Obviously it's going to be difficult to hook a 5 gallon bucket up to your vacuum sealer. As long as your using O2 absorbers, you don't need to. But you can instead use your ordinary vacuum cleaner to help reduce the load your O2 absorbers need to deal with. Is it necessary, no. Does it make you feel better? Quiet possibly.
The trick is to put your mylar bag in the bucket and fill the bag with your product. Then using your iron and 1x2 or 2x4 as your ironing board seal all but one small section.
Do this for all the buckets you're going to prep before you start the next step. For instance we buy O2 absorbers in the 50 count pack and put 5 in each bucket (always over engineer when lives depend on the results). This means we have to prep 10 buckets at a time.
Once you have all the buckets filled and the bags mostly sealed, working quickly open the vacuum sealed bag containing your O2 absorber packets, it should still have a vacuum and most if not all have a color coded indicator which means they're still good. Now push through the small hole however many of the O2's you're going to put in each bag.
Once you have them all placed, come back and shove the narrow tip attachment of your vacuum cleaner (or fake it with a sheet of thick cardboard rolled up into a funnel and some duct tape) into the narrow hole and suck the air out of the bag. Press down on the mylar as you remove the vacuum hose to keep the seal and then run your iron over it to seal it properly.
It helps a lot to have two pairs of hands for this part obviously.
The end result should be a fairly tightly packed bag, depending on the HP of your vacuum of course, with an overkill capacity to suck the remaining Oxygen out of the remaining atmosphere inside.
Why go to all this trouble? A couple of reasons. The lack of oxygen kills the many larvae and eggs that are inevetibly in your grains preventing them from hatching and eating your grain. Years down the road do you really want to open a bucket of wheat as you wait for FEMA or some other government agency to get around to getting you some food and find it crawling with insects? Sure if you're Andrew Zimmern it might be perfectly okay. For me and mine, not so much.
If the above isn't obvious, then simply youtube it. There are plenty of video tutorials out there. Note that some promote the use of those hand warmers you can find for cheap in your local walmart or other type store.
While it makes sense those are probably just the same, again do you want to bet your life later on saving a few cents now? It may seem like I'm harping on the same subject here but do understand the preperations you're making now are being done with the intention of savig your life in an emergency and as a result are not something you want to go cheap on unless you have absolutely no option. Quality > Quantity > None.
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