Great for you to prepare. Commendable. But I don’t think it is required for this scenario. I’m still trying to learn how charged particles from solar flares can induce voltage in insulated wires. They can’t. However, as I’ve seen during a 2004 solar flare, if there is enough exposed wire on a circuit a significant charge can build up and over-volt the line. This is why solid state circuit breakers are so important to use. UPSs have them built in. All important/expensive equipment should be run off a UPS if for no other reason than the built in line conditioning and automated breaker.
Important Safety tip: To avoid a house fire unplug all power strips when you hear of a solar storm event. Power strips are the service point of connected devices and will be an aggregated point of discharge for any induced over-voltage up to the line’s circuit breaker’s rating. I.e., during over voltage they will pop all their internal trip wires and may catch fire. This is what I witnessed during the 2004 solar storm. The sockets with devices plugged in caught fire as there was an open circuit to discharge the induced voltage which was obviously beyond the rating or capacity of the power strip.
You mean shielded, rather than “insulated”, right?
Insulation on wiring isn’t going to do much considering static electricity from the human body will fry a computer chip and everything runs off a chip these days. Soon. Self driving big rigs. Automated factories. Human labor might be appreciated again one day.
Yeah, an emp is more likely. The military did some testing with that back in the 60s I think and cars didn’t make it through. Fried the ignition coils & alternators/generators. It would have to be a real strong solar flare to come close to emp and would have to hit a densely populated are to do a lot of damage.
Meanwhile, express.co.uk is recycling news from 02/2012
https://www.wired.com/2012/02/massive-solar-flare/
As for prepping; The stupidity/evil of man is the #1 thing to prep for (jihad and other stupid human tricks) with somewhat normal natural disasters/weather being 2nd. Fire, Wind, Water. Around here, we can get ice storms that coat everything with 2-3” of ice. Snaps powerlines, large tree branches, coats the ground so that walking is near impossible, never mind driving. The last one was just a few years ago and people were stuck at home with no electric for two weeks in the dead of winter and that was in the city. Rural folks went up to a month with out power but the rural people’s situation didn’t make the news. Most heating systems need electric to run even if they’re LP/NG.