Has anyone done the math on minimum required electricity. Jager06?
My soon to be solar electric system will still be tied into the grid Is it necessary to add the battery storage and converters?
I am considering a masonry heater as one source for heat. Perhaps it would work for you.
db-
Since you have a solar system now, you may know the variables that are involved with calculating usage and determining system size.
If you have a grid tied system now, you will not have electricity on when the main grid goes out. You enjoy a rebate on your consumption now, but there is no back up resilient benefits to you personally for such a system in the event of a grid failure.
The best way I have figured out to determine how much electricity I will need came as a two step process. The first step was a solar survey to determine the amount of sunlight available and my current usage. I learned that a $55,000 system would cover about 35% of my usage at that time. That was shocking to say the least. From that I learned that for every dollar invested in becoming more efficient I would be saving many more dollars on the cost of a system. Basically at $2 per watt for a solar panel, for every watt I could scrounge out in efficiencies, I could save myself at least $2 on my system. It became a game for me.
The survey included my average usage report in terms I could better understand than what my utility was sending me as a bill at that time. This gave me a jump off point for trying to figure out my biggest consumers of juice, and how to mitigate or eliminate them.
I decided to purchase a watt/ amp meter that plugs directly into the wall socket and allows the device being used to plug into it. WIth this I could see exactly what was being used by the device, and I could compare that reading to the data plate on the device to compare numbers and see if they were close. Most were pretty close.
Next I had to try to figure out how much I was using on each device. I literally checked everything in my home and my shop, including my welder. I took notes on the amps/ watts and volts while it was turned on and functioning (like the fridge running) when it was not actively functioning but still “on” and when turned off but still plugged in. Most items continue to draw while plugged in and this can be a large source of savings when you go to find efficiencies. For example my son’s Playstation is 120 volts, 5.3 Amps and consumes 30 watts while it is being played. While it is off, but plugged into the wall it still consumes 3 watts. Thats 3 watts 24/7 and it adds up. For comparison most of my LED lights now only use 2.5 watts each. I realized that using a surge protector on those type items and turning it off when I wasn’t using them would save substantially.
Then I needed to know HOW LONG my family used each item on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Once I had those numbers I could average the amount of electricity each item would need to perform as required for a month. That was my Kilowatt Hour Bank Account. The less I had in it, the more I saved.
In the process of getting every bit of efficiency out of my home’s electrical system, I realized there were quite a few things we could completely do without on a survival basis. I conferred with my wife and older boys and we came up with a list of items we would use if we were going to subsist only. We narrowed that list down to:
chest freezer,
refridgerator,
1500 watt microwave for no more than 10 minutes per day,
3 LED lights per night, total of 7.5 watts for 3 hours per day.
Most cooking could be done with the microwave, the wood stove, BBQ or solar oven. Wash could be done by hand and line dried. Food processing would be limited to jerking meat, drying fruits and canning over an open fire. This brought the realization that the one most needed survival item for my family was going to be a large pot and a large metal tub, for cooking, canning, bathing and laundry.
So my solar system was downsized to a 1.4 kw, battery based, grid tied system. That sized system had enough excess in the system to run my welder for 5 minutes once a month, and other smaller tools more often. This gave me the excess to create other energy producing devices like a gasifier, water wheel etc if needed.
The point of my sharing all of this with you is to show you that each system has to be a custom fit based on YOUR family’s needs. If I did not have a wife and four children, I could get by with much, much less.
Best of luck to you. THis is a very rewarding path you have set yourself upon. Congratualtions on starting.
Yeah, I’m thinking ol’skool-style windmill (i.e., not to generate electrons but to move water) filling a cistern uphill from where 'tis needed to run the plumbing of a house (or houses) on gravity. Could also, I suppose, then put in some kind of micro-hydro power generator between the cistern and the houses to generate a little electricity.
I’d love some PV panels but that’s down my wish-list a ways…
I wouldn’t go out of my way to eat the French lop, but if it was the only animal protein around…I don’t reckon I’d balk at it.
Building resiliency takes time. Many ask me how I have the time to do so many things. My main answer is I don not own a TV. Get rid of it - it’s a great first small step on the path of preparation.
Get right with Family, Friends, and Neighbors!
Glad I found this site! Excellent!!
Amish expanding westward
HARRISBURG, Pa. — The search by the booming North American population of Amish for affordable, fertile farmland has produced settlements in 28 states and Ontario — and has even led parties to scout recently for suitable properties in Alaska and Mexico.
Chris, thanks for sharing your personal pathway toward making you and your family more resilient. I especially appreciated your description of HOW you went about creating a small community that made the steps seem much less daunting by adding a social element to them. I know that for myself, a feeling of being one of the few sane souls in a world gone insane (prioritizing purchases, building projects and other choices on the basis of contribution to resiliency rather than typical bourgeois consumerist metrics) has always made this journey harder. Now, I’m going to actively seek out like-minded people in my own community with whom to take these steps collaboratively – even if it means that I have to do the “starting” of it.
I think that there’s another thing that needs mentioning as well as personal preparation and involvement in community (although it ties in with both) – and that is developing and broadening your skill set. Perhaps pick up a trade or expand your knowledge in a certain area. Try and focus on “appropriate technology” – that is, ways of doing things that are achievable at a lower level of complexity and energy input. Although having a significant store of freeze-dried food may help you get through a short-term crisis, hoarding won’t exactly make you popular with your neighbors, and if you don’t have much meaningful to contribute toward the viability of your community after the early stages, you won’t be all that well off in the long run.
Also, I’d appreciate any input from other members of this forum who are trying to make steps toward increased resiliency in their own lives, but who also encounter resistance from a spouse or S.O. who still keeps their head either partially or completely buried in the sand. As much as I love my wife, she has not always been the most accepting of learning about these things or taking steps to deal with them proactively, instead tending to default toward the status quo.
One other thing I forgot in my previous post regarding canning:
I personally can as much garden produce as I can every year – especially green beans, tomatoes and making peach preserves with local fruit. However, canning is energy intensive in its own right, especially if you use one-use lids.
An option that I’ve found to be at least as good is dehydration of food. While you can use an electric food dehydrator, it’s also relatively easy and cheap to construct a solar one that runs for free. Also, you can just throw the food into bags or screw-top jars and store them for years. I’ve found dehydrated tomatoes to be especially good in this regard – they’re basically like sun-dried tomatoes that, when cooked with some oil and minced garlic, are absolutely delicious over pasta. Dried bean varieties (black beans, kidney beans, etc.) are also very good in this regard, and they can be cooked somewhat quickly from a dry state with a pressure cooker if you want to avoid the overnight soak.
Chris, you are absolutely right about all, but especially the 4th concept where your community needs you to get yourself prepared.
If society and life changes as we curently know it, be it from an economic collapse, limited terrorist nuclear attack, or whatever,…the better off we are prepared as individuals, groups and communities will enable us to stand this country back up quicker. Even then, Survival is a group sport. You have to count on people and these people need to be one’s you can count on and having the same values.
Small steps is where you start. I started http://www.urbansurvivalskills.com in order to help people get started. I am in exact agreement that being 3% prepared is night and day difference from zero percent prepared.
It’s not just about stocking Survival gear and foods,…it’s also a mindset. Learning that you can do things and having confiecne in your abilities to endure.
Great site. I’ll post at link to this on mine.
UrbanMan
Good call, Woodman. We shut off our sattelite TV service in February as a cost cutting measure and realized an added bonus of a more productive use of time. Hardly miss it at all.
Thx Chris ! I’m printing copies for daughters and husbands who do not read CM. They both now have gardens.
This is tricky … has your spouse watched the Crash Course? That was the trigger for my OH to start paying attention to resilience. A steady diet of key articles from the daily digest has helped keep us both alert to what’s going on, and has highlighted the huge disparity in what we’re told by the BBC and what’s happening in real life.
One decision for us was - do we pay off the mortgage now, using tax-shielded savings plans, thereby losing some future interest, or for the sake of relatively little money do we risk losing our house and farm, eg if the banks collapse and our savings are forfeit? Put like that, the benefit of paying off the mortgage so outweighed the minor financial loss that we both quickly agreed to bite the bullet and pay it off. That decision was reached just this week.
You might want to sit down with your spouse and listen to a recent presentation given by Stoneleigh of Automatic Earth at the Transition conference in the UK, called “Making Sense of the Financial Crisis in the Era of Peak Oil”. This talk caused shock-waves through those participants who hadn’t been paying attention to the coming crash. Listening to that programme, then reading Chris’ ‘Basics of Preparation’ series makes it ‘real’. http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2010/06/453356.html?c=on#c250822
I find it comforting to think that even having 3% resilience is significant - just as well, as we’ve still a long way to go in our preparations! Also, everything we’re doing to make ourselves more resilient is worth doing - like an insurance policy - whether or not the economic crash appears sooner or later.
Hi pinecarr! You’re right. I experienced the same, when hinting other people onto some strange ongoings related to the world we live in and the way it is managed.
It doesn’t matter, whether these people are friends for years and years, smart and/or aware of some things or not. Most of them don’t want to get nearby the cliff of anxiety or a reducing standard of living.
I for one had to made my first DECISION when I stood in front of a shelf inside our local food store. I wondered whether all the people around will think I’m neurotic and heavily foolish, when I put a bunch of cans onto the conveyor belt in front of the cashier. And what will my wife say, when I put lots of cans into the basement making it a pantry ?!
I decided to trust my convictions. Just these days we increase the number of self made shelfs in the basement, got food and drinking for 3 month and even 2 barrels of fuel outside the house. I invested 1 and 3 quarters of a man-year of work to deepen our basement and bring in lots of concrete. Our gain were 25 additional cubic meters of storage.
Next month we take every money left and buy a more efficient heating system. We took all money from the banks and canceled all insurances (savings) and retirement plans. We will buy a stock of silver.
During nearly 20 years in IT business on my own I learned and experienced a lot of things. But this is really hard stuff. We don’t have much area for gardening. But I think about the possibility to combine the repair of our roof with some changes in structure, making the use of solar panels possible. Some good: we got lots of water around.
It’s hard, to do everything alone. Most of my friends do not intend to awake. Only 1 friend and a farmer down the street got chickens, ducks, solar supported heating and gardening.
@Chris M.: You are right. It is expensive to follow that path. After doing the mentioned preparations I’m piling up since a few month and spent nearly 2.000 Euros. The preparation of the basement was really heavy duty. The wood (material to made the shelfs from) costs about 300 Euros alone.
It’s so much that has to be done!
Re: Musings (#26) resistent spouse. Mine is almost granite. A retired corproate exec who still has faith in the world as he has always known it. Normally he functions using facts to formulate decisions, but this impending implosion is more than he wants to factor in. Patience becomes a virtue when trying to convince him to be prepared. If I push too hard, he gets angry and things could go backwards.
Glenn Beck finally got to him a few weeks ago and to my surprise, he turned to me and said, “OK, buy some gold”. You never know when lightning will strike! I did it immediately before he had second thoughts. Solar is going to be harder.
You probably can proceed with small steps for preparedness that aren’t too expensive and don’t create much disturbance. It’s like the camel getting his nose in the tent. I am starting to enlarge my pantry and have a one-acre seed bank. This next year we will start enlarging our almost non-existent garden (plenty of room as we live on 45 acres). I used to do a lot of canning - - time to remember how to do it.
At least my marksmanship is improving - - he just laughs about that, but realizes it might prove useful, if only to put some of our resident deer in the freezer. I really recommend The Revolutionary War Veterans (RWVA) Appleseed Project for learning about American history, the rifle and marksmenship/safety. Best weekend you will ever have.
Don’t give up, just keep knoodling along.
For years I have been writing stuff and forwarding articles to family and friends, trying to pass on what I know and what other people far smarter than me have written. It has been frustrating because most “experts” only talk about one segment of the whole. I discovered the Crash Course yesterday - what a gift !! Finally someone has done the work to synthesize all the major factors into a coherent and comprehensive body of work. IMHO all Americans should be required to watch the entire course.
While our country’s “leaders” are all trying to reinflate the credit economy, the realization has yet to dawn on them that the '90’s and '00’s were an unsustainable bubble that cannot be reinflated without blowing up the economy totally/ They seem unable to grasp the concept of “sustainable” or “unsustainable”.
The Crash Course link will be going out to everyone on my mailing list and to a few folks with huge mailing lists. I hope it gets picked up and sent to a much wider audience.
Thanks, Chris and keep up the good work.
David Myhre
Stuart, FL
Thomas Carroll, I want to ID myself so you might understand why I might respond in a different way regarding particular solutions. Having Hope and a Good Attitude are everything! I Lost Both Hands & Legs from an accident followed by my Lawsuit and my Wife after an accident is how the story begins.
Your videos are an incredible display of information and concern for your fellow man, Thank you so much! I am a quadriplegic male 53 years old living on SSDI & In Home Support Services(IHSS). These are both government programs, plus I am receiving section 8 housing. I forgot, my left hand was amputated the same year the majority of my right was, so you can add the difficulties of a Double Amputee to my quadriplegia. An accident changed my life in '85, my lawsuit with the federal government made me understand how the Indians felt. I am alone in Irvine Calif. except for a couple good friends. At the time of my accident I was married and was a mainframe computer operator @Hughes Aircraft, my wife was a Buyer at Hughes. After a year of rehab I went home started a Tax business using my data processing experience and after acquiring a tax preparers license. I did pretty well too for the next 3 years. Then I lost my lawsuit and wife. I had bought a van with my insurance money the divorce put me on the state assistance and 5 year waiting list for housing, but opened up free college. I jumped on it graduated from a JC Orange Coast College. I received a scholarship to UCI that ended with a Bachelors Degree in Environmental analysis & design & Political Science in 1999. I was then accepted into their, Urban Planning, masters program, but in 2001 infection caused me to be hospitalized. A bad roommate got me stuck in a nursing home, lost everything I owned, including my van.
I escaped the nursing home and certain death due to 2 very kind doctors and close friends. After leaving I needed both hands amputated, three major surgeries with rods to straighten my spine. My goal continued to be complete independent and my return to work, after my 3rd back surgery I wrote a Plan to Achieve Self Support (PASS) to try and secure a new van and real employment. My Lack of transportation together with my disabilities has proved to be such a burden, coupled with the worst economy in my life has put me in a real precarious position. That, together with my very vocal position on Justice & 911(which I believe is key and central to this country’s ability to face reality and alter course), my opinion. I did research for my law professor at UCI and became quite skilled at getting to the root and facts. That is why & how I found you and Miss Catherine Austin Fitts. Last week Orange County housing sent DA investigators to dig through my apartment and find dirt, Catheryn’s term attack poodles seems to be appropriate. I guess they threaten me with the nursing home again, even though I have almost secured a home employment that could help even little savers build some silver reserve.
Check out my site www,SilverCoinsUnlimited.com and go to my Facebook page. We the people thrown into the Social Economic Prison have very few real solutions to break the chains only to further our dependence. I WANT MY FREEDOM, BUT at least give me a chance to succeed. If someone would get back with me on FaceBook or get involved, Please do!
I hope you will be continue this sharing of information with your blog readers.Essay Help|Research Paper Help|Write My Essay For Me|Essay Writers|Term Paper Help