PRAXIS PREPARED Hey everybody, this is PRAXIS. As you know, there's a lot of wildfires going on in California right now. There's a lot of people that are living in an area that just has very poor air quality. And people think about prepers, you know, prepping for the end of the world, prepping for alien beings there, dropping bird flu infected clams on me, to take over the populace. You know, for me personally, I prep for all the kind of normal things that seem to happen all the time, wildfires, floods, you know, to lose your job. I don't lose my job all the time. You know, the kinds of things that are kind of normal and ordinary. And right now, unfortunately, it's normal and ordinary, in many parts of California, to have very poor air quality. Now, for preppers, you know, a lot of us are kind of prepared for that kind of thing. One way of preparing is to have N95 masks. This is a PAK-20 N95 mask. I just grab this down in my basement for demonstration purposes. Behind that, I got three more PAKs of 20 and PAK for my car. Obviously, I have a lot of these things. And if you have N95 masks and you feel like you may have a need for N95 masks, you need to have more than one of them. They are not the kind of thing that, you know, you buy it once and then you're set it. Any more than, like, if you buy, like, a bag of rice, you know, you would feel that you're all set in the food department for the rest of your life. You know, this is something that you move through, you go through. You need to have multiple of them. Just right here, for example, this is just the PAK that I keep in my car. There's like, six, seven masks in there. And the reason for that is that they get clogged up with particles. And at some point, the air just kind of can't get through them anymore. It's like the filter in your car or the filter in your air conditioner or the filter in anything, you know, eventually it gets packed up with stuff. And the idea is you want it to pack into the filter, not into your lungs. So what I wanted to share with you guys today is a way of cleaning an N95 mask. If you, you know, you didn't buy tons of them, you know, you can't find any right now. Now, I'm going to say that this technique works best if you have more than one mask, if you have two masks, because what I'm going to do is I'm going to be washing it. And once you wash it, once you get wet, you can't use it until it's dry. So don't jump in and do what I'm doing here. If, but, you know, the mask you have is the only one you have and, you know, you can't get to an area where you don't need it for a little while while the thing dries out. And it is, it is a dense fiber. It takes a while to dry. If you have a de-amidifier, you can put in front of that like if you have a solar oven, I guess you could, you know, and it can do drying and you're so larmin, you know, any, any method that you could have for drying things quickly would be helpful. But, you know, this is something that it takes a little while for it to dry. So I'm going to take one of these out of here. And what I'm going to mention is that I'm going to be damaging this while I wash it. Whenever you run water through these kind of things, it's going to pack the fibers together. This one's not going to be quite as effective as it is right now after I do the washing. I think it's important I want to share this with you guys because I guess there's a lot of people that don't have enough of these. But that's something you need to know. And if you have one of these and it's kind of dirty and you wash it up, it's not going to be like it's brand new again. The washing process, what it does is that it makes it better than it was prior. But it's not, you know, it's never going to be like brand new again. This is something to help you get through it in a little bit of a better situation. But, you know, it's not a magic bullet. It's just something to improve things. So what I do is take this mask that I have from my car and we're going to go down to the sink right here. So the first thing we have to figure out here is which way we're going to wash this. And it's very important. If you imagine the way that this thing works, the dirty air is out here and it gets drawn up to the mask, goes through the mask, and then comes out this side, you know, cleaner than it was on the other side. So all of the particles and everything there, they're starting out on this outer surface and as they move through, it's getting cleaner on the way in. So what we want to do is we want to make sure that we don't wash from the outside in. We want to wash from the inside out because we want to be pushing particles outward as opposed to pushing particles deeper into it. So that's very important. You also want to make sure that you're washing with as much pressure as you can to really push all the particles through. Now again, like I said, this isn't going to be perfect. It's not going to be like brand new, but it is going to be better. So what we're going to do is just start by kind of wetting it. And as I'm doing this, I'm going to notice I'm going to want to try to minimize the amount of pressing and crushing that I'm doing here because any kind of pressing and crushing is going to be crunching down all the little air spaces and it's going to make it so that it's harder to get air through this thing later on. So I really want to minimize any kind of squishing and crunching that I do as I do this. So we've already got some water. You can see it actually, you know, see we use this water holding container. It owns water pretty well. So what I'm going to use is a spray attachment here. Turn on the water high and then I'm going to be pushing this right along the edge here. It takes a little while for the water to start, you know, pushing its way through the mat. But eventually the water is going to make its way through and you can tell usually by the outer surface it starts to maybe change color a little bit. You can really see that the water is started to break through and I'm just holding it on here and really just repeating this process for as long as I can. Again, I'm trying to avoid putting pressure down into it because I don't want to crush down these fibers. I want to have the water kind of flush through. So this is just it. I'm doing this for a while. If you wanted to kind of prime the mask ahead of time, you could soak it in some water and that'll help to allow the water to kind of get through the whole thing. But that's the essential idea right there. If you're taking water from the inside, pushing it through to the outside and trying to just get out as many particles as you can, I would probably want to do that for, I don't know, five minutes or so. If water is a limited resource, like I said, you can take this and kind of presoak it, you don't get the water through. So it permeates all of the open air areas inside here and then you can try to take a sprayer and spray through that. If you don't have a sprayer, you can kind of just put it right up under the faucet and do the best you can there. But really, the more pressure you can get pushing from the inside to the outside, the better. Now, like I said, this is not going to be really useful at this point because it's all completely filled up with water. You can't really breathe through it if I put up to my mouth. Yeah, it just, it sprays a bunch of water in my mouth. So I mean, this is not going to be useful for a while until it dries. As a matter of fact, I mean, if I were to try to breathe through this and didn't allow myself not to, it's essentially waterboarding. It's a cloth over your face, kind of simulating that you're being drowned. So definitely have to be able to let this thing dry and dry really well because you don't want to obviously start growing mold and things in there because that would take a bad situation and make it even worse if you're breathing in mold's force. So that's it. I hope this is helpful to you guys. I hope that you guys get through this and the best way that you possibly can if you're in this situation. And next time, stock up a little bit of prepping can make your life a lot more comfortable. If you just think ahead about possibilities and things like that and can make terrible situations just moderately awful. That's it. Thanks for watching.