Comment by killerstorm
Comment by killerstorm a day ago
Cooking, refrigeration and water pumping depends on electric power. It can definitely get nasty if it lasts for more than a day
Comment by killerstorm a day ago
Cooking, refrigeration and water pumping depends on electric power. It can definitely get nasty if it lasts for more than a day
Solar and battery for refrigeration seems a waste.
If you own a house I'd look into very old school options like digging a deep hole to store your food in a dark&cool place - forgot the name for it but it'll work for weeks or months without a single milliwatt
Convert a chest freezer into refrigerator and you don't need batteries.
It'll work just great to keep half the things in my fridge safe and none of the things in my freezer safe.
Refrigeration is top priority and I would happily buy solar panels just to keep it working (plus leeching a few watts for my phone).
That sounds really inconvenient (am I going to keep my food down there all the time, or is the plan to carry the entire contents of my refrigerator down there in an outage?) not terribly effective (RIP all the frozen stuff) and probably not any cheaper. Plus the hole can’t be used for other things like charging my phone.
> It's terrible in a society-collapse way - makes you a target.
A target for what? People to come charge their phone at your house?
Why would you be a target if 50%+ of population have solar setups?
If society actually suffers a sustained "collapse," access to electricity won't even be among your top-20 problems. You're going to be more worried about how you're going to obtain water, food, and protect yourself from the roving looters and/or warlords that will immediately spring up in the absence of law and order.
This is exactly it. The other part is not just water pumping but operating the sewer systems - if the lift stations are down the whole thing fills up in about a week and the basic plumbing in your house - and thus pretty much entire city, stops working.
Cities are not setup to support their current populations without those services and once you run out of buffer things go downhill quick - wastewater is an enormous and immediate disease hazard.
This is one of the reasons I'm looking at extending my solar system to add a battery and islanding, so I can have a regular resupply of some amount of power/electricity for the necessities in case of extended outages.
I'm not sure how far into "prepper" that makes me. I don't have a store of canned food or weapons or a generator. I started down this track to keep my home lab (on which I self-host a bunch of stuff) online / protected through outages.
Additionally, the city in which I live has an ad-hoc amateur WiFi setup which connects over several kilometres. I used to be a member a long time ago but, ironically (in this context) getting fiber internet meant I kinda lost interest. It's one of those things that had just never gotten back to the top of my priority list: https://air-stream.org/
Feels like they're ahead of game on this topic.