Also buy kool-aid because water will have a bad tatse and not what we are use to drinking

LOL You’ve got that right! Good call!

Good for you! You thought of something that few people do. SALT!!! NOT only would we miss the taste, our bodies NEED salt to function. Bravo! Your other ideas are good,too. I have been prepping since 1998. Not big time, just always keeping it in the back of my mind and squirrling things away. I have never stopped reading and thinking about what and how. My biggest drawback is that I’m 74 years old. Healthy, but just enough arthritis in my back to keep me from doing some of the heavy duty activities that I would like to do such as lifting a 25 lb bag of beans. But that is just something I need to overcome by working smarter and not harder. God Bless.

To purify water without electricity the simplest method is to use the solar rays. A bottle of water in the sun for several hours will have bacteria and viruses killed. You can also make a small solar oven for that purposes. The only thing you will need is aluminum foil and cardboard and some glue to attach the foil to the cardboard. There are dozens of examples in the internet.
Another thing you can use is potassium iodine that you can get in the internet. If you use bleach or similar you can also use peroxide to get rid of the bleach odor after the water is purified. If you go to the redox formula you will find a drop of peroxide per drop of bleach will do the trick. Again it is to gt rid of the odor left by the bleach

Recycling plastic bottles is a great tip I’d never thought of! Thanks for that.

No scale is needed. Just drop them onto a hard surface. If it rings, it’s copper. If it doesn’t have that ringing sound, it’s zinc

But which is the myth? Plz list a website that shows me the rate of breakdown of bleach. I don’t trust you any more than I trust FEMA.

Hard Money ALWAYS has a role in the exchange of goods. For instance, your neighbor has green beans. You want to swap some eggs for some green beans, but he has chickens also. No deal. But a small piece of silver does the trick.

I have hand tools, handles to repair them if necessary and raw stock to make more if it comes to that. We have a well with a hand pump that produces 5 gallons per minute. We have a garden that produces enough for my family and more to share with our neighbors. We can the extra fruit, berries, root crops, vegetables and other harvested items.

We grow some of our own spices, herbs, nuts and potatoes. We even can potatoes so they don’t spoil. Though we do have to store some to plant in the spring for the fall harvest. You do have to plan ahead, and don’t eat what you’re going to need to plant for the next season. Putting things aside for future growth is what you must do if you want to live.

Just counting on barter seems like a good way to get less than what you invest in time and effort to produce what you will need in the future. You have to produce more than you consume to live in the long term. That is the lesson people in Venezuela are learning today. Societies have to produce more than they consume or they will die back to some sustainable level. Specialization just means you don’t have the skills to do everything that needs to be done, and bartering just let’s people know what you’re lacking in skills and resources.

CM