There's the thing, of course. It's technically possible to build a solid state device that's rugged, solar powered, and reliable enough for decades of use but that's not where the market is right now. Never mind one that's small and cheap enough to toss into your glove compartment or bug-out bag on the off chance that you'll need it someday.
But in the future, even just a few decades from now? Sure, that's plausible. Maybe if someone decided to make a few million of them and flood the Third World...
]]>Now, if I could just thump Trumpolini & co with a few facts... like, the CRC Handbook over their "alternate factoid" heads....
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]]>I've also said that a first cut at such a manual would be to collect all the FAQs from usenet news groups.
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]]>Yes, the two big things are dry and inert. Nitrogen is not as easy to contain as argon over long periods, but that kinda doesn't matter because unless you have a sensor or two in the box you might as well consider it only good for a week anyway. My rice containers (200l plastic drums) are still very low on water after a year, even with me opening them up and lifting sacks of rice out. Which surprised me, as I thought the disturbance would get more air in than it apparently does.
small single-use argon cylinders ... come at the sort of price that makes hiring a full-size bottle an easy option to justify.
Down here it was ~$280/year for the cheap rental vs ~$250 to buy the attachment with one single-use cylinder, so the maths work out differently. You get 5x as much argon in the rental, but the last one I rented lasted about 5 years so it was a bit of a disaster financially. Looking now I see a bunch of places selling cylinders and offering cheap-ish refills, so I think those numbers have completely changed now. Note to self: next time I buy rice, buy a cylinder and regulator.
]]>An inert gas alternative for topping up your rice storage containers is nitrogen if you can buy small quantities of liquid N2 locally. It doesn't stay liquid for long of course but you could store the remainder in a bin-bag balloon in another large container.
A neat toy I'd like to own (but I doubt I'd get sufficient use out of to justify the cost) is an oxygen generator as sold in medical supplies stores. The "waste" output is reasonably pure nitrogen with 1-5% oxygen depending on flow rate.
]]>I don't know, but I have very limited experience with proper vacuum, and I know that the home freezer vacuum systems won't work (also fail for flour, in case you're interested). So I'd need a lot more gear than just a low-grade vacuum pump. Using a vacuum pump to enhance the modified atmosphere project might work, but I don't have one lying round.
The main thing for me is that I can buy a 100l or 200l drum with removable lid for $20 or so, and that will hold three to five 25kg sacks of rice quite easily, while being waterproof and largely airtight. It's also easy to poke a wire through a hole and seal it up, so I can leave a humidity sensor in the bin (1% sensors are ~$10 each and I only need one per bin).
Liquid nitrogen I'd be mildly concerned that water condensation during the changeover in the rice would cause problems.
Rice comes in permeable sacks, and one advantage of argon is that it readily displaces oxygen and nitrogen, so a length of 10mm polypipe into the bottom of the bin feeding argon, and a wee hole in the top letting the air out, fed slowly for a few hours, drops the oxygen concentration below the limits of my detector (1%, according to the label) and my half-decent humidity detector says <0.2%. I have not really looked at sensors a lot, I just looked for affordable I2C sensors that I can feed into an Arduino and bought a few (albeit the O2 sensor is still $100).
]]>You may know it's a fictionalized stand-in for the Boy Scout Handbook, which is limited by reality. Having said that, many people have recommended a copy for anyone's survival library; there's much to be said for a well illustrated book that will guide an inexperienced reader through the basics of first aid, shelter construction, not getting lost, and avoiding poisonous plants.
It also keeps getting revised and I haven't looked at a recent edition. The one I have is falling apart due to time and wear.
]]>I asked around; this may be less practical, even though a pump and electricity is cheaper than argon and easier to create at home. Responses include:
Have you thought about the logistics of parboiling even one 25kg sack of rice? At the very least you'd want to package it into sub-kilo lumps before packing, and then you want packaging that's long-lasting, physically robust but also non-toxic and affordable. It's likely more reliable, easier and cheaper to buy commercially available if that's what you want (in Oz we can easily get both parboiled and almost-entirely-precooked rice here in single serving sizes).
A second question is whether you mean parboiling stripped rice, or the traditional parboil then strip method. The latter requires a supply of unhulled rice which is not especially easy to get.
The lifetime of modified atmosphere rice could easily be the 25 years listed in the article, although one persistent problem I have is that there's a mildew that will grow just using the rice and the moisture it contains. According to the grower the only solution is a chemical treatment (which I suspect is SO2 gas) that they can't use because they sell organic certified rice. But that mildew doesn't make the rice inedible in the year or so I store it for, it just makes washing before cooking essential.
I am going to do some more organised experiments with the next lot of rice just to see if I can avoid the problems I've identified this time round. For a few years I could get rice cheaply and reliably in single-sack quantities so I didn't bother with storing it. That's changed, so I'm rediscovering the process using a different source. It may also be that the mildew comes in on the few unhulled grains, so removing those before I package the rice would be a tedious (manual) but workable solution.
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