Daily Survival: 7 Pieces of Junk That Could Save Your Life When SHTF

There’s a corner of my garage I kept meaning to clear out for about six years. Dead appliances, a bin of bicycle parts, and a stack of newspapers my wife has asked me twice to burn. Then one February the power went down for four days. I ended up walking out there with a flashlight at eleven at night, and I came back in with a coffee can and a hacksaw.

Stuff already rusting in your garage has one advantage nothing on a shelf can match. You already own it. So nobody will be fighting you for it when the stores empty out.

7. Broken Solar Garden Lights = Free Panels And Batteries

Those solar path lights line half the driveways in America, and they quit after two or three seasons without much warning. Almost nobody bothers looking inside before tossing them, which is a shame considering what’s sitting in there.

Cracking one open turns up four useful parts, since every one of them holds a small solar panel, a rechargeable NiMH cell in AA or AAA size, an LED, and a tiny circuit board. That means six dead path lights hand you six rechargeable batteries and six panels for the cost of walking to the curb.

Wiring three or four of those panels in series with a bit of speaker wire gives you a charger that runs all day in a south-facing window. I’ve kept a headlamp and a radio going through a long outage that way, without touching a drop of generator fuel.

The LEDs earn their keep as well, because each one will run for hours off a single cell. And the whole assembly still works as designed if you simply stake it back in the yard, which marks the path to the woodpile so nobody wanders out there with a flashlight.

I pull these out of neighbors’ trash every spring, since they come out with the yard waste like clockwork.

Worth Knowing: Those little NiMH cells are the same chemistry as the battery packs in your cordless drill and your old power tools, which raises an interesting question. Most batteries we throw away aren’t actually dead, and the method for bringing them back to life at home turns out to be fairly simple. This video guide walks through how to recondition the batteries most people give up on, covering car batteries, deep cycle, and the smaller rechargeables.

6. The Empty Barrel

Mine sat empty for eleven years, and I finally understood that a barrel is one of the most useful thing in a garage.

What you want is either a wooden barrel or a food-grade plastic drum, and the marking to look for is HDPE with a number 2 stamped in the recycling triangle. Wooden barrels breathe and last generations, though they need to stay wet or the staves shrink and the hoops drop off.

The Amish stay away from those commercial blue drums. Their reasoning is that hose barrels hauled solvents, detergents and chemicals, and the plastic absorbs whatever sat in it long enough that scrubbing never truly gets it out. A drum that shipped pickles or olives is a different animal, since food went in and food comes out.

Once you have a clean one, it earns its keep in a lot of ways:

Rainwater catchment off a downspout, with a screened top and a spigot fitted near the bottom
Dry goods storage for rice, beans, flour and feed, sealed against mice and damp
Composter if you drill it through and mount it sideways on a frame so it turns
Emergency water reserve parked in the basement, filled and treated, holding a couple hundred gallons
Root washing and butchering station cut in half lengthwise, which gives you two deep tubs

But the most interesting use is building a hidden underground mini root cellar. That one is a soul project for me. I built it together with my son over a weekend, working from a plan I found in The Lost Skills of Independence, and the thing turned out better than I expected. It sits buried in the side yard now, holding vegetables and part of the stockpile where nobody crossing the property would ever spot it.

5. Rusty #10 Cans = A Rocket Stove

What you end up with is a rocket stove from 3 cans, and it boils a quart of water on twigs and pencil-thick sticks in eight or nine minutes.

The fuel savings are the real prize here. You can cook for a family for weeks on deadfall gathered from your own yard, so the propane stays where it belongs, which is winter heat.

Here are the steps to build it:

Smaller cans do other jobs around the place:

Char cloth from old denim, made in a coffee can with a tight lid over coals in about twenty minutes
Rain gauge or seed starter from a can with nail holes punched through the bottom
Rodent-proof scoop for grain out of the same can, lid on when it goes back in the bin
Cooking pot for the stove itself, since a smaller can nests right on the notched rim

One caution before you light it. Burn the thing outdoors or in a doorway with air moving through, because a stove like this puts out carbon monoxide that you cannot smell coming.

4. That Dead Chest Freezer Is Rodent-Proof Food Storage

The chest freezer that quit on you is a sealed steel box lined with several inches of foam. Hauling it to the dump costs money you don’t need to spend.

Leave it unplugged in a shed or a garage instead. It holds a couple hundred pounds of rice, beans and flour in a container mice cannot chew into. Mice have taken more of my stored food over the years than any thief has, so this one isn’t theoretical for me.

That insulation keeps working as well. Bury the box to the lid in a shaded spot with the door on top and you have a root cellar. It holds potatoes, carrots and cabbage about twenty degrees cooler than the air above it. Some folks run them as coolers with a few frozen jugs inside, and the temperature holds two or three days at a stretch, because there’s so little air in there to keep cold.

Make sure you take the lid latch off before you store anything. A sealed freezer is a genuine hazard for children, so leave the lid propped whenever it isn’t in use.

3. Moth-Eaten Wool Sweaters Beat Synthetics When Wet

Wool with holes in it is still wool. And wool is the only common fiber that keeps you warm after it soaks through.

So a sweater your wife has already written off can be cut down into gear worth having. The sleeves come off at the shoulder and slide straight onto your calves as gaiters. They work over your forearms under a coat too. The body cuts into mitten liners and sock liners, and neither one asks for much sewing skill.

From there, the ribbed hem makes a watch cap that pulls over your ears. The scraps stuff into boot toes when you’re sitting still in a stand. Wool also holds up next to a fire without melting into your skin, which is more than fleece will do for you when a spark lands.

Anything too far gone for clothing still has a use. Pack old wool into the gap around a window frame or under a door. It cuts a shocking amount of draft in a house you’re heating with one stove.

2. Old Windows = A Winter Proof Garden

Nobody throws away a window on purpose, which is why yours have been piling up since the remodel and leaning against the garage wall while you figure out what they’re good for.

You can use them to build a winter-proof garden. Four cinder blocks or a couple of straw bales arranged in a rectangle against your south-facing wall will hold a window flat across the top, tilted a few inches toward the sun for runoff and light. That arrangement gives you a cold frame, and the soil inside runs 10 to 15 degrees warmer than the bed sitting right beside it. Click here for the step-by-step instructions.

The season gain is what you’re really after here, because you can start greens in late February and keep pulling spinach and kale into December. Your winter-proof garden ends up working six extra weeks at each end of the year, and your seedlings harden off out there instead of crowding the kitchen counter every spring.

That spare glass has other work in it if you have more panes than one frame needs:

Storm window screwed over a drafty original, which cuts heat loss about as well as the store-bought unit
Cloche from a smaller pane leaned over a single plant, and it beats any plastic milk jug you’ve tried
Solar dehydrator lid over a shallow screened box, good for drying herbs, apple rings and tomatoes
Seedling shelf glazing on a lean-to frame against the house, which turns a wall into a small greenhouse
Rooting bed cover over a sand box, where cuttings hold humidity long enough to take

Two cautions are worth respecting before you get started. The lid needs propping open on any sunny day above 45 degrees, since a closed frame will cook tender plants faster than you’d believe. Older frames also tend to carry lead paint, so the wood wants sealing or stripping before it sits over anything you intend to eat.

1. The Dead Water Heater = 40 Gallons Of Emergency Water

The water heater standing in your basement right now holds 40 to 50 gallons of clean drinking water, and it has been sitting full this whole time without you thinking about it once.

Here’s how to get the water out in 10 minutes The power breaker or the gas valve comes off first, because an element that fires in an empty tank burns out within seconds. Then the cold supply valve on top gets shut, which stops fresh water from pushing in behind you while you work.

Do you have a broken garden hose? Well, you can learn how to patch it after this easy method and thread it onto the drain valve at the bottom, with the far end running into a bucket or out a window below tank level. Once air is moving, gravity does the rest on its own.

The dead heater in your garage is worth even more than the working one. Elements and thermostats fail long before the tank does, so a heater that quit heating is usually a perfectly sound steel vessel. Standing it upright on a platform gives you gravity-fed water for a shower or an outdoor sink, while laying it on its side turns it into a rain barrel that rodents cannot chew through.

If the tank itself is genuinely shot, an angle grinder opens up a whole other set of options. You can end up with an Amish meat smoker that draws better than most store-bought units, a fire pit that will outlast any burn barrel you’ve owned, or a stove body for a serious rocket stove build.

A stored tank does need flushing before anybody drinks from it, since sediment collects in the bottom over the years and nobody wants that in a glass. Repressurizing a rusty tank is the other thing worth avoiding, because a failure under pressure gets dangerous in a way an empty tank never does.

Go Look In Your Garage Tonight

Every one of these seven things sat in my house for years while I was reading catalogs and adding gear to a wish list. So take a flashlight out to the corner you’ve been avoiding and go through it item by item, asking what each thing is made of rather than what it was sold as. A dead appliance stops being an appliance and turns into steel and copper, and a flat inner tube stops being a tube and turns into three minutes of fire in a wet wind.

Then set aside what’s worth keeping and put it somewhere you’ll find it in the dark. The night you need a coffee can and a hacksaw is not the night you want to be hunting for them.

Seven items is only where this goes, though, because a man who thinks this way stops buying preps and starts building them instead. These 25 projects are a must-know for preppers like you and me, and every one of them comes out of scrap and salvage rather than a catalog order. You get the root cellar that doubles as a bunker, a generator built out of used car parts, and an underground greenhouse that grows food straight through February.

So clear that corner out this week, then have a look at the most common items your neighbors are throwing away. They might be more valuable that you think.

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