5 Hand-Operated Kitchen Tools You’ll Need If The Grid Goes Down

Image source: Hinge Vintage Hardware

I’m a big fan of kitchen gadgets, having bought just about everything that has come out in the past 40 years: food processors, bread machines, rice cookers, even special margarita blenders!

You know what I have discovered lately? Most of these items were used a few times, and then covered and put away in a cupboard.

Some of my favorite kitchen items are simple, manual items that have been used for at least 100 years. When we consider that our electrical grid could be compromised at any time, it might be a good idea to have a few of these hand-operated items on standby.

Let’s examine five you may want to stash away.

1. Coffee percolators

My father never got the hang of those electric coffee pots or coffee makers. He believed that they were a waste of money and that coffee tasted “funny” when made in the expensive coffee maker one of my brothers bought him. Until he was placed in a nursing home, he used the same old-fashioned coffee percolator that he and my mother had received as a wedding present. Of course, you can use a French press, as well, but there’s a certain appeal to listening to that old percolator on the stove.

2. Egg beaters

You can still buy these today, but unfortunately, many of them now have plastic gears. Shop around, however, and you can find old-fashioned metal gears. You might pay more, but it will be worth it. While hand-driven egg beaters won’t handle heavy work or anything that needs super-fast mixing speeds (such as whipped cream), they will do the job for just about anything else, including cake mixes and, of course, eggs!

3. Stove top toaster

You can find these in the camping section of most general department stores. These cost less than $5 and they really do a terrific job. Depending on the size, you can toast two to four slices of bread or bagels in the same amount of time as your electric toaster.

4. Pastry cutter

If you like to bake, you might be familiar with this one. Most of us have become accustomed to our food processors, but once you try one of these to cut butter or shortening for baking, you will wonder why you waste so much time cleaning your food processor when you can simply use a pastry cutter. Best part is that these use no electricity!

5. Potato masher

Although the name implies that this only works for potatoes, let me tell you from experience: You can use this handy little tool for more recipes than you can shake a stick at! Mashed potatoes, yes, but beans (think refried beans!) and cauliflower, too. Anyone who likes to make jam will find one of these invaluable if you have no electricity to run your food processor. I’ve used both plastic ones and metal ones. While the plastic ones are lightweight and I’ve never had a problem, I have an old-fashioned metal one with the old wooden handle that I found at a second-hand store, just in case!

Of course, there are many other hand tools that didn’t make the list, including can openers, pressure canners, apple peelers, and manual meat grinders, to name a few.

What are your favorite hand-operated kitchen tools?

6 Surprising Luxuries You Didn’t Know You Could Run Off-Grid

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Before moving off-grid, I had a lot of preconceived notions about what “off-grid living” meant. Say goodbye to grandma’s antique 1000-watt waffle iron, put away the power tools and don’t even think about a dishwasher … right? Well, not really.

While “off-grid” can mean living without electricity and hauling water and all of your meals on a wood stove, it doesn’t necessarily have to.

To my surprise, with a small rooftop array on an off-grid cabin in rural Vermont, we’re able to enjoy more luxuries than the average suburban home has available. Even in a cold northern climate, there’s more than enough free solar energy at least 8 to 9 months of the year to power things you might not consider owning with the expense of grid-purchased electricity. Add in a wind turbine to collect energy from winter storms, and you may be set up for quite the life of luxury.

1. Whirlpool bath tub

For off-grid homes, a whirlpool bathtub can be a great way to relax after a long day working in the woods. While it may not be an option most of the winter except on the sunniest days, March through October is whirlpool bath season. Imagine relaxing comfortably, submerged up to your neck with jets flowing all around you after an eight-hour session hauling logs and splitting wood. Some of that wood, once dried, went into your wood-fired boiler to heat the water for your tub, and the surplus electricity generated throughout the day while you were outdoors is powering your evening tub.

2. Dishwasher

Believe it or not, a dishwasher can be a great way to utilize solar electricity during peak hours. Unless you happen to live where a gravity well is an option, a water pump uses a significant amount of electricity.

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If doing dishes by hand, the best time to run water is mid-day when production is at its peak. The question is: Do you want to spend the most beautiful part of the day trapped indoors with your hands in a sink, or do you want to be outside enjoying the fruits of your off-grid life? By wiping off your dishes and loading the dishwasher in the evening, all it takes is a second to turn on the dishwasher mid-day when you come in for a lunch-time break.

3. Internet

While a complete off-grid lifestyle is practical for a tradesman, what about those of us who were raised in a city and still need to make a living through a more “on-grid” line of work? While wired broadband is becoming more available in rural areas, the more remote areas still do not have those options. If you happen to be in an area covered by cell service, there are options for cellular-powered wireless adapters for computer use. In a slightly more remote area, there may be radio Internet options that still allow high-speed connection by routing the signal through a series or mountaintop towers, as is commonly available in rural parts of the northeast. For those in true wilderness, satellite Internet is remarkably dependable in all but the stormiest of weather.

4. Radiant floor heat

While an indoor wood stove is an exceptionally practical and dependable way to heat a home without electricity, it requires quality hardwood to burn to avoid chimney fires from softwood creosote buildup. For those living in conifer or hemlock forests, an outdoor boiler might be a better way to use your available resources. Fortunately, with the super-efficient models on the market today, they only require minor retrofits to run directly off battery power. A small inverter placed within your boiler shed to power the boiler fan, and the use of DC electric (directly battery powered) pumps to circulate your water or antifreeze, and you have a low-energy solution and warm radiant floors to boot. Still, make sure you have an electricity-free form of heat to get you through the worst storms, but most days your boiler will keep you toasty on just a small amount of softwood.

5. Dehumidifier or air conditioner

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Really? A compressor on solar power? Yes! Peak summer heat and humidity often coincide with peak solar output. Around the summer solstice, our battery bank will be full by mid-day, meaning that a whole afternoon’s production will be wasted without an outlet.

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Once you’ve done all your electricity-using chores, go ahead and switch on the dehumidifier or air conditioner with your free electricity. Obviously you need to monitor closely to make sure it doesn’t stay on past peak solar output, but that’s a small consideration for a free burst of comfort during the heat of the day.

6. Electric cooking appliances

While many homesteaders are building summer kitchens to keep the heat out of the house during hot months, solar-powered homesteaders have the option of setting up an electric-powered kitchen either indoors or outdoors for the summer months. Single burner induction ranges can bring a large canning pot to a boil in no time, and will barely dent our mid-day production at high summer. A small countertop electric oven, like an oversized toaster oven, is great for baking summer pies or a quick meal using free electricity. Just as wood stove cooking accomplishes two tasks, heat and food, a separate set of solar-powered summer appliances means lower bills and quick meals.

What luxuries would you add to our list? Share your off-grid advice in the section below:

Are You Prepared For Extended Blackouts? Read More Here.

Maybe All Those “Smart” Gadgets And Appliances From China Aren’t Such A Smart Idea (VIDEO)

You know all of those cool, sci-fi gadgets that people are beginning to get that are connected to the internet in their homes?  The voice controlled thermostats, the wireless printers and cameras, the home security systems, the food scale that sends the calories to your phone app, those “smart” appliances that text you to pick up milk, and the DVRS that can be programmed via your phone from work?

Apparently, those things may not be so smart after all because they played a big role in the cyber attack that took place last Friday. Security analysts believe that Friday’s attack on popular websites such as Reddit, Twitter, Netflix, and Spotify was the first one carried out by hackers who used the “Internet of Things.”

Here’s how the Internet of Things works:

Who else thinks that this is how Skynet got started? Maybe it’s just me.

The attack was on one service, Dyn.

The massive attack took down the internet across the country. The website Downdetector provided a map that shows how much of the US was affected:

The attack was on one company, and everything else fell over like a row of dominoes.

All of the companies involved use Dyn, a cloud-based Internet performance management company.

Dyn was the target of the attack, and that, in turn, affected other companies.

Dyn is sort of like a phone book that directs users to the internet address of the website. On Friday a distributed denial of service attack, (DDoS) affected Dyn by sending thousands of messages at the same time, which overwhelmed the service.

Security company Flashpoint said it had confirmed that the attack used “botnets” infected with the “Mirai” malware. From their site:

Flashpoint has confirmed that some of the infrastructure responsible for the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Dyn DNS were botnets compromised by Mirai malware. Mirai botnets were previously used in DDoS attacks against security researcher Brian Krebs’ blog “Krebs On Security” and French internet service and hosting provider OVH. Mirai malware targets Internet of Things (IoT) devices like routers, digital video records (DVRs), and webcams/security cameras, enslaving vast numbers of these devices into a botnet, which is then used to conduct DDoS attacks. Flashpoint has confirmed that at least some of the devices used in the Dyn DNS attacks are DVRs, further matching the technical indicators and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) associated with previous known Mirai botnet attacks.

While Flashpoint has confirmed that Mirai botnets were used in the October 21, 2016 attack against Dyn, they were separate and distinct botnets from those used to execute the DDoS attacks against “Krebs on Security” and OVH. Earlier this month, “Anna_Senpai,” the hacker operating the large Mirai botnet used in the Krebs DDoS, released Mira’s source code online. Since this release, copycat hackers have used the malware to create botnets of their own in order to launch DDoS attacks.

It is unknown if the attacks against Dyn DNS are linked to the DDoS attacks against Krebs, OVH, or other previous attacks. Given the proliferation of the Mirai malware, the relationship between the ongoing Dyn DDoS attacks, previous attacks, and “Anna_Senpai” is unclear.

Coincidentally, many of the  vulnerable “smart” devices are made in China.

Many of the devices involved come from Chinese manufacturers, with easy-to-guess usernames and passwords that cannot be changed by the user – a vulnerability which the malware exploits. According to the BBC:

“Mirai scours the Web for IoT (Internet of Things) devices protected by little more than factory-default usernames and passwords,” explained cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs, “and then enlists the devices in attacks that hurl junk traffic at an online target until it can no longer accommodate legitimate visitors or users.”

The owner of the device would generally have no way of knowing that it had been compromised to use in an attack, he wrote.

Mr Krebs is intimately familiar with this type of incident, after his website was targeted by a similar assault in September, in one of the biggest web attacks ever seen…That attack began around 8 p.m. ET on Sept. 20, and initial reports put it at approximately 665 Gigabits of traffic per second. Additional analysis on the attack traffic suggests the assault was closer to 620 Gbps in size, but in any case this is many orders of magnitude more traffic than is typically needed to knock most sites offline. (source)

I’m sure those easy passwords and vulnerabilities aren’t deliberate. China would never sneak Trojan horses into the USA, would they?

Article first appeared at DaisyLuther.com