Life & Safety with Jimmy Rios
Welcome to Life & Safety with Jimmy Rios! Get ready to dive into a world where safety meets storytelling! Drawing from his rich background as a former firefighter, EMT and safety expert, Jimmy brings you straight into the heart of safety and emergency preparedness. Episodes feature easy-to-understand tips, real-life stories, and interviews with experts, all designed to help you protect yourself, your business, and those you care about.
Whether it's advice on navigating everyday safety challenges or insights into the latest in health and safety trends, let this podcast educate and entertain you. Join Jimmy and level-up your safety knowledge with engaging discussions that could one day save a life.
Life & Safety with Jimmy Rios
Gear You’ll Regret Throwing Away!
Spring cleaning isn’t just about sparkling garages and organized shelves—it’s also the perfect time to double-check your emergency supplies.
In this episode, Jimmy and Megan roll up their sleeves and dive deep into their own camping and disaster gear to figure out what’s worth keeping, what’s better off retired, and why even a dusty water filter might still deserve a spot on your emergency supply shelf.
We cover it all: sleeping bags, tents, camp stoves, old MREs, even a hand-crank blender that once seemed like a brilliant idea (and now feels like a workout machine). We've got tips on how to sort your gear, what red flags to look for, and why some forgotten items might still be lifesavers when you need them most.
If you’ve ever looked at an old sleeping bag and thought, "Should I keep this?"—this episode is for you.
If you've ever wondered if your garage junk pile could actually come in clutch during a disaster—you’re definitely in the right place.
Spring cleaning just got a whole lot more useful—because sometimes, the gear you almost tossed is exactly what you’ll need most.
Life Safety Associates specializes in emergency response training for corporate ERT Teams. We help businesses create competent and confident first responders who are ready to handle unexpected emergencies. For more information you find us @lifesafetyassoc or email@lifesafety.com.
What's happening. It's Jimmy with your girl Megs. Hello, with another life and safety podcast. Today we're going to talk about spring cleaning. And yeah, you're thinking, well, how does that save? Well, it's safe on a lot of levels. If you do what your wife or your partner says, it's probably pretty safe. No, what we're going to talk about is a quick conversation backstory on this.
Jimmy:Jenny and I were looking at our camping supplies and said, damn, we've got to organize that better. It's just a lot of old stuff there and a lot of old things. And I said, yeah, we should, and we should think about doing our spring cleaning, clean the garage out, but also look at some of our disaster stuff, because do we get rid of all of our old camping stuff or do we keep it and maybe put it someplace else and have that as our disaster supply stuff? So she started to answer me and I said stop, wait, that's a podcast idea. We tabled that conversation and here Megan and I now are having a conversation about it. So I want to put Megan on the spot and say Megan, what do you think when I say that Like sprinkling, cleaning, cleaning up your disaster supplies and or your camping stuff?
Megan:Well, personally speaking, I have like I wish I'm kidding, I have like ten different sleeping bags at my house right now. I'm in the process of needing to go through, like for me personally, my sleeping bags, because there's some that are way too small for me, that are nice for, like my nephews, but do I need to keep the sleeping bags so that my nephews can use them?
Jimmy:No Wait, do they have like cartoon characters and stuff on them?
Megan:No, but they're small. They're like small people, like I'm not that tall, but I am too tall for these sleeping bags. But my nephews are, you know, still under the age of 10, so can fit in them.
Jimmy:Sure, sure no.
Megan:I was like morally opposed to pink things when I was younger. I'm still not a huge fan of them, but so all of my like stuff that I have are, you know, like reds and greens and stuff. So it would work for the boys Nice.
Jimmy:So they're not the you know Paw Patrol. No Dora the Explorer.
Megan:I don't know that Paw Patrol was a thing when I was younger.
Jimmy:Those are the first two cartoony things that popped in my head.
Jimmy:Fair Little Einsteins you know zooming through the sky, you know. So all that kind of stuff you know kicks in, yeah. So sleeping bag is obviously a big one, something that people don't think about in their disaster supplies, you know, like where am I going to sleep, you know, and your old sleeping bag and their disaster supplies, where am I going to sleep, your old sleeping bag? Take that old sleeping bag and if you have the room for it and you can keep it, put it someplace else.
Jimmy:The thing that I like to tell people to do is get a huge. They make these really large containers that are on wheels that you can buy at Target, and I want to say they're like the size of an ice chest, maybe a little bit bigger than an ice chest, and that's a great spot to put things in. If you have the room and you can put that, you can start maybe building a shelf in a closet. If you're in an apartment or townhouse or something like that, maybe a hall closet or something, maybe a crawl space, you can have stuff like that in there or maybe, if you have a larger I know some apartments I've been to have these really large closets as a kind of a yeah, there's small living space, but there's a lot of storage in here.
Jimmy:And in there. You can have that. So that's just some ideas where you can store that sleeping bag. And sleeping bags are pretty compact. You can really, if you have a nice stuff sack, you can really really make them small. So don't just throw them away either. Recycle them. If you do a Google search on recycling sleeping bags, there's a couple of different ways to do it. Um, I know RAI sometimes has a um, I guess I don't want to say buyback, but they'll have, they'll host things like that and they have recycling bins for a lot of gear. I believe they do one, I believe Sports Basement does it also, and I know there's a lot of.
Megan:Yeah, Ari, I retire your gear.
Jimmy:Yeah, yeah, and I've seen people that are really good like sewing will take their old down or their old sleeping bags and they'll cut them and they'll make them into jackets or vests. I've seen that. I guess it's upcycling them. Th a t's something to do. This is a great time for your food and water, so you start to spring clean. You get some new disaster food. So you start to spring clean, you get some new disaster food. If you have your freeze-dried food, like your Mountain House that's a brand or something like that or MREs that are getting a little bit old maybe they have one more year in expiration and you don't want to cook that night try it, and that way you know how to use the heaters or the MREs, or you can remember how to use them practice.
Jimmy:Or you could, you know, remember how to like boil some water? Maybe get that jet boil out or whatever you have and make sure it works.
Megan:Do we want to keep it? That's a good one.
Jimmy:Right, do we even want to keep this thing?
Jimmy:Do we even have the fuel for it or what have you? And make sure those work and you can try that. And then you know it's just a little outdoor, you know, try and work kind of a thing. Do you have propane for your little burner? Or like dang, I keep meaning to buy that, you know my little propane thing and it doesn't work.
Jimmy:And they make a recyclable or refillable propane cans, now little five gallon ones, um, you've probably seen it back there on my desk. I had one back there, yeah, um, so that works really good. So another thing is to do is also it's a great idea to start looking at anything that might expire. Um, like a lot of water filtration pumps. I have one that still uses a little chlorine drops to it. You put it in a little filter and then it works really cool because it's a little hand pump. And then I really like it because you can take the supply line, basically, and stick it in a stream, lake, whatever, and it goes through this filtration system and then the other side, where it collects that actually screws onto a Nalgene bottle.
Megan:Oh cool.
Jimmy:So it works really cool and I really like it, but it's getting to a point now where it's getting really hard to buy the components for it. It's old, I believe Jenny and I actually got it 20 years ago for a wedding present. Oh nice, we actually registered at REI for wedding stuff and not like it. I think we did REI and some other store.
Megan:I kind of love that.
Jimmy:Right, kind of fun, right, and so we have a lot of camping stuff I think we're going to. One of the things we're talking about getting rid of is we actually have a hand crank blender. Cool yeah, you take it and you actually C-clamp it to like a table and then you hand crank the sides of it. You know, and when we were younger, when we got married, we're like yeah, for margaritas, then it turned into smoothies and we got the kids. Hand cranking smoothies is not the business.
Megan:No, that sounds like a lot of work. It's pretty hard. Burn off all the calories you're going to get from the smoothie.
Jimmy:Right, right. So those are some of the things we're looking at. And then tents I think we have three or four tents. No, I just told a story, we don't have that many. During the fires in 2020, we actually donated our tents I just remember that To a lot of the fire victims and stuff like that. But now's a good time, you know. Look at your old tents or late your tent and put it up. Is it moldy? Did you put it away wet? Does it work?
Megan:That's a good one. We one time I went camping and we had a few tents cause there were lots of people but one of the tents wouldn't. It wasn't our group, I think it was another group, but the tent wouldn't go up because the pole things, that snap was broken and they couldn't fix it. And they're like now, our tent's just floppy, yeah, and so that was not fun for them to sleep in.
Jimmy:That's the worst, but yeah.
Megan:I think they ended up giving up and pairing up with another group that had a larger tent until they could go get a new tent.
Jimmy:Yeah, yeah, you know when you're the spring, you know you're starting to plan your outdoor trips with that stuff. You know it kind of turned into like a little disaster thing, like where would I set this up on my property if I could or if I needed to? You know where are my backyards flat, where would I use the bathroom? You know you got to turn your wherever you're at into like a little makeshift bathroom or a little makeshift campsite. So you know where the bathroom is. I try to say where would you wash the dishes at? Where would you sleep? You don't want to sleep next to your latrine, so to speak. Yeah, so there's some of the things you can think about this coming up spring, when you start doing your spring cleaning, think about cycling out your food, checking all your camping stuff, getting ready for the camping season. Be safe, peace.
