Rocket stoves are highly efficient for cooking and heating. They use a simple combustion chamber coupled with an insulated chimney to burn small amounts of material at high temperatures. A few sticks of wood will have water boiling in minutes. A couple more will keep your house warm and cozy through the harshest winter months at a fraction of the cost of a wood, pellet or gas stove.

An important part of survival prepping is sustainability. To be truly ready for disaster on any scale, you must be prepared to provide your family with food and shelter. Ideally you are able to generate your own power and heat, collect your own water and process your waste. An Earthship home is designed to do all of this. It collects and recycles water, generates power, stabilizes temperatures, processes sewage and grows food.

Part of being prepared for any disaster, natural or man-made, is having a plan for power. If the electric grid goes out, how will you light your home? Keep the contents of the freezer from spoiling? Run water pumps? Wind turbines are an easy way to harvest free power. There are many options, including the popular DIY wind generator design called vertical axis wind turbine, or VAWT.

Whether a local storm knocks out the power in your home for a few hours or a massive disaster shuts down the grid for month, solar powered gadgets will help you make it through. It is important to have a plan for providing light, heat and food preservation to your family when the electric goes down. Yet it could be just as critical to have power for a radio or to charge a cell phone.

Every survival prepper should sit up and pay attention to the tiny home movement. These little dwellings are a physical representation of the survivalist philosophy: they consume minuscule amounts of energy, save on water, are generally inexpensive and, most importantly, they force you to let go of your attachment to stuff. There simply isn’t room for more than you need.

You may just be wanting a small cabin made from pallets with no running water or power sources for off grid living – or you may just want to do a few small things to help reduce your utility bills every month. Either way, you can get reduce your power and water consumption really cheap with just a little out of the box thinking.

Thanks to the hard work of Lasersaber at LaserHacker.com, he’s developed an open source idea for making your own solar power unit. What makes this build so unique is that everything is enclosed inside the frame of a 20 watt solar panel allowing you to plugin a power strip and power your devices easily.

Using a few soda cans, some spare wood, some leftover plexiglass and a couple of old CPU fans – I made a miniature solar heater that is designed to sit in a window sill. This is a smaller version that I wanted to test out before building a larger 4×8 unit to do some real heating.

We’ve all turned the ignition on our cars only to hear nothing when we expect it to crank. Usually we hitch a ride to the auto parts store and grab a new battery and turn in the old one to eliminate the dreaded core charge which is mandated by our lovely government. Before you turn the battery in, let me offer you an alternative use for those old car batteries.