Posted on 11/30/2012 10:08:24 PM PST by Kartographer
Some people believe that we are hurtling towards physical disaster with our delicate electrical grid. Just how that disaster might occur is open for debate, but we need only look at major power outages over the last few years to see how precarious our grasp on electricity is. It isn’t a matter of “if” the lights will go out, but a matter of “when”.
Severe weather has given the grid a walloping over the past few years. For example, three years ago, parts of Kentucky, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Indiana, Illinois, West Virginia and Missouri suffered through 3 weeks sans power after a record-setting ice storm. Last summer, people in the Washington, DC metropolitan area were without power for a week during a heat wave as the result of a severe thunderstorm accompanied by high winds. And most recently, of course, we have witnessed the plight of the victims of Hurricane Sandy as they have struggled to function in the most populated area in the United States without electricity and running water, all while attempting to clean up the detritus of the massive storm.
Mother Nature could have other tricks up her sleeve with the possibility of a solar flare-related coronal mass ejection that could cause not only outages but irreparable damage to items powered by electricity. Many countries have developed EMP (electromagnetic pulse) weapons that could perpetrate the same type of damage.
Yet another grim possibility is that as the economy continues to degrade, more and more people simply won’t be able to afford to keep the electricity on in their homes.
(Excerpt) Read more at shtfplan.com ...
See post #59 this thread.
Its your choice you can prep or you can stand around on a bridge waiting for FEMA to bring you a bottle of water, a MRE, a warm banklet and a kiss for your boo-boo and maybe you can even get your picture as you stand there on the national news. How do you think that will workout for you?
It’s not the lead it’s the elevation you have to watch, because after the first few shots they all start running and then trip over their pants and fall to the ground. ;-)
/johnny
Declare a war on coal, shut down every coal power plant, then wait for the disaster to occur so you can declare martial law and start implementing Bill Ayers' plan to murder 10% of the US population to show them who's boss.
Nearly all tools and equipment I buy for our outpost have decals stating: "Not for sale in California".
LOL! I see that as indicating it's the one I'm going to buy! Guarantees it works and doesn't have all that commie eco bullchip Cali demands...
The process in getting a generator for your set up is not all that hard. Figure out which stuff you want to run during an outage, find out what wattage each uses and buy the unit that will run them. Always get one that will do that plus what you might run in the future.
Most home standby units available start at 10kw, which will run most small houses as if there was no outage! That being that, if you can only afford the smaller gasoline (home depot, lowes etc) generators, get a minimum of 6kw. That will keep the fridge/tv/heatpump etc humming along no problemo. If you have electric heat though, youze gonna need a bigger unit!
Shop! Shop! Shop! til you find the size and deal you can live with. Good Luck, and see you on the other side...
Well, I am from Missouri, and have lived through weeks with out electricity before. It ain’t no big deal.
A big ice storm hit about 25 years ago a few days before my oldest daughter was getting married. About an hr. before the ceremony, the lights in the church went back on. They stayed on until after the ceremony and most of the reception.
Everyone was able to clean up pretty good, but some people couldn’t come due to the roads. We didn’t even have a generator then, but we do have 2 now. One we bought for Hubby’s sideline business. Later we bought a better one and kept the older one for backup. Dad was living with us and on oxygen 24/7 at the time, so that was the reason for keeping a backup.
We always liked to camp, and back packed a little, so we always have had a way to cope with life’s little hiccups.
We were just talking about the issue of electricity and cost last night. Hubby said people lived with out electricity in this country for a long time, so we don’t really need it anyway, if it gets too expensive.
I said that I thought it would be good to be able to:
1. Run the well pump for water
2. Run a window air conditioner or at least some fans
3. Run one decent light source at night
4. Recharge the cell phone
5. Run the refrigerator/freezer
6. Be able to run an Oxygen machine if needed down the line
A few days back, one of the links on one of the threads linked to a site that had invertors. I saw a resonably priced gizmo that could be solar charged or electrically charged to run various things that I want to read up on.
Longterm, the water solution has got to be a way to run our well. That could be a hand pump maybe. A way to use the generator by just flipping the switch and drawing up enough for a week or so would be nice-Hubby said it would be easy to fix it to run the pump on the generator if we ever need to. He sees no need to do it now. AAARGH! I said wouldn’t it be nice the next time the electricity goes off to just flip a switch and still have running water? He said he’ll give it some thought-he has several repair jobs he has been thinking about for years. Long term contingency planning and repairs is kinda like Fibber Mcgee’s closet with a broken latch. (Gonna fix that thing some day).
Long term we might need A way to convert one of the generators to run on ethanol and materials to make a still to make your own fuel from bio-mass.
OK. So need to learn more & get some books on:
1. Gizmo’s to use for solar, wind, and muscle powered electricity production.
2. How to build a still to produce ethanol
3. How to convert generators, lawnmowers, etc to ethanol.
Well, guess it’s time to make out my wish list for Christmas and birthdays.LOL.
I wrote a thread on how to do that. You can find it here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2913038/posts
I am adding that book to my wish list for next payday.
I've carried water when I lived in the mountains. A little over a year of that had me convinced that the Romans with their running water had a GoodThing(tm). ;)
/johnny
Don't mess with Mexico.
It seems to me more and more that getting of the electrical grid completely is a desirable thing. I am thinking windmills, solar panels, inverters, generators.
Just get it all set up now, and use it to keep the electric bill down, and be able to switch totally.
Here in CA we keep getting some of the highest rates for electricity in the world, so I predict many will do without electrical long before it gotes off line and will use their home like a cave.
OBAMA!!!!
of-off
“I am adding that book to my wish list for next payday.”
You won’t be sorry - it’s the finest there is to get through a long term emergency. I got that books years ago and was so impressed I sent a message to Denise Hanson. She got her food training in the best place possible - a university in Utah.
She answered my message and said she was living by the book right then in the US just short of the Canadian border. They were building a house and didn’t have power there yet, so she was using her food storage with her recipes in the book. She is an exceptional lady.
She discusses options for eating off the grid, explains how to keep food cool, etc., so it’s not just recipes. You will know a lot more about food and ways of cooking when you read the book.
Walton Foods split off their Rainy Day Foods to another website and the book is on the Rainy Day website. Below is the url to the book page that has Eating Off the Grid:
http://www.rainydayfoods.com/shop/index.php/shop/books.html?p=2
LOL. I carried many a pail of water back in the 50’s and 60’s. Granny’s house didn’t even have a well, so we went next door to the neighbors and carried the drinking, cooking and dishwashing water back to the house.
We used the hand pumped cistern to water the garden and do laundry.
Later they moved to the farm. They had the hand pumped well located kinda far from the house, so we had to haul more water about the same distance. It was the late 60’s before they got running water to the house, and they never had hot water on tap.
Yep, gotta agree, running water is a definite plus.
Fashion voodoo dolls of every RAT and RINO in office, gather a handful of pins and proceed from there.
Thank you so much. We are growing more and more of our own food supply, and I dislike heating up the house with canning in the summer.
Some things I freeze in the summer, and process later, when the house is cold, and I am too cheap to turn on the furnace.
We get enough sun in the afternoons to be warm, but then at night it gets cold, so baking or cooking knocks the chill off until bedtime. I have been able to reduce our electric bills by about 30%, and will be working on even more as time goes on. LOL.
Ran into this link earlier today (no association with this blog whatsoever, just looks like a lot of good info) .... there’s always cooking with wood. My uncle had one of these woodburning ranges and made us a really nice meal on it ... wonder what happened to that stove (I would love to have it now).
http://woodcookstovecooking.blogspot.com/
How to have running water when there is no running water:
Buy inexpensive camp showers. There is a tube running from the plastic bag with a shower head on it and a clip to press to turn it on and off.
Put it in the sun for running hot water in a short time. Some now come with a thermometer on them so when it's in the sun you can see what the temperature of the water is.
I have enough for the kitchen sink, bathroom sinks, and bathroom bathtubs. That's running water when there is no running water.
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