Posted: 5/5/2010 10:12:58 AM EDT
| If I store rice in a 55 gallon sealed drum, how long before weevils start appearing, and can you buy irradiated rice? |
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Quoted:
If I store rice in a 55 gallon sealed drum, how long before weevils start appearing, and can you buy irradiated rice? Why would you want to buy arradiated rice? Take your 25lb sacks of rice that you would fill the barrel with, and stick it in the freezer for a week or two. That's all you would need to do. |
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I haven't bought rice for many years but last time i did it was $4.50/#25, so 55 gallons of rice is not too expensive, so that is #400 or 16x 4.50= $72.
I would not store it in one drum, the only way i would consider it is with 6 or more drums an i would also have some stored in a different manner. One problem with large bulk storage is water will migrate to the coolest place of the container, the bigger the container the more water there is to congregate, this means if the total moisture is 12%, a large container with a large temperature difference can have a huge moisture gradient (8% in some places %100 in others), this means more chance of failure. If you can dry your grain and purge it with co2, and store it in a constant temp, it could work. |
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Do some reading on the freezing of the food. I used to always freeze it but I used the freezer over my fridge and its temps were probably not low enough to kill any eggs. A deep freeze might be good enough, do some reading about what it takes to kill the eggs. These days I like vacumn sealing stuff but I don't have a lot of stuff on hand yet so I am using canning jars and a handpump vacumn pump and the canning jar attachments for a vacumn sealer to vacumn the canning jars shut. Once I get tired of these I will probably step up to mylar bags and O2 absorbers and go with small bags stored in big containers like 55 bags in a 55gallon drum. I never had issues with bugs in my sealed stuff. Had some issues with stuff opened and in the pantry but I don't know if it was already in the food or got in at a later date. These days I use metal and glass for food storage, even open stuff, and I have not had a problem in a long time and figure I am due for something soon. But metal and glass with good seals are hard for bugs to get into. My concept is to use what I store. A canning jar of rice or beans or whatever is something I can use up in a reasonable amount of time. Once I have a bunch of these on hand I will step up to the 1 gallon size bags and once one of those gets opened it could be put into a few canning jars and those could be vacumned shut if I was worried about it. And I doubt I will fit 55 bags of 1 gallon size into a drum but when I get to that point we will see what we shall see. Of course I always kind of wondered about putting a port for a vacumn sealer on a 55gallon drum and sucking it down a bit if I did not seperatly bag everything. One thing about playing with vacumn is you can suck metal cans into odd shapes so this is a bit of a learning process. Using the hand pump or a vacumn sealer might not be a big deal but I remember in automotive tech school asking about hooking up a car's vacumn line to something and the teacher said it could be a bit loud and destructive depending on the type of container. |
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www.bucketpacking.com
www.howtopackfood.com Use these methods and you won't have to worry about weevils. Individuals sealed bags into the barrels. Put them in as soon as possible after sealing as the bags will get hard once the absorbers start working hard. You'll have to make a slight cut into the bag when removing them from the barrel. This can be re-sealed or you can then just use the bag then. Using barrels versus buckets saves on average $42. in packing costs per barrel. When your putting up a decent amount of food this saves you big time- put that savings back in more food. Hardly anyone takes food storage serious enough. These "two week" warriors are going to be starving one day while sitting amongst piles of extra nylon and black plastic. If you ever wonder how serious some one is, don't ask to see their gun safe, ask to see their PANTRY. :) |