BrianK Posted 23 hours ago Author Report Share Posted 23 hours ago (edited) 2 hours ago, Magwa said: well the lights are back on just short of 7 days .... man depends on electricity like our ancestors depended on Fire! Correct. Most homes are dependent on it, not all but most. Being w/o power is the pits. Glad to hear you got power back. We're rural and my plan after we first moved to rural Maine was to revert back to pre-REA days. Kerosene figured prominently in those plans. That plan worked fine for short outages which we had a lot of. Then we had an ice storm that put 4-5" of ice on everything. Trees came down and power lines couldn't take the weight. So out came our kerosene appliances to supply our light, heat, and cooking needs, to include melting ice for the toilet, washing, and after filtering, drinking*. What worked for short outages then showed the flaw. Pre-REA days had homes that weren't as tight as todays homes. Burning hydrocarbons produces water which started to condense on the cold walls. We were screwed. Store shelves were empty and the area was devastated. We know because we had to go out to see what was going on. Most folks couldn't move but our 4x4 made it through and around the downed trees. We were w/o power for 5 days and only got it back that soon because we're on a trunk line. It was that ice storm that caused me to rethink things. I put in a solar (PV) system with battery back-up. Now if the power goes out I can furnish power in seconds from the massive 24v batteries. Typically the solar part is useless in a storm 'cause of the clouds, but if the clouds clear out our smallish system will power the house if we're careful in consumption. But I also put in a welder/generator and that can easily handle larger loads and recharge the batteries. Sort of like the way a WW2 diesel/battery submarine worked. I also had built an addition specifically for a wood stove. We have a lifetime supply of wood. * W/o power our well pump doesn't work. And since it wasn't TEOTWAKI I wasn't going to remove the pump and 100' of piping to use the well casing "bucket". But our weather, the reason I came here... We're back in the deep freeze and snow is expected over the next 36 hours. When I woke up it was 18* and that was actually warmer than yesterday this time. 3 more months of this. Edited 23 hours ago by BrianK added the weather report Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shooterrex Posted 22 hours ago Report Share Posted 22 hours ago 60 deg today. Warmer the next 2 then back to winter. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
98Z5V Posted 11 hours ago Report Share Posted 11 hours ago 15 hours ago, Magwa said: well the lights are back on just short of 7 days .... man depends on electricity like our ancestors depended on Fire! I know for a fact that you are quite well-versed on basing things on fire - so I never had any concerns at all about how you were gonna come out of this, brother... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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