Any Generators, Power Banks, Solar Panels, etc…?
Edit: So I’m gonna answer my own question. I’ll probably freak out and would have zero generators to deal with it. Heater is Gas, but I don’t know if gas would work during power outage. Cooking, well there’s a butane burner stove. I have 3 10000mah batteries, but they have 60% efficiency due to power loss during transfer, so its effectively 6000mah, enough to roughly charge my 5000mah battery once, 3 batteries is 3-4 charges. Then I’d be bored with zero entertainment, along with all the food melting and going bad, very not fun 🙃
As Hurricane Helene recently reminded me, pretty much nobody is prepared. Even the people/my family members who like to think they’re prepared. Nope. Didn’t really help.
That’s because the best preparation is a strong knit small commune worth of people (20-100) with diverse skills, good planning and community coordination, that’s set up somewhere away from disaster prone areas with plently of arable land and abundant natural water.
The above is way more difficult than the average American plan : one nuclear family of various ages, a shelf of canned goods, way too little water, a propane stove, and a gun.
This is what I keep telling my family members who have fallen down the prepper rabbit hole. They keep buying the freeze dried food and bulk dry goods and water filtration things and I ask them “do you know your neighbors? Do you have a garden? Do you have your own well?”. They buy into the marketing hard but I don’t think they have any idea what it would actually be like to lose access to infrastructure.
When I first moved into my house I did try to create an emergency kit but with a lack of serious thought. A few weeks ago, the plastic water jugs had degraded enough to spontaneously start leaking. So yep, that’s why you don’t do that
We lost power for at least a week after Helene. There were plenty of people that weren’t prepared and freaked out, but by and large, I saw people pitching together to share fuel, food, water and company. It was a tough time, but it was nice seeing the kinder side of humanity.
We live in a large straw bale house in the country. We have a generator (and a dozen large gas cans which we rotate by filling our van then refilling the gas cans) which runs all the lighting circuits, the fridge and freeer, our propane in-floor radiant heat, water well, and our propane tanlkess DHW. We also have a wood stove in the center of the house that we can use to heat the house very effectively and more than a winter’s worth of good, dry hardwood in an enclosed wood shed. We have ample supplies of food and other necessities.
Durign major weather events we leave our front door unlocked and our friends and neighbors know that they can come, bringing bedding and just find an open couch or floor space.
We’ll be fine for a good long while
My God in Heaven, you live in a Norman Rockwell painting.
You built your house out of hay and people seek safety there? I’m getting real big bad wolf vibes and a trap situation from this.
Not hay, straw, but yes.
Jesus Marie, they’re minerals not rocks!
Hay is grass and other plants. Straw is the stems of cereal grains. Hay has substantial nutritional value and will rot. Straw is cellulose and won’t rot.
Did two weeks after Helene. Generators, UPSs, and self-hosted services kept us entertained and the security cams powered up. There was some rationing for three or four days until the gas stations got power but we were ready. By the second day we were running the air conditioner at night to sleep and didn’t miss any football games on tv.
Got an old wood stove that’s not really in use, but could be used for heat and cooking. Not entirely sure if could get dry wood quickly, but it probably get it to burn. I’ve done many a campfire with freshly collected wood.
I’m also vegan, so most of my protein sources are legumes, which are either canned or dried, ie shelf stable. I buy those as well as rice and other shelf stable things in bulk because there’s only the tiniest little shop nearby and i try to stock up whenever I get to borrow a car. What I currently have would probably last me a month of normal eating, so i guess like two if i ration.
If I can shop for things, I could go on indefinitely. Thinking about it, it sounds kind of nice to literally not be able to work on my thesis and get to read and draw a bunch.
I’ve got 5000w worth of generators, two wood stoves, water heater and stove are gas, and we have about three months worth of food in feezers/pantry (we stocked up right before covid lockdowns and have kept up with it since). We would probably be good for a while, but we have a lot of family in the area that would shorten that by a bunch.
No problem, happens all the time here. We have had “loadshedding” and random outages for years, so we are well prepared. All the lights in the house is solar, and I have two solar charged power banks (2kw units) for the computers and fridge (if required, the fridge can last two days or so without power, but this is only a problem on overcast days, which is not too often here (South Africa, near Hammanskraal)) recently we have been without water for days at a time, but for that I have 5000 liters of water and solar pressure pump, gas geyser in one of the bathrooms.
Used to love losing power during ice storms as a kid. Sure, I couldn’t play Bassin’s Black Bass on SNES, but my dad would stoke the fireplace and light up the extremely dangerous kerosine heater that smelled fucking awesome. Then we would chill with my mom on the couch and read Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
That kerosine heater never did blow the family up…
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Been there, done that. I am currently in the home I inherited from my grandfather, and so I have a lot of old-fashioned things like a gas stove and a non-electric refrigerator. Only communication would be any issue.
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I’m way ahead of you on that one. Thanks.
Non-electric refrigerator? Like an old fashion ice box? How do you like using it?
I think more like a camper fridge. Runs on a small pilot light.
Yes and no.
People tend to forget even ancient peoples had ways of preserving food. The Romans would either dig a ditch and dump their food in it and it would keep their food preserved due to the elements, or they’re keep smoke from a fire flowing over it, with the smoke keeping bacteria from forming (in fact, if I am not mistaken, the second of these works better than refrigeration for some things, since it is easier for bacteria to adapt to the cold in semi-sealed containers than where the air is actively harmful).
Even after electricity, this was all still common for a while (and people still do it now), but they would specialize it more (instead of, you know, digging some improvisedly crude ditch) and this is where the idea of ice storages in peoples’ basements came from. The setup all just kind of came with the home. Where most people have maybe two refrigerators, the pre-refrigerator containment area like my second refrigerator, which helps because the area where I live is prone to some challenging stuff.
Solar power on the roof, powerwall battery backup, and 3100 gallons of rainwater. All electric appliances here. We could go weeks without power.
I take it you live somewhere that’s fairly sunny year round? We had a visit from a door to door solar salesperson stop be recently, so I dug in a little. We get a little over 6 peek solar hours in the summer, but come winter we’re down to around 2. Our energy use last month was about 25 kwh/day. There’s basically no chance of us generating all of that :( Add in a third of that being my plugin Volt, which charges at night, and it’s really not looking good for generating all our own power.
San Diego, so yeah except for " winter."
Our generator will kick in within 30 seconds automatically, and has enough fuel to run the entire house for about 2 weeks.
I’m living in an apartment on the 8th floor. Heating is geothermal heating (from a big geothermal plant owned by the city I live in). So no heating in winter. My second worry would be the food spoiling in the freezer. I’d probably move everything down into the car to drive to my family’s place (that’s a bit of work, 8th floor, no elevator) and then notice that my car is trapped inside the garage below our apartment block due to the electric garage doors not opening. I’d probably get some help from other people in the house opening them by hand (might involve dismounting of the electronics box).
In other words, in case of a longer city-wide outage I’m screwed.
In case it’s a shorter one and my electric window blinds in the bedroom are still closed, I wouldn’t worry and find someone to screw.
Probably pretty long. There’s plenty of wood and propane, dry food, and salt to preserve things.
I will eat my neighbors raw if I have to.
Is your neighbor rich? A literal “Eat The Rich” moment?
No I am admitting to possible cannibalism.
I live in a pretty dense urban center (São Paulo), so I just guess the emergency departments on the city are going to take care of us while the energy come back. I have the privilege to live in one of the nicest neighborhoods here, so our infrastructures is well maintained.
Got a gas stove, gas water heating and hybrid car. Could probably survive indefinitely assuming I can still shop, if I can’t then I would die even with electricity. Hell, i would be forced to finally revive my reading habits and work on my book backlog, maybe it would be a little good.
