Everyday Carry “EDC” Bag Maintenance

by Prepare Magazine | Apr 5, 2025 | Blog, Guest Bloggers

EDC Bag Maintenance

Guest Blog Post By Author, LeAnn Edmondson, Homestead Dreamer

An “Everyday Carry Bag,” or EDC for short, is something that all humans do in some form or another. Women have their purses, men have their wallets, and most people carry keys, a cell phone, and some kind of coffee or water bottle when they leave the house.

When it comes to preppers though, the contents of what is carried everyday tend to be much different. Most people these days don’t carry a folding wallet knife, or a fire starting kit they made out of an old Altoids tin. They don’t carry a mini first aid kit with them wherever they go, let alone a larger one in their vehicle. These kind of people like to be ready for anything whether it is a full on disaster they need to get home from or a simple scrape on a child’s knee. Where many preppers fail is the regular maintenance of their EDC.

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The maintenance of your EDC is more than just restocking items used or replacing expired supplies. These are important and useful things to take care of on a regular basis but part of the point of having an EDC is to make sure you can make it to a safe place. That means the contents of the bag should meet the following criteria:

• Suited for you and your climate/location
• Meets the basic needs for water (ability to filter), food, shelter, and warmth
• Appropriate weight to be able to carry longer distances if needed
• Tailored to handle the seasonal extremes
• Ability to handle different activities (camping versus being mostly inside)

There are more, of course, but this gives you a great baseline to work from if you are new and a good reminder if you are an old hat at carrying an EDC. At the most basic level, the EDC bag should be able to get you through 24 hours with the ability to warm and feed yourself, along with getting water and hunkering down if needed.

For us, we maintenance our bags twice a year: Late Spring and early Fall. The reasoning for this is largely in part to the extremes we experience during these times. Unseasonal freezing and the increase or decrease of average rainfall, snowfall, etc. are all part of why we check things out during these times.

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Living in a rainforest, plus being rural, makes for some interesting items in our bags that others may not need or have. These bags are tailored to us and for our climate of being rainy more often than not. We also worry more about cold year round than most people do so no matter what, our bags have items in them to help keep us warm and at least semi-dry.

Starting a fire here can be tricky so we make sure to carry enough fire starter to ensure a hot enough fire to dry out more wood if needed. In the summer, we love to go camping and hiking so we have to make sure we have bug repellant and sunscreen. In the winter, we still love to hike around and have made up some emergency dry clothes packs that include wool socks, a dry t-shirt, and cheap wool gloves that are vacuum sealed so they take up less space.

 Our EDC bags weigh less than 10 pounds on the average day which is light enough to be able to carry longer distances plus have room in the pack in case you come across anything useful or necessary. I have seen so many people who carry around these huge bags that might as well be called a Bug Out Bag (BOB) or Go Bag. The point of the EDC is to get you to a safe(r) spot that has supplies. There is no need to overload yourself on a daily basis!

All the best gear in the world will not help you if you don’t know how to use it so be sure to get some experience using the items you carry around as they were intended to be used. Do the stuff!

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LeAnn Edmondson lives in beautiful Southeast Alaska with her husband, dogs and cats. The ‘dream’ is to own land and live as self-sustainably as possible. You can follow her on Facebook & Pinterest, as well as on the main site, Homestead Dreamer.

She has also the author of Aftermath: A Story of Survival (Jimmy Walker Series Book 1). Check out her book in Paperback or on Kindle.

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