families used to handle disagreement

It helps to remember that families have never fully agreed on everything. Grandparents and parents have argued about elections since there were elections to argue about. What kept those disagreements from becoming permanent breaks was structure. Families lived close together. They saw each other every week, sometimes every day. A disagreement on Tuesday got smoothed over by Sunday because there was no way to avoid each other long enough for it to fester. Distance and silence are what turn a disagreement into a rift, and for most of history, families simply didn’t have the luxury of that kind of distance.

The slow build before the breaking point

Family researchers and sociologists point to a gradual shift that picked up real speed in the 2000s and accelerated hard after 2016. It wasn’t one election or one Sunday sermon. It was a slow build of a few things happening at once.

First, we stopped living near each other. Extended families used to share a town, a church pew, a Thanksgiving table every single year almost by default. Now our children and grandchildren are scattered across states, and much of our family contact has moved online, where a stray comment can be read by twenty relatives instead of just the person sitting across from you at the table.

Second, our news sources split apart. Grandma and Grandpa might be watching one channel and the grandkids might be getting their news from a completely different app or a different set of online voices, and by the time everyone sits down together, they aren’t even arguing about the same set of facts anymore. When two people can’t agree on what’s even true, agreeing on what to do about it becomes nearly impossible.

Third, and this one matters more than people give it credit for, our sense of identity got tangled up in our opinions. A political stance or a change in faith practice used to be something a person held. Now it often feels like something a person is. When disagreement feels like a rejection of who someone is, rather than just a difference of opinion, family members dig in harder and forgive more slowly.

Social Media Is Loud

Fourth, social media rewards the loudest, most extreme version of every opinion. Nobody’s feed is showing them the calm, measured middle ground. That means when family members do talk politics or faith, they’re often unconsciously borrowing the sharpest language they saw online instead of speaking the way they would face-to-face over coffee.

Fifth, we lost a lot of our shared community spaces. Fewer people belong to the same civic clubs, churches, and neighborhood groups that used to regularly bring people with different views together for a shared purpose. When the only interaction left is a holiday dinner once or twice a year, there’s no ordinary, low-stakes practice at disagreeing well.

Why religion adds its own layer

Faith differences have always existed in families, but a few newer patterns have made this harder. More adult children are stepping away from the denomination or faith tradition they grew up in than in past generations. For a mother/father or grandmother/grandfather who built her whole life around church community, that can feel like grief, even when nobody meant it as an attack.

At the same time, some families are seeing the opposite: a grown child becomes far more devout or joins a different faith community than the one they were raised in, and that shift can feel just as unsettling to parents who don’t understand the pull.

There’s also the matter of blended families bringing together two very different religious backgrounds under one roof. That’s not a bad thing at all, but it does mean holidays and traditions require more conversation and more compromise than they did when everyone in the family tree shared the same faith by default.

Either direction can leave a mother or father quietly wondering in the kitchen at night where they went wrong. I want to say gently, you probably didn’t go wrong. People grow. Faith journeys are rarely a straight line, and they’re almost never a reflection of a failure in how a child was raised.

The particular pain of political division inside a family

Political disagreement inside a family stings differently than political disagreement with a stranger. You can’t simply walk away from a son or a sister the way you might end a conversation with someone at the grocery store. The relationship has history, obligation, and love tangled up in it, which is exactly why the arguments cut so deep.

Many families are also navigating something new: disagreement not just over policy, but over which sources of information to trust at all. That makes conversations feel less like a debate over ideas and more like a disagreement over reality itself, and that’s exhausting for everyone involved, especially the mother/father or grandmother/grandfather who just wants everyone to get along at Christmas.

What actually helps, from one mother/father to another

I’m not a family therapist or a pastor, so please take this as practical, prepared-mom advice and not professional counsel. If tension in your family runs deep, a licensed family counselor or your own clergy can help far more than a blog post ever will.

That said, here’s what I’ve seen work in my own circle of family and friends.

Keep the relationship bigger than the argument. You can love someone fully and disagree with them fully. Those two things are allowed to sit side by side at the same table.

Set a house rule, not a gag order. Many families do best with a simple understanding that certain topics get a lighter touch at gatherings, not because they don’t matter, but because Grandma’s ninetieth birthday isn’t the venue for a debate.

Ask questions before you respond

Ask questions before you respond. When a grandchild says something that surprises or unsettles you, try asking what led them there before telling them what you think. You’ll learn more, and they will feel heard instead of corrected.

Protect the traditions that aren’t about the argument. Keep baking the same pie. Keep saying the same blessing, or let each person offer their own if that becomes the family’s way forward. Continuity matters more than we realize when everything else feels shaky.

Choose your moment. A serious conversation about faith or politics rarely goes well in the middle of a crowded holiday dinner. If something truly needs to be discussed, a quiet phone call or a one-on-one walk often works far better than an audience.

Watch your own tone before you watch theirs. It’s tempting to focus on how someone else spoke to us, but the fastest way to soften a hard conversation is to notice our own sharpness first and adjust it.

Give it time and give it grace. Some family rifts heal in a season. Some take years. A closed door today isn’t always a closed door forever.

Remember what the relationship is actually for. Family isn’t a debate club. Nobody needs to win. The goal was never agreement; it was always connection.

When healing doesn’t come

I want to say something honest here, because I think too many articles on this subject skip past it. Not every estrangement resolves. Some words, once spoken, leave a mark that doesn’t fade easily, no matter how much time passes. Some family members have hurt each other in ways that were not a simple misunderstanding but real, lasting harm, and pretending that a phone call or a holiday visit can undo that does a disservice to anyone living through it.

If you’re in that position, please know that stepping back from a relationship that continues to hurt you isn’t a failure of love or faith. Forgiveness, when it’s real, happens on its own timeline; sometimes it doesn’t happen at all, and that’s a valid place to land. Forgiveness is also not the same thing as reconciliation. A person can release their own bitterness for their own peace without ever returning to a relationship that isn’t safe or healthy for them.

If distance protects your well-being or your children’s well-being, that distance isn’t a moral failing. Some families do find their way back to each other after a period apart. Others don’t, and both outcomes deserve to be spoken about honestly rather than wrapped in false cheer. Grief over a relationship that may never be repaired is real grief, and it deserves to be honored rather than rushed.

A word for the grandmothers/grandfathers reading this

If you’re the matriarch/patriarch trying to hold a divided family together, please hear this. It’s not your job to make everyone agree. It never was. Your job, the one that actually matters, is to keep the door open and the table set. Agreement is optional. Love doesn’t have to be.

You may be the only person in your family who still talks to everyone. That’s not a small thing. That is a quiet, steady kind of leadership, and it matters more than you know. I also believe some comments or statements made can’t be forgiven. Therefore, we must let go of the stress and live our own lives. That may seem harsh, but some words will never be forgotten.

Does Prepping Mean You Don’t Have Faith

The Final Word

Family will always be made up of different people with different minds, and that’s never been a flaw; it’s always been the design. What’s changed is how loud the disagreements have become and how far apart we have drifted in our daily lives. I believe the families who weather this well are the ones who decide, on purpose, that the relationship matters more than being right, and I believe those who can’t weather it deserve compassion rather than judgment too. May God bless this world, Linda.

Copyright Images: Old Abandoned Church AdobeStock_212120257 by Scott Book

The post Family Divided: Politics and Religion appeared first on Food Storage Moms.

from Food Storage Moms

Apple Butter Recipe for Canning – The Complete Tested Method

We’ve already covered the basics of getting apple butter onto your shelf with a two-year shelf life elsewhere on the site. This one goes deeper into the parts that actually separate a good batch from a mediocre one: the exact tested recipe ratios, the doneness tests almost nobody explains properly, a genuine reduced-sugar option that’s still fully tested and safe, and the troubleshooting for when a batch doesn’t turn out right.

If you’ve ever ended up with apple butter that’s too thin, scorched on the bottom, or never quite sets right, this is the guide that explains why, and how the tested recipe avoids each of those problems in the first place.

Why Apple Butter Is Safe for Water Bath Canning

Unlike green beans or other low-acid vegetables, apples are naturally acidic enough to process safely in a boiling water bath rather than requiring a pressure canner. The combination of that natural acidity with the reduction in moisture during long cooking is what makes apple butter shelf-stable, which is also why the cooking time and final consistency matter for safety, not just texture.

Choosing Your Apples

A blend of apple varieties produces better flavor than any single type on its own. Mixing a tart variety with a sweeter one gives the finished butter the balance it needs, since an all-sweet batch tends to taste flat and one-dimensional once concentrated down.

• Tart varieties: Granny Smith, McIntosh, and other cooking apples that break down easily and add brightness
• Sweet varieties: Fuji, Gala, or Golden Delicious to round out the flavor and add natural sweetness
• Avoid apples that are overly mealy in texture, since they tend to produce a grainier finished product

The Standard Tested Recipe

This recipe follows the National Center for Home Food Preservation’s tested method, adapted from the USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning.

• Wash, peel if desired, core, and slice apples
• Cook slowly in cider or apple juice, with a small amount of vinegar if desired, until the apples are completely soft
• Press the cooked apples through a colander, food mill, or strainer to remove skins and seeds and create a smooth pulp
• Return the pulp to the pot and stir in sugar and spices such as cinnamon, cloves, or allspice
• Cook slowly, stirring frequently to prevent scorching, until the mixture thickens and passes the doneness test described below
• Fill hot into sterile half-pint or pint jars, leaving ¼-inch headspace. Quart jars don’t need to be pre-sterilized

A typical starting ratio is about ¼ to ½ cup of sugar per cup of fruit pulp, adjusted to taste once the mixture has cooked down and concentrated.

The Reduced-Sugar Tested Version

Most apple butter content online skips this entirely, but NCHFP has a separately tested reduced-sugar apple butter recipe that’s just as safe for water bath canning as the standard version. The process is nearly identical, cooking the pulp down with less sugar and relying more heavily on the natural concentration from extended cooking time to reach a safe, shelf-stable consistency.

This matters because sugar in apple butter is primarily a flavor and texture ingredient rather than the main safety factor, unlike jams that rely on sugar for pectin gel formation. That means you have real flexibility to cut sugar without compromising shelf stability, as long as you still cook the batch to the correct final consistency.

How to Actually Know When It’s Done

This is the step most home canners get wrong, either underselling how important it is or not understanding what the tests are actually checking for.

The Spoon Mounding Test

Remove a spoonful of the hot apple butter and hold it away from the steam for a full 2 minutes. If it stays mounded on the spoon rather than running off, it’s done. If it slumps or runs, it needs more cooking time.

The Plate Test

Spoon a small amount onto a cool plate and let it sit for a moment. If a ring of liquid separates and pools around the edge, the butter isn’t ready yet. When the mixture holds its shape with no liquid separating out, it’s fully cooked.

Both tests are checking for the same thing: enough moisture has cooked off that the mixture holds together at room temperature. This matters for both texture and shelf stability, so don’t skip this step even if the color and thickness look right.

Cooking Method Comparison

• Stovetop: The fastest method, typically 30 to 45 minutes once the pulp starts a gentle boil, but requires the most attention and frequent stirring to prevent scorching on the pot’s bottom
• Slow cooker: The most hands-off option, taking 2 to 4 hours on high or 6 to 8 hours on low. Prop the lid open slightly near the end to let excess moisture escape, since a fully sealed lid traps steam and slows down the thickening process
• Oven: A middle ground, cooking uncovered at a low temperature and stirring occasionally, which reduces scorching risk compared to stovetop while still allowing moisture to evaporate more efficiently than a sealed slow cooker

Whichever method you choose, the doneness tests above are what actually determine when it’s ready, not the clock.

Processing Times and Jar Sizes

Apple butter is processed in a boiling water bath canner, using the tested times for half-pint and pint jars. Always check the current NCHFP or USDA table for your specific altitude, since processing times increase at higher elevations to compensate for water’s lower boiling point.

• Half-pints and pints are the standard, tested jar sizes for apple butter
• Sterilize jars beforehand if your processing time will run under 10 minutes, since a shorter process time isn’t enough to sterilize the jar itself during processing
• Wipe rims thoroughly before applying lids, since any apple butter residue on the rim can prevent a proper seal

Troubleshooting Common Apple Butter Problems

• Too thin even after the mounding test seems close: Keep cooking. It’s better to slightly overcook than to can an under-thickened batch that may separate in the jar
• Scorched flavor or dark spots on the bottom of the pot: Heat was too high, or stirring wasn’t frequent enough. Lower the heat and stir more often, especially as the mixture thickens and starts sticking more easily
• Liquid pooling on top after jars have cooled: This usually means the batch wasn’t fully cooked down before canning. It’s still generally safe to eat if properly sealed, but the texture won’t be ideal
• Overly dark or bitter final product: Often from cooking at too high a heat for too long, essentially over-caramelizing the sugars past the point of pleasant flavor
• Grainy texture: Usually traced back to using mealy apple varieties or not straining the pulp thoroughly enough

Common Mistakes

• Adding all the sugar at the start instead of tasting and adjusting as the mixture concentrates, since flavors intensify significantly during cooking
• Walking away for extended periods without stirring, especially in the final stage when the mixture is thick enough to scorch easily
• Skipping both doneness tests and relying only on visual color or a rough time estimate
• Using quart jars for a recipe only tested in half-pints and pints
• Not adjusting processing time for altitude

Take the Next Step: Reclaim the Skills That Once Made Every Household Independent

Making and safely preserving your own apple butter is about more than filling a few jars. It’s part of a much bigger tradition of knowing how to provide for yourself with what you have—growing food, preserving a harvest, cooking from scratch, repairing instead of replacing, and keeping a household running when modern conveniences aren’t available.

Those practical skills were once ordinary knowledge passed from one generation to the next. Today, many of them are disappearing.

The Lost Skills of Independence brings that knowledge back together in one place. Inside, you’ll discover practical, old-fashioned skills for food preservation, self-reliant cooking, gardening, household preparedness, traditional remedies, repairs, and making better use of the resources around you.

If learning to turn a harvest of apples into shelf-stable food appeals to you, imagine being able to do the same across far more areas of everyday life.

Whether you want to depend less on the grocery store, become more prepared for disruptions, save money by doing things yourself, or simply recover the practical knowledge your grandparents took for granted, this is a resource designed to help you build those skills one project at a time.

Don’t let another generation of useful knowledge disappear.

Discover The Lost Skills of Independence and start rebuilding the skills that can make your home more capable, resilient, and self-reliant!

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I use any apple variety for apple butter?

Most varieties work, but a blend of tart and sweet apples produces noticeably better flavor than an all-sweet or all-tart batch. Avoid overly mealy varieties, which tend to produce a grainier finished texture.

Is reduced-sugar apple butter as safe as the regular version?

Yes, when made according to the specifically tested reduced-sugar recipe rather than simply cutting sugar from the standard recipe on your own. The tested version accounts for the change and still reaches a safe, shelf-stable result.

Why does my apple butter separate after canning?

This almost always means the batch wasn’t cooked down enough before it was jarred. Cook until it passes both the spoon and plate doneness tests next time, rather than stopping at a target time or color alone.

Can I substitute honey or maple syrup for the sugar?

This moves outside the specifically tested recipe, so it’s worth treating cautiously and using it only for a batch you plan to refrigerate and eat soon rather than shelf-stable canning, unless you’re following a recipe specifically tested with that substitution.

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Canning Green Beans – The Complete Guide

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Amish Canning: Myths Debunked

Canning Supplies: The Ultimate Guide for Preppers

Amish Cinnamon Bread: Friendship Recipe

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Seasonal Rhythms: How Native, Pioneer, And Amish Families Planned Their Year

Modern life has gradually replaced the calendar of the land with the calendar of appointments, notifications, and deadlines. Earlier generations lived differently because much of their work depended on recognizing what the season was already telling them. They knew roughly when maple sap would begin to run, when frozen ground would finally loosen, and when […]

from Survivopedia

10 Things to Keep Charged Before The SHTF

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Most people already own the gear that would get them through a blackout. A flashlight in a drawer, a radio on the shelf, a power bank buried in a bag somewhere, etc. But more often than not, those devices are at maybe 25 percent, or possibly dead, meaning they'll be useless when the power goes out. Owning useful equipment with a dead battery is one of the most common gaps in modern preparedness, and it's completely avoidable.

To avoid having dead devices during the next blackout or major disaster, you have to create a habit of recharging everything on a regular basis. You could market it on the calendar or put a reminder on your phone, whatever works for you. Just make sure everything is charged. And as for batteries, consider getting a battery tester to see how much juice is actually left.

The list in this post comes from the the UK preparedness channel, Charlie Survival, which focuses on calm, practical readiness without the fear-mongering. You can watch the video and see the complete list below. Here are 10 things you must keep charged.

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1. Your Phone

Number one is obvious, but most people use it completely wrong. The second a serious outage starts, stop treating your phone like entertainment and start treating it like emergency equipment.

That means setting it to lower power mode, lowering the screen brightness, and turning off Bluetooth if you don't use it. Stop endlessly refreshing social media, and skip the videos and games that drain the battery without helping you. Your phone can be your map, flashlight, banking access, weather source, news feed, and lifeline to family, but only for as long as the battery lasts.

It's also worth sending important messages early. Something simple works: “Power is out here. I'm safe. I'll update you later.” Mobile networks get congested fast during widespread disruption, so it's better to get that message out early than to wait until everyone else is trying at once.

2. Power Banks

This is the thing that keeps number one alive. Keep at least one good power bank charged, and ideally more than one.

The goal isn't to run your whole house off battery packs. It's redundancy. One power bank can fail. One cable can break. One battery gets left in another bag. And if the outage stretches into days, a decent power bank can be the difference between staying reachable and staring at a dead phone.

Larger capacity is nice if you use a lot of electronics, but the principle is the same at any size: keep them charged, test them, and know how many full phone charges you actually get out of each one before you need that number.

3. Lighting

Headlamps, handheld flashlights, and rechargeable lanterns all belong in the plan, but the headlamp deserves priority because it leaves both hands free. That matters when you're cooking, treating an injury, checking the breaker box, or moving through a dark house with something in your hands.

A rechargeable lantern is great for lighting a whole room, and a handheld flashlight is easy to hand off or point where you need it. But if you only prioritize one, make it the one you can strap to your head.

4. Portable Power Station

Not everyone needs to rush out and buy the biggest power station they can afford. But if you own one, keeping it charged makes a huge difference.

A power station can run lights, charge phones, keep communication gear going, and depending on its size, support some medical devices or refrigeration. The mistake people make is treating stored electricity like an unlimited resource. It isn't. If the power goes out, decide immediately what actually deserves a charge: communication first, then lighting, then medical needs, then information, then everything else. Don't burn through capacity running things simply because you can.

If you pair it with solar panels, learn before the emergency how long they realistically take to recharge the system in your actual local weather, not the ideal conditions on the box.

5. Emergency Radio

A battery-powered radio becomes surprisingly valuable when normal communication starts failing. Most people assume their phone will always deliver information, but that assumption breaks down fast. What happens when the internet is down, mobile data is overloaded, your router has no power, or your phone battery is nearly flat?

A radio gives you another way to receive information, and during a serious emergency, information itself becomes a resource. A hand-crank or battery model that you've tested and know works is one of the cheapest, most reliable layers you can add.

6. Satellite Communicator

This one isn't essential for everyone, but it's worth knowing about. A satellite communicator lets you send and receive messages in areas where normal mobile signal disappears entirely.

If you hike, camp, travel alone, or simply live somewhere rural where coverage is spotty, it can be genuinely valuable. The mistake is owning one and letting it sit flat. Before any trip, make sure it's charged, activated, set up, and familiar to you. Emergency equipment shouldn't require a tutorial once the emergency has already started.

7. Two-Way Radios or Walkie-Talkies

Owning walkie-talkies isn't the same as having a communication plan. Two flat radios in a cupboard aren't a system.

Used well, they're useful around a property, campsite, neighborhood, or between family members when cell networks fail. So if bad weather is forecast or disruption looks likely, charge them, keep them accessible, and test them in the actual spots where you expect to use them. Range on paper and range through the walls of your house are two very different things.

8. Rechargeable AA and AAA Batteries

This sounds less exciting than a power station, but rechargeable batteries are a quietly useful layer of redundancy. Flashlights, radios, headlamps, some medical devices, and plenty of small electronics still run on standard cells.

Keep a set of rechargeables charged and ready, and keep a sensible stock of ordinary disposable batteries as backup on top of that. This is where good preparedness gets less dramatic and more practical. You don't need one perfect solution. You need enough overlap that a single failure doesn't leave you with nothing.

9. Laptop or Tablet

During a longer outage, a laptop or tablet can help with communication, work, and access to anything you've saved locally. The key word there is saved.

Cloud storage is wonderful right up until you have no internet. So important documents, maps, instructions, contact details, and reference material shouldn't live only online. Store critical information locally on a charged device, and if you know a storm is coming, download anything useful before the network gets unreliable. Preparedness is largely about using the quiet period before disruption to make life easier afterward.

10. Portable Jump Starter

A flat starter battery can leave you stranded even when the vehicle itself is perfectly fine. A small lithium jump pack gives you a way out without needing a second vehicle and a set of cables on hand at the exact right moment.

Like everything else on this list, it only works if it's charged. A jump starter that's been sitting dead in the trunk for a year is just extra weight.

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from Urban Survival Site