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 🙃
I can probably survive as long as water is available. I assume, heating (gas) will fail, but then the house temperature will only drop slowly and a sleeping bag with some blankets should keep us alive. Food? Tough, I don’t keep much food and most of what i have is refrigerated. But then things don’t spoil instantly. I would first eat what’s in the fridge, then from the freezer, then whatever is kept at room temperature.
I guess two weeks. The real problem is all the other people and no functioning police, fire brigade, ambulance. I don’t grow my own food or hunt, so this will be practical problem, but I’m more afraid of all the other people who are also desperate.
I’m literally dead in about a week. All of my heating, cooking, and refrigeration are electric, and I have no backup supply or the means to safely add a backup. So I’d have no food, very little water, and I’d freeze to death.
Try downloading this guide and following some of the advice in it. It’s Sweden’s emergency preparedness guide.
https://www.msb.se/sv/publikationer/om-krisen-eller-kriget-kommer-pa-engelska/
Damn, its scary how everyone is so reliant on the “grid” to survive. 😖
That’s how cities work - a 300-home apartment building isn’t going to have 300 generators on the balconies and expect each family to maintain one - it has a single grid connection with specialists to maintain the electric.
I’m on the grid, but I didn’t come from it.
If anything hits me too bad, I’m not beyond living in a car or just straight leaving the area entirely.
I have a fireplace, a spring, and laying hens. I’d be fine, just incredibly bored.
I… um… What’s the spring for? 🤨
Water spring, not metal spring.
Oh! Hahaha that makes a lot more sense 😄
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.
Straw bale construction isn’t hay, and its characteristics will probably surprise you: https://www.familyhandyman.com/article/straw-bale-construction
Straw bales have up to three times the R-value of conventional home insulation, along with excellent soundproofing and fireproofing characteristics.
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.
My family probably wouldn’t make it past 3 weeks. We are dependent on rechargeable electronic insulin pumps. Pumps last 3-5 days. Can be recharged on a laptop, maybe 2-3 times. Can recharge in the car a few times. Our real problem is no food.
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.
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.
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
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.
Hey cousin! Crazy apocalypse, right?
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.
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…
dad would stoke the fireplace and light up the extremely dangerous kerosine heater that smelled fucking awesome.
kerosine has that effect on people 🤤
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.
careful with catalytic fridges, they will kill you. make sure you install monoxide sensors everywhere around it.
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?
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.
I think more like a camper fridge. Runs on a small pilot light.
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.
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."
Same. 14kW system on the roof, 2800 gallons of water storage refilled from well with electric pump. 4xPowerwall batteries for storage/backup, all electric appliances/hvac.
We can theoretically go for weeks as well, assuming moderate sun.
Central Texas, 260+ days of sun here.
Probably indefinitely, as long as there was food and a source of unfrozen water that can be purified. I’ve gone camping in temperatures down past -20f for days on end. The cold sucks, but will not kill you as long as you’re dressed for it, have a sleep system/shelter to keep you warm, and have enough food to fuel your body. Fuel/fire is downright luxurious in the cold, but not strictly necessary unless you have inadequate insulation from the cold and your body can’t keep up with the heat loss.
Same here. I have cold weather sleeping bags and appropriate clothing. I’ve got light weight cooking gear and water purifiers. I’ll be grumpy but otherwise fine.
Until you run out of food and the region has been overhunted/fished/foraged. This is why I need to expand my garden and do more indoor hydroponics. Last year we started growing sprouts and herbs and it was awesome but we’ve been lazy this year.
Sprouts are an excellent sandwich topping btw, way better than lettuce. We were doing alfalfa and mung beans (lol, mung).
In that situation, calories per person is what will count. Sprouts are nice but aren’t going to do the job. Grains, root vegetables, and meats will count.
Yeah as long as we can retain access to food and water we’ll survive. But if either of those stop we’re going to die and basically can’t do anything about it.
Could flee or fight depending on the circumstances.
I have a wood burning stove with peltier device powered fans to distribute the heat.
It gets hot enough to boil water so I can cook on it.
And I have about 4 days worth of continuous fire firewood.
So assuming that I couldn’t just hop in the car and drive somewhere else I guess I would be okay for about 4 days.
