A lot of what is sold in this category does not do what the label suggests. These are the things we looked at and passed on, and why. You will not find them here.
Prebuilt 72-hour kits
The kits sold on Amazon and Temu. Price the contents one by one and they rarely add up to the kit price, and the water pouches tend to expire unnoticed.
Plug-in EMP shields
A device plugged into a wall socket cannot protect a house's wiring from an electromagnetic pulse. The product has no working mechanism for doing so.
Hollow-handle survival knives
The handle is hollow where the solid tang should be, which makes the knife weakest at the point that takes the most force.
Pocket solar chargers
A panel that size, in full sun, needs most of a day to partly charge a phone. A power bank does the job better.
Buckets of raw wheat
They make sense only if you own a grain mill and have used it this year. Without one, you are storing food nobody in the house knows how to cook.
Pre-made first aid kits
Most are padded with filler. Building your own from individual supplies costs less, and you will know what is in it.
Atmospheric water generators
The marketing claims about thirty liters a day. In a year-long field test, one unit averaged about eight, produced nothing on some winter days, and used roughly eight kilowatt-hours per gallon. The same money spent on tanks and gutters collects thousands of gallons a year.
Silver and gold as crisis money
A coin is hard to authenticate without a dealer, and you cannot make change from it at a grocery store. Metals protect against a weaker dollar. They do not help if your bank account is frozen or your card stops working.
Plate carriers and tactical anything
This store is for a cold house and a dead phone during a long outage. Body armor and tactical gear are outside that.
This list grows. When something we recommend fails, it comes off the other list and goes on this one, and we say why.