Self Reliance Expo

Last weekend we had the opportunity to attend the Salt Lake Self Reliance Expo. We were like kids in a candy shop at that event. There were SOOO many great things to learn about, people to talk about, and new products to see. We got a lot of answers solved that we have been stewing about for quite a while.

If you are new to food storage, we highly recommend that you focus on food and water storage first (following our babystep checklists or Food Storage Made Easy all-inclusive ebook is a great way to get started). If you are feeling ready to move on to some ~~scarier~~ more advanced topics check out some of the great things we are going to be sharing with you over the next few months.

Water Purifiers/Water Filtration
It’s amazing how actually hearing people TALK about these things in real life can really clear up a lot of confusion. We visited every booth with water solutions and we now feel like we can accurately tell you about the differences. We’re also working out some dealer arrangements to help you get AWESOME pricing so stay tuned!

Food
Here are a few hints for you on this one … “healthy, organic, gluten-free, vegetarian, food storage”. Plus we got to taste and learn about lots of other more traditional food items too.

Sanitation
You may have noticed that we are a little obsessed about emergency sanitation lately. We found some fantastic (and CUTE) laundry and toilet kits at great prices. If you don’t have the time/energy to put something together yourself, these are awesome. More info coming soon.

Emergency Binder Kits
You know how baby books come perfectly formatted, with information sheets for you to fill out, special places for you to place every imaginable thing like hospital bracelets, hair from first haircut, birth certificates and more? The types of books that leave you thinking- there’s nothing I would have thought of that they didn’t. Well imagine a baby book on steroids for all of your emergency binder needs. If we were going to make something like this ourselves, this is EXACTLY how we would do it. But the work has already been done so we don’t have to! We can’t wait to share this with you (hopefully next week!)

Generators
We’ve always been a little jealous of the people who during the powerless days of the 7 Day Challenge say “Got that one covered, just used our generator”. The issue we’ve had with generators is that most generators require fuel, and fuel can run out. Well, at the expo there was a solar-powered generator that doesn’t require you to store fuel … SIGN ME UP! You may be surprised at what some appliances/tools current solar power solutions will or won’t charge. We’ll be doing an in-depth report on this. We’re also getting some dealer arrangements put together so we can pass along the best prices on these too! And don’t worry, if you can’t afford a generator (we’re still saving up for ours) we will continue to share helpful ideas for powerless cooking, and alternative heating/cooling methods to survive without power!

Friends
We got to meet tons of awesome people at the Expo.

James Talmage Stephens, author of the best-selling Emergency Preparedness Handbook chatted with us for quite a while and is trying to encourage us to start a weekly podcast on his preparedness network. Eek!
At the American Preppers booth we visited with Phil who is one of the contributors at UtahPreppers.com (we LOVE LOVE LOVE these guys) and with Dr. Christine Princeton from American Preppers. We are working on convincing both of them to contribute some of their talents/knowledge in guest posts on our blog.
Jeff from Directive21.com has been a long-time advertiser on our site. It was awesome to see him and thank him for his support of our blog over the years
All the crew at the Tattler Reusable Canning Lids booth were so helpful. I had just BARELY tried out my lids for the first time (see Monday’s post) and I got some more great tips from them (and got convinced to buy a bunch more lids!)