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Survival Retreat Recommendations
I realize that in the preparedness community there is a lot of discussion about “off-grid retreats,” and like any other subject on prepping, the advice you get can be all over the map. When I travel around the country and help clients set up off-grid retreats, there are hundreds of prerequisites that I am looking for in an effective retreat location. I could literally write an entire book on that one subject (and I may at some point). But in the meantime, I am going to cover some of the basics, some fresh ideas that I consider important, and some items you may not have considered before. This is NOT a complete list of retreat considerations, though, and do not base a major property purchase on just the information in this chapter.
I realize that it may sound self-serving, but if you are a wealthy individual who is considering the purchase of a remote survival retreat or a dual-purpose weekend getaway, it is ABSOLUTELY imperative that you hire an expert like myself to help find a proper and effective retreat property location. I can’t count the number of times that I have emailed, had phone consultations with, and visited clients with retreats that may have been far from a big city but still had serious, life-threatening OPSEC (operational security) issues. Some of them were nearly, if not completely, impossible to solve without selling the property and starting over. I literally hate telling a client that their recently built retreat is in a bad location. It makes me feel horrible, but I feel it is more important to tell a client the truth than to give them a false sense of security.
First of all, it is important to remember to put into practice things like gardening, canning, and raising rabbits BEFORE the SHTF whether you have a retreat or not. Some people plan to buy a retreat and wait till society falls apart before they implement any of their survival skills they learned in a book or watched on YouTube videos. It is vitally important that you don’t do this; the learning curve on a lot of these skills is extreme and there is no margin for error when your family’s lives depend on said skills. That is where my first recommendation comes in. Even though a lot of prepper experts recommend buying property 500 miles from the nearest city, don’t do it! The one exception to this rule is if you are able to make a living and provide for your family while living at your retreat location. At that point, yes, get as far away from civilization as you can (or your wife will allow you). Don’t forget that if you live 50 miles from the nearest small town, then you (or your wife) will be putting serious miles on your vehicle travelling to and from town just to get basic groceries and supplies each week.
Most people that are preparing for hard times still need to live near a major city for work purposes. This brings me to my point: one of the biggest mistakes you can make when buying a retreat is to buy property so far away from your everyday life that it makes it unfeasible to go there regularly on the weekends and maintain it or actually put into practice your preparedness skills. I’ve talked to numerous clients that have bought retreats hundreds of miles away from where they live. They went there regularly at first, but after the first year, the novelty wore off and now they only make the tedious, four-hour drive a couple times a year. How are you supposed to install and maintain a garden at your retreat like that? It is very important that your retreat be less than a three-hour drive from home otherwise you’ll probably not use it very often. Owning a retreat then becomes a burden instead of a weekend getaway and you’ll spend half your weekend “free time” stuck behind the wheel of a car as opposed to relaxing in front of a warm fire.
It’s also impossible to build a retreat 500 miles from the nearest city on the east coast without driving into the next big metropolitan area. So how far should you be from a major city? There is no definite answer because each city is different and the topography surrounding each city varies as well. For example, some big cities are very centralized and as soon as you drive out of the city limits you enter massive corn fields or mountains. On the flip side, some cities have large suburbs and small towns that surround the cities for fifty miles or more in every direction. My recommendation would be to have your retreat at least 75 miles away from the outside edge of any major population areas, while 130 miles would be ideal (this makes it around a two-hour drive in most cases).
This is not set in stone, though. If you live in Las Vegas (bad idea from the start) and you drive 75 miles from town, you are still in the middle of the desert. I have also seen a very effective retreat location tucked away nicely while only 40 miles from a major city in Pennsylvania. It was five turns from any major road, at the end of a dead end country lane. The cabin wasn’t viewable from the road and was surrounded by a thousand acres of state game lands. It also had a very deep and steep ravine that circled the back half of the property making an approach from any direction outside of the only road in nearly impossible. For an additional 50 reasons I don’t have time to get into, I would actually take that location over a lot of the other retreats I’ve visited that were hundreds of miles from a major city yet had one or more very serious OPSEC concerns. At the same time, it takes a very trained eye to find an effective retreat property less than 100 miles away from a large city.
It’s not just the major cities that you need to steer clear of, though. You need to be at least five to ten miles away from any small towns (less than 1,000 people) as well. I realize that some experts may tell you that moving to a tiny country town will help you survive in a SHTF scenario. This information is false! I currently live a two-hour drive from our family retreat inside a tiny town of less than 1,000 people in the mountains of Pennsylvania. This town is surrounded by farm land and farmers with plenty of livestock. If my town had to survive for under a month, it would probably make it through. However, in a long-term SHTF scenario where transportation and food deliveries shut down, you are no safer surrounded by 1,000 starving mouths than you are if you are surrounded by a million. If you have food in your basement and the starving masses surrounding you don’t, they will eventually take it from you by force if necessary. There is just no way to feed 1,000 mouths without electricity unless you had a fully functioning, town-sized, off-grid food infrastructure in place BEFORE the collapse (which I have yet to hear about any town having in place).
Conventional wisdom from people who have never crunched the numbers would tell you that a small country town would do just fine following a collapse. Even though there may be a few thousand cows on farms surrounding the town, those will not last very long. A thousand people eat an incredible amount of food on a daily basis. Once the food runs out, the smaller towns may keep law and order in check for a while longer than the big cities, but after a month or two with no food, many people will be dying on a daily basis from starvation. Even though the “country folk” in a small town may generally have a better work ethic and set of morals than the inner city masses, making them more likely to work together for a while, all that goes out the window once true starvation sets in. Once the average dad watches his young child withering away before his eyes, he will do ANYTHING to get food for that child. I don’t care if he is blue collar, white collar, redneck, urban hipster, white, black, or purple. Human desperation brought on by starvation affects everyone the same regardless of background or upbringing. The looting, murder, and pillaging in the tiny towns across this nation will be just as severe as in the inner city once people get hungry and desperate enough.
When most people think of a “survival retreat,” they instantly picture a concrete home with steel shutters. I am actually of a different mindset; I believe that building a “fortress” is a telltale sign to your neighbors (and anyone who visits your home pre-SHTF or stumbles upon you post-SHTF) that you have valuable supplies, like food, worthy of taking by force if necessary. Outside of the most hardened structures (very expensive), almost every compound can be overcome in time by a handful of well-trained guys, whether it’s burning you out, destroying your utilities, or just laying siege to your retreat for weeks. A “fortress looking” retreat is something a looting force will be likely to lose a few men over and spend some serious time and effort to get inside. I realize that a lot of preppers think they are John Wayne incarnate...you are not! Those of you with Special Forces training know what I’m saying is true. You can only hold a location (even a good defensible location) against a much larger force for so long without re-supply and reinforcements. It’s very unlikely that you’ll do so without taking serious casualties and injuries over time. If the majority of your food and other supplies are properly hidden from the looters on your property, is “defending your castle” worth losing family members over? Hiding in plain site with a normal looking cabin is far better. You can still do a lot of things to increase the defenses of your property without building an obvious fortress.
Staying hidden from prying eyes is the most important part of having a retreat. Being in a location that very few people stumble upon is much better than having a reinforced concrete fortress to fight from out in the open. A lot of preparedness experts will try and teach you how to make your retreat a fortress so you can utilize it like the Alamo. If it comes down to a last stand against a superior force, your fate will likely be the same as those who fought at the Alamo. You are far better off hiding than you are fighting regardless of how well trained you are and your conventional OPSEC plans.
The first basic to staying hidden is to make sure your cabin, garden and livestock are not visible from ANY roads and preferably hidden from any neighbors as well. When designing a retreat from scratch, I prefer to have as long of a driveway off the road as financially feasible to the landowner. Even if you are a billionaire, this is not the time to pave your driveway for convenience sake. The first fifty feet of your driveway leading off the road should look very minimally travelled with maybe a couple strips of gravel for your tire tracks. Just off the road you need to install a secure gate without easy access around it. Not any gate (especially decorative ones) will do, though. Find out what type of gate the oil companies, cell tower companies, or utility companies use in your area and purchase a gate from the same manufacturer or have one made that resembles them. Have a sign company make a replica sign from a picture you supply them from the cell tower (or other) company’s gate and place it on your gate. Essentially, you want your driveway to look exactly like an access road and NOT A DRIVEWAY. This will deter most non-local looters right from the get go and severely minimize the amount of random travelers wandering down your lane and begging for food. Make sure you also take down any property number signs or mailboxes immediately after the SHTF that will give away the fact that it is a driveway and not an access road.
At the same time, you don’t want someone being able to look back a long driveway. After around thirty yards, it’s important that your driveway make an “S” bend back in the trees. After that “S” bend, and as long as it’s not visible from the road, feel free to install heavy gravel or asphalt for convenience sake. I would also try and have the last segment of driveway that leads to your cabin (or watchtower) as long and straight as possible. You want to be able to see hungry stragglers approaching from as far away as possible from your watch location. Another thing to consider would be to have a spare sheet of plywood available to make a very forceful no trespassing sign after the SHTF. You don’t want a professional made sign as you want it to appear as if an average homeowner made it using a can of spray paint. I would consider the following language or something similar, “No Trespassing – If you proceed past this point, you will be shot on sight with no questions asked! (We don’t have any food either...).” I know it may sound a little corny, but you have to understand the mentality of a starving individual who is looking for easy targets of opportunity. I am not insinuating that you actually kill hungry people on sight, but you want them to fear that you will.
I would install this sign along your driveway at the furthest point visible from your watchtower while not being visible from the main road (this is a backup to your gate utility sign to deter hungry stragglers and neighbors). The reason you want it visible from the watchtower is that you’ll want to know if someone was deterred by the sign and left. At that point, you’ll know someone was on your property and you can follow them and confront them on your terms down the road and make them leave the area, or follow them from a distance to make sure they actually leave the area and aren’t trying to find another way onto your property or looting a neighbor’s house.
Another idea that works great with this is to hang a steel target or piece of metal fifty feet past the no trespassing sign that has the words “Turn Around!” spray painted on it. If someone ignores the no trespassing sign and continues down your driveway, then your watch (preferably someone with a suppressed rifle) takes a shot at the metal gong and sends it spinning. If the no trespassing sign doesn’t make them leave, then a rifle round pinging off a sign/target right next to them with the words “Turn Around!” most assuredly will. If it doesn’t and they continue on, it’s time to raise the alarm!
Next, I want to discuss your actual cabin at your retreat. There is a gung-ho segment of the preparedness community that wants to build mini fortresses for their retreat cabin. There is nothing that screams “prepper” and “person with food” louder to your neighbors and local community as building a concrete fortress or installing extravagant steel shutters on your cabin. Besides, regardless of where you build your retreat, there may come a time when a large raiding force attacks your compound. This is not going to be like the movies or an episode of The Walking Dead. The looters aren’t going to blindly rush your compound across an open expanse like they are storming a medieval castle’s walls. In all likelihood, they will post up at rifle range and slowly pick you off one by one as you leave your cabin or retreat to garden or bring in firewood. It is very hard to defend against this or prevent it from happening! You will likely lose at least part of your group defending your “castle.”
What if your father gets killed? Or your sister? What if it’s your young daughter who takes a random ricochet? Your wet dream of having a shootout with Zombies is not going to be a reality in this situation regardless of how tactically prepared you think you are. If a large looting force approaches your retreat, they have likely been assaulting retreats for a long while and are probably very good at it. Do you think you are the only group that has members that were ex-special forces or ones that could qualify as snipers? How do you plan to make your last stand if every time a member of your group sticks their head up to fire at the assaulting force some random sniper takes them out? What if they raided an Army Reserve base down the road and they’re driving MRAPs with ballistic protection? What if they have fifty-caliber machine guns mounted to their vehicles that cut through your concrete walls like Swiss cheese? How sturdy do you think your fortress really is? Is it fire proof? Even a redneck can figure out how to make Molotov cocktails.
My point in this is that it’s far better (and cheaper) to fly under the radar and build a normal looking cabin than something that screams Prepper Retreat. You should have a mindset of retreating and living to fight another day rather than dying while protecting your supplies like Custer’s Last Stand. The best way to do this would be to have an escape tunnel leading out of your cabin into the surrounding woods or brush. If you hide the entrance to the tunnel out of the basement of your cabin well enough, you could actually use it to hold up in for a day or two and wait till the following night to actually leave under the cover of darkness. You could also use the same tunnel to bypass their scouts, sneak back into your cabin in the middle of the night with suppressed weapons and catch the looters off-guard while they sleep. I realize that in the scheme of things a tunnel like this could be a considerable expense, but it is one that I very highly recommend. If you don’t have a way of escaping your retreat when you’re surrounded by an overwhelming force, most of your other preps don’t matter. I’m not saying that you run at the first sign of danger, but there may come a time when things go south very quickly while defending your retreat and it makes more tactical sense to leave than take numerous casualties.
If you go this route, it would be wise to have some food and ammo supplies stored in the escape tunnels (personally, I would store each person’s BOB/lone wolf pack in there as well) in case you are fleeing in a hurry. Most assaulting forces aren’t going to move into your retreat and set up a base there. They need to stay on the move to prevent being over-run by a larger force themselves or being attacked guerrilla warfare style from the locals. They’ll probably ransack your cabin, take what they need or can find, and be gone within a few hours or the next day.
Having an escape tunnel goes hand in hand with not having all of your food inside the four walls of your retreat. This will make the prospect of retreating through an escape tunnel a much better option without worrying if the looters will find your stash and clean you out. I recommend having a full underground storage location hidden on your property, outside the four walls of your retreat. Some people will cordon off a section of their existing basement, but that is very hard to conceal and anyone looking for a hidden room will notice that the basement is smaller than the upstairs footprint of your cabin. Eventually they will find your hidden door. If building from scratch, it’s better to have your storage room under a garage, shed, or barn. Even if it’s separated from the cabin, you can always connect the two by a tunnel. If you are on a budget, they make plastic barrels with re-sealable lids made for burying supplies around your property that you can purchase as you can afford them. Just try not to put all your eggs in one basket. It’s best if you keep about ten percent of your supplies easily found by the looters (lightly hidden) in your cabin. This will make them think they have found your entire stash and hopefully, they’ll stop scouring your property and cabin for more food.
If you do go the route of hidden underground storage (or for any hidden storage facility), then I also recommend a “double blind” storage room using the same ten percent principle. Let’ say, for instance, your underground storage facility is located under your 14’ x 24’ mini barn you had built for your rabbits and other animals. I would have a dividing wall poured at 6 feet allowing two separate rooms. One would be 6 foot x 14 feet while the other is 18 feet x 14 feet. Obviously you’ll want a hidden door into the 6 foot storage room where you keep ten percent of your supplies. Have a second hidden door from inside the 6 foot room leading into the larger storage room. If the looters find their way into the initial 6 foot room, they will assume they have found your hidden stash and will likely stop looking for additional hidden doors. Wherever you put your main storage facility, it’s vital that you have a quality vault door installed to protect it.
Another thing I would highly recommend is to have a sniper hole or two facing your cabin and garden. This is a small space (roughly 7 foot long x 4 feet wide x 4 feet deep at a minimum) dug underground where a member of your retreat can hide himself for a few days while taking random shots at any enemy patrols or any of the looters that are hanging around your cabin or trying to raid your garden. A couple important things to remember here: first, a suppressed bolt gun (or a scoped and suppressed .300 blackout upper for your AR) would be highly recommended in this situation. Second, the purpose of this is NOT to engage the enemy in a shootout. You should only take a SINGLE shot every few hours. Your purpose is to slowly take the enemy out one by one and/or make their life a living hell while they occupy your cabin. A single suppressed shot will make it very hard for the looters to locate the source of the shot. Shooting multiple times from the same location in short successions (even suppressed) will help the enemy pinpoint your general location and make it easier for them to find where you are hidden.
This is also where two sniper holes in different areas could really keep the enemy guessing where the random rounds are coming from. You should keep a sleeping bag in a waterproof stuff sack, a set of shooting sticks or rifle bipod, army cot, and some food in these locations as the person may need to be there for a few days till the enemy force gets tired of getting shot at. If you don’t have suppressed rifles, you need to be at least 300 yards away. If you are using a suppressed rifle and subsonic rounds, you can be as close as 100-150 yards away from your cabin. Third, make sure the entrance is hidden to perfection and your firing hole is as small as possible with the ability to close it off and be unnoticeable from the outside. A good way to do this would be to have a large log lying across where your firing hole is sticking out above the ground level.
Even though you want to avoid having the appearance of a fortress, you can—and should—add security items to the cabin that will not be so obvious. The first item I would consider would be to have very solid and secure exterior doors. Depending on your budget, you can go as light as a solid steel core door or buy custom wood doors that have steel plates sandwiched in the middle. Regardless of which door you choose, the weakest link is your locking mechanism. Standard household locksets are easily defeated and can be opened with a set of bump keys in less than a few seconds. If you can afford to, buy entry doors from Master Security Doors or a similar company that makes nearly impenetrable doors that will still blend in with your cabin. If working on a budget, consider deadbolts from companies like Bilock and Abloy, which typically run between $200 and $400 for each dead bolt. On a tight budget, you can find deadbolts from Kwickset and Master Lock that advertise their $40 deadbolts as bump proof, but that is only for when you are physically in the house. On a side note, if you do plan to escape through your tunnel system and turn over your retreat to a large invading force, don’t lock the doors when you bug out. Leave them unlocked. Why have them destroy the door to your cabin when you plan to move back in after they are gone?
Another thing I strongly discourage is the use of “bullet proof” glass windows in your cabin. Bullet-resistant glass that is thick enough to defeat rifle rounds is VERY thick and VERY heavy for a normal window-sized opening. This also prevents you from having functioning windows that open in the summer to get a breeze through your non-air conditioned cabin. Besides, most rifle rounds will easily penetrate multiple walls when they don’t hit a stud. There is no reason for bullet-proof windows when shots can go right through the walls surrounding the windows.
Another drawback to bullet-proof glass is they grow “cloudy” over time as they get tiny surface scratches on them. So while I don’t recommend bullet proof glass, I do highly recommend Anderson’s Stormwatch hurricane-proof windows placed, at minimum, in all your first floor window locations. Anderson sandwiches a clear, very strong polymer sheet between two panes of glass, making it very resistant to intruders. It would probably take five to ten minutes to smash your way through one of these windows with a normal hammer. These windows won’t keep someone out indefinitely, but it will definitely slow them down. This is great for a non-occupied cabin as it takes them longer to get into your cabin and if you have a security system at your retreat, it allows more time for the rural police officers to arrive and catch the intruders in the act.
If you go this route, I recommend keeping your window sizes on your cabin as uniform as possible so you can keep an extra window pane or two on hand to replace a broken window. The best part of the Anderson Stormwatch windows is they don’t cost much more than a standard high quality window. In fact, they would actually be cheaper than making functional steel shutters like I’ve read a lot about on prepping forums and various books. In order for security shutters to be even remotely effective, they would have to be made out of some pretty hefty AR500 steel and probably cost five times as much as just installing Anderson’s hurricane proof windows. Steel shutters are another thing that screams, “Prepper retreat!” which, again, is something you definitely want to avoid.
Another item that screams “prepper retreat” are large banks of solar panels on your property. While solar panels may work great in some areas of the country like out West, there are a lot of areas in this country that have considerable cloud cover throughout the year, making solar power quite inefficient. In fact, where I live, we’d be lucky to get 30 solid days of sun each year. Even if you do live out West, those large sections of panels can be seen from a long way off and will draw looters like moths to a flame. You also run the risk of installing an incredibly expensive piece of infrastructure that may end up getting fried in the event of an EMP attack or massive solar flare. I have yet to find a solar panel company that can assure me that an EMP or solar flare won’t fry their panels. I realize that solar power is all the rage lately, but I recommend attaining your post-SHTF electrical power from a different source.
While there are a lot of ingenious ways to get power, my preferred method of off-grid power is with a propane-powered generator hooked up to a battery bank. With a diesel generator you have a serious issue with the storage life of the diesel in your storage tanks. Even with addition of fuel stabilizer, diesel fuel can only be stored for 6 months to 1 year without significant fuel degradation and only if you keep it perfectly clean, cool and dry. What this means is that if you’re not running this system pre-SHTF, it is going to be very costly to consistently replace and maintain a large supply of diesel for a SHTF scenario. Properly stored propane will last indefinitely and doesn’t degrade over time, making it a perfect option for a SHTF fuel source.
The major drawback to any generator sourced power is going to be the amount of noise they produce. However, this can be greatly minimized with a reasonable amount of expense. Two ways to accomplish this is to build an underground enclosure for it or a double-walled shed. In both instances, it is very important that you have proper ventilation installed. With the addition of acoustic paneling, you can greatly reduce the amount of sound produced by the actual generator.
The generator exhaust is a different matter, though, and you will need to get creative to minimize the sound from the exhaust. There are plenty of resources online on the subject of silencing generators. You are, however, going to have some level of ambient sound produced, so I recommend that you only run the generator in the middle of the night when most people will be sleeping. You can also add all your electrical equipment, like your battery bank and inverter, into the generator enclosure or shed and EMP proof it by following the advice of Scott Hunt in his DVD available through The Survival Summit titled “Home EMProvements.” This DVD is full of invaluable resources on EMP-proofing your retreat and I highly recommend it.
The last thing you’ll have to figure out on your own is what size generator to purchase and how large of a battery bank you will need for your cabin. These two points can fluctuate greatly depending on what you plan to power in your cabin after the SHTF. Ideally, your generator should only run for about two hours a day, just long enough to recharge the battery bank. Anything that requires excess electricity like showering, laundry, or running power tools, should be scheduled during the two hours when your generator is actually running. During the day, when you are operating off the battery bank, all uses of power should be kept to a bare minimum. If you are only running your generator an hour or two each day, a 2,000 gallon underground propane tank should provide you power for at least a year or two.
Another security feature I would definitely have inside the cabin is a full Burglar Bomb system. The Burglar Bomb Repulsar IV is a system of motion-activated pepper spray canisters that are ceiling-mounted and look like your typical smoke detector. When activated, and after sensing movement in your cabin, they release a full canister of OC aerosol spray into your cabin, preventing anyone from entering for multiple hours. Once the first canister goes off, the system resets. There are three backup canisters on standby for the next three attempts at entry. If you had a couple of these strategically mounted throughout your cabin, you could literally keep an assaulting force out of your cabin for most of a day, allowing you to get set up in your sniper holes and start creating havoc amongst their ranks. Even if they had NBC masks, they would likely enter your cabin just long enough to raid your pantry and any other low hanging fruit available to them. It’s doubtful they would stick around long. This would also be great for a security system to prevent burglars from breaking into your cabin pre-SHTF. If the neighbor kid tries to break in and gets a face full of pepper spray, he’s likely to leave just as fast as he entered. The best thing about this system (per their ads) is that it leaves no residue behind to clean up.
I saved my biggest piece of advice for last. One of the absolute best items you can put into your survival retreat cabin is a Masonry Heater, sometimes referred to as a Russian or Finnish Stove. Over the last few years, I have seen the rise in popularity across the prepping community of “rocket wood stoves” whose technology is actually very similar to masonry stoves. In essence, a masonry stove looks like an enclosed fireplace (with a door) but instead of the chimney flu going straight up through your roof and taking most of the heat with it, a masonry stove has channels built with fire brick that weave back and forth above and beside the firebox. These channels absorb all the heat from the fire and store the heat in the stone mass of the fireplace while slowly radiating the heat throughout your house over the following 18 to 24 hours. It is an extremely even radiant heat and you don’t suffer the extreme temperature differences in your home that a wood stove produces (hot when the fire is blazing and cold when the fire dies down). Most preppers are putting wood stoves into their cabins for warmth and for cooking, but a masonry heater is far more efficient. In fact, they are so efficient that 90% of new home construction in Finland uses this method of heating. Except in the absolutely coldest climates and subzero conditions, you can easily heat a 2,000 square foot, open-floorplan cabin with a masonry stove while only building a SINGLE large fire each morning or evening! With a wood stove you are constantly adding wood throughout the day and night, fighting to maintain a constant temperature. In addition, wood stoves consume four times (or more) as much wood as a masonry stove/heater.
The biggest issue with standard wood stoves is that they produce smoke from your chimney which can be seen from miles away. This is a huge OPSEC issue that could attract hungry neighbors and looters in your area. A masonry heater burns at nearly 2,000 degrees, as opposed to the average wood stove which burns at only 700 degrees. Because of the high burn temperature, every ounce of your wood is consumed and even the gases produced by the wood are burned. This means that you literally have zero smoke and no creosote buildup in your chimney system. The exhaust that does vent out of your chimney is actually cool to the touch as all the heat has been absorbed by the fire brick and stone mass.
The only drawback to a masonry heater is that you need to find a qualified mason to custom build it, and their services can be fairly expensive. They typically run over $6,000 for a small masonry stove for a smaller cabin, upwards of over $10,000 for a larger or more decorative masonry heater. Regardless, I would make whatever concessions you can to put one in your retreat cabin. Over time they will definitely pay for themselves. They are more efficient, use considerably less wood, produce no smoke, and produce a much more even heat for your cabin. Do your own research on masonry stoves and highly consider installing one at your retreat.
In closing, these recommendations are literally the tip of the iceberg of information needed to set up an effective survival retreat. You will find a lot of good information online that will be useful in building a full retreat. However, for every good piece of information, there are probably twice as many terrible recommendations from “survival experts” and bloggers who have no idea what they are talking about. There are a handful of good Survival Retreat Consultants you can find with a simple Google search, but make sure you thoroughly vet them first to find out where their expertise comes from.
It’s also important to find out which threat they recommend their clients prepare for, as that will tell you how they will be tailoring their prepping recommendations. For instance, if a consultant thinks the most likely SHTF event is a financial collapse, then his recommendations likely won’t protect you from a grid-down scenario. Especially when dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars building a retreat, it’s best to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. If you are prepared for a grid-down scenario, a financial collapse will be no problem. If you prepare for a financial collapse, you’ll likely not have enough food storage, an inoperable electrical infrastructure for your cabin, and many other issues that could have been solved by just building it differently in the first place. If you’d like to discuss hiring me to help you set up your family’s survival retreat, you can contact me via email through my website, GridDownConsulting.com.