Cleaning Products

 Let’s talk about keeping clean in an emergency - bodies, homes, work surfaces. The CDC recommends storing paper products and plastic ware for your family for two - four weeks for an emergency. Again, we’re having a small stash on hand so you can learn to adapt without being thrown in all at once. To your Stores, you might want to add disposable eating supplies, to include paper cups, paper plates, napkins or paper towels (using paper towels as napkins also gives you disposable towels for cleaning, thus they serve a dual purpose) and plastic utensils. The goal here is to use items initially that can be thrown out while you establish a routine of how to wash dishes with no running or hot water.

Soap is a critical product in an emergency. You need it to clean your bodies, clothes, dishes, and wounds. The safest and easiest treatment for scrapes, cuts, bites, etc., is soap and hot water. Bar soap is the easiest product to purchase for cleaning wounds and bodies. Bar soap can also be used to clean clothes. My son spent this past summer in Kenya praying to further discern a call to be a Missionary. In Kenya, clothes are washed weekly by first putting them in a bucket pre-filled with soapy water and allowing them to soak to loosen the dirt. Next, they’re put into a second bucket of water, one at a time, and washed by hand, rubbing soap into dirty or stubborn spots. There is a third bucket of clean water for rinsing. If the rinse water gets too soapy, it must be dumped out and fresh water used. Any soap left in clothes makes them very stiff and agitates the skin of the wearer. After rinsing, clothes get wrung out and hung on the line to dry. We lived in England once, during the winter months, and it rained pretty much daily. The neighborhood joke was to look out the window to check if I had my clothes on the line as an accurate weather forecaster. If my clothes were out, it would most certainly rain. We learned to hang our clothes inside or drape them over our furnaces to dry. All winter long, we had clothes draped throughout the house. But we also were able to wear clean clothes. Think through hanging out clothes to dry. Where would you hang them? Do you need to also store line that can be used indoors for hanging clothes to dry? Make sure to stock up on bar soap. It’s inexpensive and can be purchased in large cubes of bars, making it easy to store.

Dish soap is, by definition, not soap, but detergent. Bar soap is made from, and has at its base, lye. Anything that is NOT lye-based is really detergent, not soap. Detergent is what you need to wash dishes. Again, a little goes a long way, but an essential product is dish soap. You can buy huge refill containers at most grocery stores and you should always have on hand 2-3 of these huge jugs. The best way to wash dishes and minimize dish soap is to put a little dish soap in a wash basin, fill basin with very hot water (as hot as you can stand; if you wear gloves to wash your dishes, you can stand much hotter water, which disinfects and cleans your dishes better), and put the dishes into the soapy water one by one, scrubbing each. You can have a clean water basin that you slide the clean dishes into, then remove and put on a dish drainer rack. I have a friend who used to be a nun. In the Convent, they put their soapy dishes right into the dish drainer, then poured fresh, clean water over them after all the dishes were washed. This method is a little riskier, however, because if you don’t get all the soap off your plates and utensils, the left-behind soap can cause stomach upset and diarrhea, which can be avoided by thorough rinsing. Dishes that need soaking can be done last and left in the wash water for a few minutes while you do other chores. It might be necessary, like with the clothes rinse water, to dump out and start fresh with clean hot water if your rinse basin just gets too soapy. You might want to save this water, rather than just dumping soapy water. If you have a Berkey water purifier, this soapy, dirty water can be purified for drinking. Or you can use it for plant watering. Try to not just DUMP water without attempting to reuse, especially when water may be difficult to obtain.

Cleaning and disinfecting your counters, tables, and work surfaces is vital to maintaining good health. I’ve approached this from several different angles. First, I have tried to store up mouthwash. I had extra space in a cabinet in my bathroom. Mouthwash does wonders at healing mouth sores, but it is also an antiseptic that can be used to clean wounds and surfaces. Be cautious using it to clean wounds, however; my daughter (who is a 2nd year Med student) and I were talking about this last night and she said that many products, like alcohol, are too harsh and kill the good bacteria as well as the bad, and that, unless infection sets in, soap and water is still the best first line of defense against wounds. If a wound begins to get infected, that’s when you need to move to a product stronger than soap, and mouthwash can serve this purpose. I’ve found that, when I get a sore in my mouth, after 2 days of rinsing several times a day with mouthwash, the sore is noticeably better, and typically fine after 3. This is a nice ace in your pocket.

Another product that’s helpful for cleaning in an emergency is vinegar. Learn to make your own vinegar. It’s not difficult and is a handy skill to have. Vinegar can be made from beer, any fruit juice, or apple scraps. You put the starter in a mason jar that’s been disinfected (you want the CORRECT type of bacteria growing), fill with purified water (fluoride added to city water keeps the proper bacteria from growing; to eliminate this, leave water sitting out for 24 hours before using or use purified or distilled water), add sugar, and cover with an air-permeable cover. I usually use 2 coffee filters and put a rubber band on them to keep them in place. Then, store in a dark, warm place. We have a room in our house for the water heater. We almost never open this door. It’s a perfect spot to grow vinegar - dark and warm. After a month, check it. If it’s not strong enough yet, recover and let it sit a few more weeks. Practice this until you know how to make vinegar. You can find recipes with exact quantities on-line. Vinegar can be used for cleaning and disinfecting, has health benefits, and can be used in preserving vegetables. It’s an invaluable product and you need to know how to provide an unlimited supply for your family.

I use a lot of bleach. I put a little in the dishwasher EVERY time I run it, I sometimes use in with wash, and I frequently use it around the kitchen on surfaces or cutting boards. Bleach is a tricky product. It has a short shelf-life and you can never be sure how long it has sat on the grocery store shelf. Time affects its efficacy. But, with the right products, you can make your own bleach at home. You need pool “Shock”, granular calcium hypochlorite, or HTH. A heaping teaspoon of this chemical added to 2 gallons of water produces normal household bleach. Since I have mostly one gallon jugs, that would be a little over 1/2 tsp of chemical per jug of water. Every bleach jug I finish at my house, I refill with water and label (with my trusted sharpie) “Non-Potable”. These water jugs will be used for bleach, when necessary. They’re all ready now to have the pool shock added to them. I purchased a plastic bag of pool shock from a local pool supply store, then brought it home and repackaged into MANY small packages, then put the small bottles in my food saver bags and vacuum-sealed them. Two words of caution: NEVER! put this product in anything that contains metal - don’t store in a jar with a metal lid, for instance. The chemical will eat right through the metal. It MUST be stored in a plastic container with a plastic lid. Secondly, pool shock may be hard to find right now. A manufacturing facility in Louisiana burned to the ground and resulted in pool chemicals being very hard to find this summer. Be persistent. Keep checking at the pool supply store. Ask the staff to notify you when they receive a shipment.

In review, you need to store up soap, dish detergent, and mouthwash. You can make vinegar and bleach at home, but you need to begin practicing these skills now, before your family depends on them. All of these products will enable you to keep your family members and home clean and relatively germ-free. You might want to also learn how to make your own soap. I’ve tried, it wasn’t easy. It requires cookware separate from what you will use for feeding your family. It also requires a copious amount of stirring, unless you have a designated stick blender (which won’t work if you don’t have electricity). Both of my parents were raised in a very rural area of northern Canada. My mother told me that, every Spring, my grandmother would set a fire in the yard, drag out her cauldron, and make soap over the open fire. The bars she made every Spring lasted her family of 8 the full year, until she made a fresh batch the next year. This is the way our ancestors did it. Find a recipe on line. Buy the ingredients. TRY to make your own soap. If you succeed, you’ll have learned a very important survival skill and should feel really great about yourself!