As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
As I can not afford this, I am going to repeat my reinforced lesson on EMP, power outages and whatever else in how to survive when your electricity goes off.
There is a common human condition in humans respond to light. Take light away from them, and they become sullen, moody and withdrawn. Complete darkness is like being in a coma and the more intense the light, the more cheerful the primate.
I have found that LED lights in flash lights work best. They still eat batteries though.
Propane lights, give me a propane cough, and oil lamps give me an oil lamp headache.
If I had money, what I would do is purchase a generator for a tractor, or a diesel powered generator, as diesel is more economical to run, as the engines last longer. This generator then I would use to charge up deep cell car batteries for lights, and to be able to run your furnace fan, as this was a disaster this time, in I was afraid our stove was going to get too hot and burn the place down, so it was 10 minutes on and then 20 off every hour.
Believe me, that wears your ass out, and if you go to bed, you will wake up in a cold house, as I had to turn our propane furnace off, and then restart it.
While we were awake though, I did use the 20 pound propane tanks to run a Mr. Heater, the old 15,000 BTU to heat the house to 90 degrees. These should be vented, and hence the propane cough, and are never to be run while you sleep or you might not wake up.
Extremely hot and fire hazard though.
Mr. Heater has some expensive non vent heaters. I do not know what these would be like, but another reader mentioned them before in the radiant types and they work.
So the cheap version is, a generator to charge batteries which if you are unfortunate can blow up as they are acid based and have vapours.....so like a garage thing and not in the house, and you run an electric cord to your lamps in theory.
An invertor would power a furnace motor........again low power shut off in electricity is a must or you will burn an electric motor out.
I did learn why our florescent lights were not coming on before.....the power company was not running full charge to the house.......imagine that cheating people.
Homes will hold heat for about 2 days. Add in an Arctic wind, and that drops to a day. You have to have heat to restore that temperature base. My plans are for our home to build a Siberian Mason wood stove thing, that would be fired up, and then bleed heat off for a day to keep things civil.
I love electric, but electric needs electricity and propane is the best to at least being able to cook with.
I have a system which I have developed and in theory I believe this would work in using solar for heating, but again until I am wealthy and have the resources and time to experimentally perfect this.......it is like Star Trek light panels.
TL and I did something which we had planned for sometime though, and that was we gave each other about 5 hours of reading time each night. I have played games and that wears a human out, and listening to the radio sucks after a time, and again eats batteries. So what we found is we took turns in reading to each other. We had free books in the Little House Series from Laura Ingalls Wilder, James Herriot and the autobiography of Chuck Yeager, which is going to appear here as a basis of how President Trump should deal with a variety of situations as well as insights to teach you how to construct your lives.
The point being, reading out loud was enjoyable and is something we discussed doing years ago, but have never had the time. It was nice to be forced into the darkness to glean a few nights of filling in time, as everyone was in a bad mood with the electric off.
I was amused at ingenuity as my neighbor had two generators......of course neither worked as why should they. So he has this corn fired stove, and needs a battery.........that did not work either as why should it.......so he hooked up his pickup to the house to run the heater and ran the vehicle all night.
I am going to pry information from my neighbors to see what they have for generators as like terrorists only drive Toyotas or shoot AK 47s, the things people use can not be wrong as the Obama green cons are discarded by the wayside.
For food, it is a basic that a freezer if you stay out of it, will last 7 days without a problem. A fridge will last about 3........but that is what the outdoors are for. Just make sure to keep it out of sunlight, as a vehicle will heat up as a solar oven and that breeds food poisoning.
You must have heat and light, both physically and psychologically. The most economical seems to be a battery, charged by a generator, and then the appropriate DC to AC conversion, and just figure the thing is going to not work.
I believe an open faced wood burner would be best for heat and light. Fire calms people a great deal in the flicker affects the human brain positively. That though requires maintaining the chimney, the stove, and of course wood supply, as you know your wood is going to be wet and that will not burn either..........get hardwood, ash, maple, oak etc..... and then keep it in a dry place, and of course it will probably have spiders and snakes in it.
That is your million dollar knowledge again. Most of you live in homes which are incapable of keeping you warm or alive, as they are modern and are not built to work without modern technology. It is always easy to forget this stuff when things are going good. You will regret not getting set up though when you have the chance.
I simply have the ideas and not the resources, but each lesson is a teaching experience and you are going to learn the hard way. You are also going to get cabin fever and go nuts. Sorry about that, but that is what humans do, and every human goes through a sort of fury and lunacy being locked in the winter and freezing. Once you go through it though, you never have it as bad. I did most of my bitching outside where only the snow heard me like most people do, as it makes inside more pleasant.
Once again though, you need back up heat and light, not for an entire house, but at least one room, and then a way to manage a furnace, as generators eat fuel and make a hell of a great deal of noise too..........
And generators are amusing creatures in our feed store guy, had his running.....had his lights on, lights in the garage, the computer......and all sorts of things, until we got there, and then everything crashed. Yes generators are such lovely fickle things.......why I believe charging batteries is the correct measure to getting by. Solar power might work, but you will be surprised how much the sun never shines when you have 20 below zero.
Nuff Said
agtG
