Start Prepping Here – Basics of Sanitation

You never know when you’re going to be without water.  Or even just without HOT water.  I think I’m being prepared for some kind of water outage because I feel like we’ve had so many of them!  January 1st of this year, our pipes completely froze.  Today, I woke up to no hot water.  Now, you might not think that it’s a HUGE deal, but it’s a much bigger deal than you think it is.  First off, it means no showers – unless you can stomach a freezing cold shower which I can’t.  Then it means that you have to heat water for dishes.  Forget your kids getting baths.  Fortunately, we can still run the washing machine and the dishwasher.  They may be a bit less effective, but they still work.

So how do you handle sanitation if you lose power and water?  Well, remember last Friday, we talked about having the basics in place.  Starting out with water, in one form or another, is very important, like I mentioned.  You should be stocking one gallon per person per day.   What do you use that one gallon per person per day on?

Toilet Use and Handwashing  

1.)  Make-shift toilet

Putting together a toilet for use is actually very simple.  Get yourself a 5 or six gallon round bucket.  These are amazingly easy to find for FREE at grocery stores.  Go to the baking section and ask if they have any empty 5-6 gallon frosting buckets.  Most of the time they do or they can tell you when to come back for them.  Once you have a bucket, take it home and clean it out.  Purchase some heavy-duty- trash bags.  I kept mine in the bucket.  Then get this toilet seat with lid.  Make sure you have several containers of kitty litter on hand as well.

To get the setup up and running, we took the bucket and lined it with TWO heavy-duty trash bags.  Pull the extra part of the bags over the side and snap the lid over the top of them all.  Pour the kitty litter into an open container and put a 1/2 C measuring cup into it.  Every time someone needs to use the bathroom, have them use the 1/2 C to scoop that much kitty litter and deposit it into your portable toilet.  This helps absorb the liquids and helps keep at least some of the smells at bay.

2.)  Washing your Hands

The best way we’ve found to wash our hands was to put one of our five-gallon water containers with a spigot at our kitchen sink just 10 feet or so from our main floor bathroom.  This spigot allows you to get your hands wet and close the spigot while you lather up with soap before opening the spigot to rinse your hands.  We even had a guest with us over the holiday.  Even with 8 of us in the house, we still didn’t go through 5 gallons while washing our hands in 3 1/2 days of being without water.

Bathing

How do you go about bathing with no water?  It can be done and there are multiple ways that you can go about it?

Let’s start the discussion with how did people bathe 150 years ago?  First off, they didn’t bathe every day.  If they were really well-off, they may have bathed their entire body once a week.  But is that the only way that they cleaned themselves?  Not by a longshot.

(1) Face and Hands were cleaned at least daily.

Do you remember the pitchers and basins that you would see in old movies?  Ones like this?

These would usually be filled by servants so that when a person woke up in the morning, they would be able to wash their face, hands, and sometimes arms using the water from the pitcher poured into the basin.

We can do the same thing, but no one has to have the same pitcher and basin.  We can use any type container of water and our sink with the stopper up.  Use a washcloth and clean at least your face, hands, arms, armpits, and groin area daily in this fashion.

But there’s an even easier way.  You can use baby wipes!  We stock baby wipes in our house so that we can give ourselves a sponge bath, even daily if need be.  These are gentle enough that they can be used on a baby, so most people shouldn’t react.  The fact that you don’t need to rinse yourself off is a HUGE plus because it saves part of the one gallon per person per day for other activities.

(2) Use deodorant

Of course, you can only use deodorant if you have a stash of deodorant.  I can only imagine the pungent scents that wafted through most houses before we had indoor plumbing and deodorant, ones where the smells of food could almost be rivaled by the smells of sweaty people.

(3) If you need a REAL bath or a shower.

I highly recommend this handy little gizmo.  It’s a solar shower.  You fill it with up to five gallons of water, hang it in the sun, and once it’s warm, you can bring it inside, hang it in your shower, and use it.  You would turn the water on to get your hair and body wet to wash both.  Then you would turn it off to lather up your hair and body.  Then you would turn it back on rinse yourself off.  The solar element on the shower helps heat the water so you don’t take a COLD shower.  How hot it would get would depend on how long you leave it in the sun.

Dishes

If you have the ability, make sure that you keep plastic silverware and paper plates, bowls, and napkins on hand.  If you are in the midst of a water crisis, you don’t want to have to wash a TON of dishes.  Even with that being said, if you can cook in a disposable aluminum pan, that’s awesome, but during times without water, you will probably need to still wash the pots and dishes which you cooked in.  You’ll use more water on dishes than most of your hand washing and personal cleaning.  It amazed me how much water I had to use to wash dishes when our pipes froze.

Getting Set Up

Make sure that you have two dish pans, a dish drying rack, a large pot, and a teakettle.  We have two dishpans we keep in our basement and only use in water emergencies, but they’ve been lifesavers when we’ve needed them.

Interesting “How To” Nitty Gritty

1.)  To wash dishes you will want to heat some water on the stove (or butane stove).  The more water you can heat, the better off you will be.  I also highly suggest that you keep a teakettle on hand.

2.) Once you’ve heated your dishwater to wash your dishes in, then fill your tea kettle and put it on to boil.  Wash your dishes, drain as much of the water out of them as you can and leave them in the second dish pan until it’s pretty full.

3.) When your teakettle whistles, then use that boiling water to both rinse and sterilize the dishes you just washed.  Once the dishes are sterilized and rinsed, put them in the drying rack.

4.)  Repeat the process until all the dishes are washed.

Laundry

I left the laundry for last because you will do it the least often.  If you are only in a short-term crisis, you can make it without doing laundry.  If, however, you find yourself in a longer-term crisis and you need to do laundry, it will be an undertaking.

1.)  Changing the way you wear clothes

If you end up in a long-term crisis, I want to suggest we take a look at the way our forebears wore their clothes even less than a century ago.   They wore the same outfit all week long.  Even my mother has told me stories of how they would have one school outfit for the entire week.  They had to keep it clean enough that they could wear it each day to school.  Then they had a play outfit that they had to wear the entire week.  So that’s two outfits per person per week.

When dealing with undergarments, when they put on their night clothes each evening, they would remove their undergarments and wash them, rinse them, and hang them out to dry overnight.  These would be worn all week (but cleaned nightly).

Once a week, her mother would do laundry.  So you’d end up with one set of PJ’s, one set of play clothes, one set of day clothes, and one set of undergarments per person to wash for the entire week.  While this is still an undertaking, this is MUCH more doable than our “wear a new outfit every day” life that most people live now.

2.)  Laundry basics

SO what is the absolute minimum that you can get by with for doing laundry?  You’ll need two wash tubs, a washboard, a bar of laundry soap, a ringer of some sort, a drying rack or clothesline.

Have you ever seen the movie “Far and Away?”   Tom Cruise did an amazing job in showing how to wash clothes using a washboard and washtub.

1.)  You plunge your clothes into the water at the bottom of the first washtub.  Get then thoroughly wet.

2.) Once you pull them out of the water you run your bar of laundry soap across the garment.

3.) You then lower your garment into the water again to spread the soap throughout the garment better.  Bring the garment up and scrub it on the scrub board.

4.) Plunge it back into the water, then bring it up and scrub it again.

5.)  Then you’ll want to rinse your garments in clean water.

6.)  Once it’s rinsed, then you’ll use something to squeeze out the water.  I chose to purchase a mop bucket with wringer.  I use the ringer to squeeze the water out of the clothes.

Handling basics for sanitation aren’t all that complicated and don’t require a ton of equipment.  With a few basic pieces of equipment, some of them very inexpensive, you can take care of your family’s sanitation needs for a week, for a month, or for longer.

What About You?

Do you have some or all or even more items than are listed here?  Have you thought about how you would handle each of these situations if you were faced with a situation for which you would be out of water for a time?  Are there other ways that you would take care of your family in this type of a crisis?  I’d love to hear!  Leave a comment below and let us know!

Remember, knowledge isn’t just knowing something.  It’s living it!

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