Never Skimp On Air Filtration
There's one thing you always need immediately before anything else
Let’s just imagine like most preppers with the means to still construct their own shelters, you have built it mostly by hand with a lot of hard work. Whether out of railroad timbers or ICF or bamboo poles you have mounted the walls, ceilings and entrances yourself. It’s a very doable thing if you’re in shape to sweat for a couple months. You might keep it as small as a root cellar with “extras” or maybe attempt something very ambitious, as big as an underground parking garage. (Subterranean structures of similar size or even bigger have been built by lone madmen many times, in some cases the product of years of work.)
If we imagine the person has constructed this shelter for themselves and a family of four, they may have barely even spent much on materials. There is a great deal that can be scavenged or foraged for. Only a few miles from where I am now somebody dumped a huge pile of railroad timbers behind a car lot and would probably pay you to haul them off. We’ll say this prepper has skimped so much on materials and done everything with their own labor that their completed structure has come in at around $200.00 of their own money … usually for things difficult to scavenge up like waterproofing tar or rubber sealant, paint, plastic sheeting for more dampness control and other supplies they just gave up on and decided to buy outright from Home Depo.
Usually someone this wise or frugal has done the same with food storage. Avoiding expensive dehydrated packaged food, they have stocked five years of food away with nothing more than regular visits to the supermarket to buy staples like rice, oats, sugar, cooking oil, powdered milk and canned/sealed goods with very long shelf lives. Gotta tell you to this day along with Spam those Vienna Sausages at 89 cents a can last forever, taste great and present a real cheap form of meat that can be boiled, fried and baked mixed with other fillers to make pretty darn good meals. If you want you can survive the apocalypse with a million conventional, easily bought foods that will last forever.
This may be before your time but the Kurt Saxon survivalists of the 70’s never stopped talking about their boiler recycling to create water storage tanks. Huge volumes were written on how to rescue these things from the dump, flush the rust or silt out and turn them into a battery of stainless steel water tanks. Boilers were free, widely available and if they came from residential were guaranteed to have never had anything but water in them. It was a great idea and it may still be a good idea for preppers on a budget. In the 70’s the old time survivalists always talked about how critical it was to have a spring well dug that either flowed into the shelter or was so close by it could be used regularly to top up. That idea will never go out of style. So it is possible that water can be sourced in a way that also costs very little or requires little work compared to other necessities. Clean water is as important as food, probably more so.
Now this may be old hat to most of you but let’s go over the immediate critical needs in a survival situation one more time.
In an emergency situation, you can only survive:
3 weeks without food
3 days without water
3 hours without shelter (in extreme conditions)
Three minutes without air
If there’s a flash on the horizon and a mushroom cloud coming from a nearby city, you are going to take shelter with your family or friends and there is one thing you need as soon as you turn on the lights. Maybe in some situations the lights don’t even come on. You forgot to charge the batteries recently or there’s a short somewhere or your bulbs have burned out. That can happen and you can easily bring up a flashlight or an electric lantern until you figure how to solve that problem. Even a chemical lightstick could get you over that hump.
Once you’re inside your shelter and you pull the hatch door shut behind you and seal it, you’ll be using up your air. If you have to close your blast values (definitely recommended after a nuclear strike if they have not closed themselves from the blast wave already) then you are living on the air trapped inside when you arrived. Depending on the volume, within ten minutes to six hours you are going to start breathing in your own carbon dioxide. That’s a very serious problem. CO2 makes people act irrational and behave very oddly. It can interfere with your judgement, raise blood pressure and cause your thoughts to race. Aside from the fact you really need both alarm detectors for CO2 and carbon monoxide in your shelter at a minimum, you may find your initial safety becomes severely compromised in a hurry. Most shelters will find that guests have arrived at the last possible moment and you’ve taken onboard relatives you forgot you had. Your neighbors could be in there with you, too. They’re all panicked, scared and sucking down three times the volume of air they normally do.
Here’s where we see the financial hurdles. Either you’ve built a very clever expedient system (which is possible, it’s just a major piece of work in advance you’ve take care of prior to the day you need it. No money made from this link I just recommend this book if that is what you are planning) or else you have hit the frugality wall and realized this is one element in your shelter you are going to have to spend some money on. You only appreciate air when you don’t have any and are in a situation where you can’t open that door again because you’ve got 1200 rads an hour falling right on the doorstep beyond. It’s then you realize just how serious that can get and I like to hope you don’t wait until then to start taking it seriously.
For this reason, I recommend purchasing a commercial air filtration system. There are many, many choices here running from around $500 for good HEPA to upwards of $9000 for Swiss Luwa (the Rolls Royce of bomb shelter air filtration) and even in between you got your fancy Castellex gear around $7000 at current prices. That’s no small investment. I recommend if you have very little to spend, you spend a major chunk of it here. Aside from batteries for your shelter it’s hard to squeeze around this issue without ending up dead inside your shelter gone bright red from CO2 poisoning and crazy-as-hell before you drop surrounded by other screaming lunatics gasping for air. You gotta admit that’s a damn shame after going to all that trouble to build the shelter in the first place.
You also need to keep these ten points in mind before buying :
Can you handcrank it with no power?
Can the filter be changed safely? Where is particulate matter captured?
If it breaks down, is there a maintenance kit? Is it simple enough to repair?
How much current does it draw when it is running? Will it dim the lights or worse?
How will you pump clean air deeper into the shelter?
How will you exhaust bad air when the good air is coming in to replace it?
If it stops working, you need to know instantly. Does it have an alarm?
Where would you mount radiation monitoring before your interior is compromised by fallout ash or other toxins?
How easily can you hook up monitors and sensors to it the way it is designed?
If you aren’t there, will the people you love be able to operate it by themselves?
There’s a good introduction to this subject found here which is more complex than it might seem at first. So many of us take a breath and always assume there will be more where that came from. Once you’re breathing, you can tackle all those other problems of life in a shelter that will start to rear their heads soon.
It is a great thing to have food, water, shelter, cooling, warmth, light and electricity when you need it. It’s well worth the time needed to automate all of this functionality and to make your shelter as flawless as the deck of a 50’s Starship with machines and computers helping you every step of the way. That’s my plan for VAULT-SYS. Of all your needs, once you take shelter you will agree that proper air is the most important function of the shelter design of them all. With or without a computer system to watch it, you need that air to keep working on its own despite needing to fall back on absolute failsafes that guarantee you and your loved ones and friends keep breathing. There’s no such thing as too much redundancy when it comes to air supply.
Keep your faith strong in God and take everything Tex says with a grain of salt. God bless you and I hope the day comes you barely even think about your air supply any more because it is so well designed.
Regards, Tex