The problem is "our" image is not something we all agree on. I see no reason for that to be different for the handful of survivors. The survivors will most likely end up wishing they had died quickly.
Probably evolution. My guess is that there have always been "weirdos" that live at the outside or are especially paranoid. Most of the time it's just weird, but sometimes it payed off during our evolution.
Basically your great great great great great great great great great great granddad was a prepper. But you didn't inherit the prepper gene.
A lot of them aren't planning for the end of the world, just for "something bad" of indeterminate but finite length that's longer than a lot of people think reasonable.
It's a spectrum, with routine "emergency preparedness" on one end, and "self sufficient lifetime bunker filled with reusable water and canned food" on the other.
It's normal for people to have a flashlight, a few days worth of shelf stable food, a first aid kit and a couple of tarps. It doesn't even need to be intentional, it's just normal, but it still forms a basic emergency kit.
A rational response to a normal risk.
A lot of the more extreme peppers who aren't radical are in more rural areas, where something like a tornado could actually knock out power for a week or more.
A rational response to an uncommon, but real risk.
Others just have a disproportionate estimation if the risk of something like Katrina or the 2003 blackout happening, that can knock utilities out for a protracted period of time, or some esoteric and unlikely beliefs about civil unrest.
A rational response to an uncommon, unlikely risk.
At the far end you have people who want to survive the literal end of the world. I don't necessarily get why you would want to survive for a bleak and empty life either.
An irrational response to an unprecedented, infinitesimal risk.
I work in emergency management. I'm on the "keep beer in fridge" end of the scale but I know people who bury containers of goods for trade (rimfire for varmint hunting popular for this). It really is a continuum.
Best advice: keep a full tank of gas, food in a chest freezer with ice packs, and 1 gallon of water per person per day. You will be expected to make it for 3 days without assistance. Full marks if you plan for a week which includes a heat source for warmth and cooking.
My brother bought some land cheap and started with his infrastructure before the house (he'd previously bought a school bus and converted it). He started with solar, batteries, and a generator for the well etc, but he's finally expanded to the point where the batteries can last him through all the dark, and the generator is hardly used a d just there as an emergency backup.
He works in IT remotely so it's not like he isn't using electricity and internet all day. He does have more room to put the panels though.
I am interested in prepping, and if anyone else is, too - - I look at solar/wind renewable energy & I'm concerned about high draw, high demand devices & processes. Well I started to notice that even super green setups tend to have a small generator on-hand for large/rare draws, failures, and emergencies.
And small generators have become a lot smarter & more capable! Bonus.
You probably aren't running tons of major appliances all at once all the time. Buy the generator, have that backup plan...and go into the green energy world with confidence.
I mean even those generators are only bought out of a lack of understanding. Really easy to get 6kW home inverters, and they are stackable. Some systems will stack up to 16 units. Thats 96kW, or said another way 400 amps of 240V.
A setup of dual 6k isn't even that expensive anymore and 12kW is enough for most people to just use appliances like normal without worry. Grab a couple of the low hanging fruit efficiency changes like heat pump for both your dryer and hot water heater and your golden.
The only other mistake people make is they size how many panels they need based off the potential maximum rather than the potential minimum. You should oversize your array for summer so that it is appropriately sized for cloudy/winter :)
I wish solar made sense where I live, but it's not just "cloudy right now", it's extremely overcast for 9-12 months out of the year. It'll still generate power, but not really enough to offset the cost of the installation. Hopefully solar keeps getting cheaper, more efficient, or both.
It will! And if you've got wind...wind turbines weren't very good & experienced breakdowns, but we're on the verge of a few breakthroughs. Making wind turbines cheaper, more efficient, and less moving parts to break.
I've come to learn that the typical wind turbine design just doesn't work on a micro scale, that you would need to have in a residential area. (Even on a farm, the wind turbine would need to be pretty big to even be worth installing and maintaining.) I've learned about a few advancements in wind power.
There's some up and coming ideas. The problem with traditional designs is that for them to be efficient and effective, they have to be big. Backyard turbines with less than 10 acres to work with won't cut it. They might supplement things a bit, but they're expensive for little gain.
I would add that when it comes to these sorts of things that have yet to see mass adoption, you should be skeptical of any individual thing. However, if there are ten different things, probably at least one of them is going to work out. In fact, that's my general feeling about Matt Ferrell's videos. Good for getting an overview of what might work in the future, but don't be too quick to jump on any one thing.
You could maybe rig one up with a car alternator and a older turbine design. But that may take some effort and if you want to be real redneck about it.
Frezik is right, there are plenty of small wind turbines. As I alluded to, the tech naturally involves moving parts & has been prone to breakdowns. They're getting better all the time, but the small ones don't produce heaps of power. The big ones do; there is a bigger residential one in my community & it outperforms the solar panels 8:1. It also broke down in the first year of operation, and a crane had to come in & take the turbine down, to be shipped to TX for (thankfully under warranty) repairs.
I like to see everything getting better, I think I feel more comfortable with solar panels & reducing needs, increasing insulation.
I can't Google what I remember seeing, but they're working on very efficient & tough ones that just spin in place. Mounted to the roof of your house. It's kind of like that vid posted below, but not, the fins looked like 2 ribbons.
I saw some that had spiral turbines used on the side of the highway somewhere years ago. That type of design would be a lot less space constraining. I doubt my HOA would be cool with me installing an enormous fan in my front yard. There might be some alternative designs that would be acceptable though. I'm going to look into it. We're completely off the grid except for electricity & internet, so becoming self-sufficient with our electricity needs would be awesome!
Yes, but the tall ones are hard to get approval for in most residential areas. Smaller spiral/helix looking turbines can be easier to install if you can find a good spot to place it.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !preppers
You would need to treat, stabilize the fuel for long-term storage, incurring additional cost. And even then. It's technically not "as good" as fresh stuff.
How about propane / butane? The gas canisters from WW2 and probably even older ones are still in use today and the fuel inside doesn't chemically degrade.
I don't have any personal experience, but that sounds like a plan to me. I do really like propane, and I recently got a small generator that runs either gas or propane. Just need to change out the spark plug so it burns hotter or something (for propane). In fact, some people just use propane in their generators because it runs cleaner.
Idk, frankly I think all fuel is a non-issue, because in an emergency all these things run on money, money, lots of money. Fuel today, gone tomorrow. 20# propane tank? Gone. 8-gal gas? Gone. Hopefully it's enough to run your appliances & get you by until utilities are restored.
In an extended power outage or grid down type situation, generators are great to have but you'll be limited by your ability to obtain fuel. And the money to run it. A generator will be loud & could attract unwanted attention from beggars, looters/thieves. The best investments you can make right now is increasing your efficiency ((insulation)), reducing your energy needs, & investing in things that can help you in a grid-down situation.
Love it. People look at me like I'm crazy for trying to go greener, and I see this stuff online all the time.
"Haha EVs are so dangerous! Look at the fire hazard" like you aren't literally parking a tank of explosive gas in your house every night
"It doesn't have nearly the range of gas" They say while driving a massive truck that needs filling every week, meanwhile my charger at home is needed once a week and costs 1/6th a tank of gas
"Solar doesn't even cover the entire electric bill" Sure, it only halves it...
This is an informal fallacy, "letting perfect be the enemy of good." You have to feel out people who are doing this and try to determine what their angle is. Usually they have one, some kind of asinine hobby-horse or ulterior motive, and you need to figure out quickly if they're arguing in good faith or not.
Because usually they're not, and inevitably you'll find that as soon as you're done addressing one point they've moved the goalposts somewhere else.
I just heard this phrase, and I'm so happy because I've needed a word for it. People who do this annoy me so much. Like with EVs especially. "Well we should be using mass transit_." Yes, we should, but that will take a very long time. Let's take a good solution now, which is better than the bad solution that is currently being used, and we will continue to build and push for the perfect solution at the same time.
Strive for perfect, but accept a good solution in the meantime.
Yeah a lot of people here are just like "Don't own a car at all" and don't know how most of the US is laid out. When a commute is 20 minutes by car and 2 hours by bus, it's hard to still justify the bus. I'll for sure be pushing for better bus service and transit, but I can't force my wife to sit on a bus 4 hours a day just out of principals. EV is a good solution, but I'll push for the better solution at the same time.
Never mind how the US is laid out, a lot of people -- myself included -- do not want to and will never live in an urban environment. I realize that makes the "fuckcars" contingent salty, but that's just tough shit for them.
I respect that, but counter with it's still easy go go green. EV for commuting with charging at home, if there is a bus system learning it and taking it when possible is great, and biking if you're in a town makes a huge impact. At home, moving off of gas and going electric can reduce your footprint by a huge amount, and of course as the comic says adding solar panels can go a long way.
I'm big on urbanism and walkable cities and absolutely don't mind people who don't want to live in cities. We don't tend to argue rural areas shouldn't exist, but rather point out that suburban areas have a lot of problems and are way more common than they should be, when looking at demand for mixed use development, walkable cities, etc.
For what it's worth, for most of human existence rural towns existed without need for cars, so there's still some truth to the idea that America has been rebuilt for the car, even in rural areas. There's a variety of explanations out there for why and how they worked, but one I'm a fan of is how many rural towns would organize around a central "main street", and keep the houses near it while the rest of their land spread outward. That way food, entertainment, and neighbors were all still easily accessible despite the large average amount of land.
And tbh, even setting that aside, I don't think many urbanists actually have an issue with rural areas. The movement really focuses on suburbia. A lot of the problems stem from suburbs being spread out like rural areas, but with city level amenities, without paying the amount of taxes to get those amenities that far out. Most notably, paved roads are extremely expensive to maintain and gas taxes are not high enough to pay for it. But to some extent most services suburbs get are going to be subsidized by those living in a nearby city, because it's just so much cheaper to provide those services when everyone lives closer together. And besides the subsidization, suburbs (unlike both cities and rural towns) just have a lot of qualities to them that make them bad for the environment and unpleasant and dangerous to live in - I understand not wanting to live in a city, but no one thinks hour long commutes through rush hour traffic is a positive.
I'm currently learning to drive but I think, unfortunately, my first car will be ICE.
I live in a rented flat, so no way I can install a charging point.
The prices of the paid charging points near me mean that it's close to parity with petrol here (UK).
The insurance on EVs is much higher than ICE at the moment, this is doubly important because as a new driver I'll be paying a lot for the next 2 to 3 years.
I'll be looking into various different vehicles when I've passed my practical test so I'm not ruling EVs or PHEVs yet, but it's looking unlikely.
Understandable. Consider that one of the biggest things you can do is just buy a smaller vehicle. I gave up my car about 12 years ago, but I'm considering buying something like a Vespa now for errands around town. They get 90+ mpg! If you can't go that small, just try not to buy bigger than what you need for 90% of trips.
For the last decade I've mostly rented vehicles for trips to the coast and things like that. Even if I did that once a month it would be far cheaper than owning a car. I recommend this route to anyone who doesn't want to buy more car than they need.
Look, nothing wrong with an ICE especially starting off. Ease up on use, drive safe and swap when you are able. Don't take on the worlds problems when you aren't even secure in yourself yet - leave those sacrifices for us until you can.
This is one of the exceptions I still give, however, look into hybrid options. Newer hybrid can really reduce your emissions (and petrol bill). Even used ones are still pretty decent
I can totally understand that, I think its not a wise option to buy a new ICE car, but a cheap used older car can be a good option until you are able to buy an EV.
I have an ICE car as well, because it just didnt make sense for me to buy an EV a few years ago, I couldnt afford it and there wasnt a suitable one available in Germany.
I do use my bike quite a lot, so I dont think its too bad.
Working on it actually. We got the EV for the wife to replace a dying ICE vehicle, and we live about 20 miles away from her job, with no transit in between, so we were stuck with a car. For me, I won't be replacing my car and I take the bus to work, but we are getting a train within the year, so I'm looking at possibly an ebike to get to the train station
Fully agree bud, kills me every time I hear "tracks to trails" or something else stupid. We had one going from our 10,000 person town through a few other towns to downtown of our nearby city. They proudly paved over it and made a 50 mile bike trail. Which sure, is nice but no one is going to go commute on a 50 mile bike trail. They already owned the land, that's 80% of the battle and cost when it comes to building rail, why couldn't they redo the rail, throw up a couple of concrete platforms, and build an easy commuter rail?
Because no one even thought of it as a possibility, that's why. A simple little DMU (really electric would be great but let's not push it in my imaginary scenario) could have moved hundreds (probably thousands) of people of day. But no, bike trail
But it's not a good solution. In fact it's not a solution at all. EVs aren't going to save the environment, they're going to perpetuate our reliance on personal vehicles.
Oh my god, that's literally the point of the whole comment. You are offering a perfect solution, while the only alternative you offer is a bad solution. EVs are not perfect. They are an okay solution that is better than remaining on ICE.
That was literally the point. Small towns with populations of <10,000 are not going to build rail in the next decade. I would love for them to, but they're not going to! So you're solution for them to get to town where groceries are is to... continue using ICE while sitting on their hands waiting for rail/bus service that is not coming? If that's your best solution then it's not a solution.
Oh my go that's literally the point of my whole comment. You stated that EVs are a good solution. They are not a solution at all.
It's not a matter of perfect being the enemy of good, it's a matter of people mistakenly thinking that personal EVs are a solution. They are not a solution at all, they only serve as placebo to make people feel good while while continuing the same habits and relying on the same infrastructure that caused all this in the first place.
That was literally the point. Continuing with the same sprawling, oversized infrastructure built for personal, usually single-occupancy vehicles is not going to solve climate change. We are so far gone the only real, actual, solutions are in fact drastic, society changing measures. So your solution is for us to keep doing the same thing we already are but with 20% less pollution? While the earth is already past the 1.5C global warming mark? If that's your best solution then it's not a solution.
EVs are here to save the automobile, not the environment.
Well, not to be that guy but given your specific example of a dryer there is a way you can get over half the way there. Get a heatpump dryer. They use 1/4th the amount of electricity as a standard electric dryer and can literally be plugged into a standard 110v 15A outlet they don't need the big ass 220v 50a plug. Heavy items like thick beach towels take a bit longer but otherwise they function identically
Different country, all our dryers and appliances run off mains power - 220v 10amp. The big issue is that they can't be mounted upside down, so we can't have one.
Because you put them above the washing machine, and flip them upside down so you can reach the buttons - its a space thing. They even have mounting brackets they come with and the front panel removes so you can turn it upright. I never did though, mine are upside down. But I don't care.
But yeah, means we can't use heat pump or condensation dryers unless you have extra space.
Is it like a top load washer or something? I have the melee heat pump dryer and the matching washing machine and they come with a stacking kit. I don't need to flip it upside down because all the controls are on the front anyway rather than the top
They are quite compact, as I am using them in an RV at the moment so I needed something capable of fitting through a 24 inch door and those were just fucking barely able to do it at 23 and a quarter inch
Top load washer, front load dryer. Its a lack of floor space - just uses the empty space above the washing machine. Out of one, into the next, towels over the shoulder to go on the line.
I never knew you could get stacking kits for heat pump dryers - just told that you can't flip them so have to be on the floor
I feel like I read somewhere about someone routing the Arizona air from outside into a dryer intake and running it without the heat and saving a big chunk in electricity too. It's too bad I live in rain and humidity town.
“Haha EVs are so dangerous! Look at the fire hazard” like you aren’t literally parking a tank of explosive gas in your house every night
Just to be pedantic, the real issue there is that EVs are potentially more explosive, and once they've caught fire, pouring water on the makes them explode a second time.
Sure, and that's one I hear, but it's blown out of proportion by them. Really whenever you store that level of potential energy in any form it's going to be dangerous.
So don't use water? I mean, don't use water in basically any situation regarding a fire anyway, it's a last resort, but if you don't have a fire extinguisher in your home you're asking for trouble eventually.
Pouring water on lithium-ion battery fires is not only safe it's the primary means of fighting them. It does not make them explode a second time, what it does do is cool down the battery.
Lithium battery fires though, there you'll want a class D extinguisher. Those batteries aren't in EVs though.
Yeah I've got family that are like this. I'm kinda wondering what you'd actually need for solar to change a vehicle for say a drive to work and back in a mid sized city (10-30km) on the average electric vehicle.
One the the reasons I haven't gone solar here is not so much cloud as cloud+half the year the things are gonna be covered in snow+smoke during the summer (we actually have issues with solar-powered parking kiosks already due to this).
If I won the jackpot though I'd definitely go "prepper" with one item being a solar-powered retreat I'm a location that gets a decent amount of sun without too much dangerous weather.
While I agree with the premise of your argument, most of your points are false. Liquid gasoline doesn't explode and the range of the truck is definitely longer than the range of the EV, regardless of when you recharge/fill up the tank.
Sure, liquid doesn't, just it's vapour. Which of course is constantly evaporating around gasoline. :|
And yes, the range thing was a comparison to "Who cares about range when you're guzzling 40 gallons of gas to get the same range". But even then, I always argue that the range argument is ridiculous anyway. 95% of trips people make are within their town or county, plenty close enough within the range of most EVs. Mine is 260 miles. Tell me who drives 260 miles daily. Even when I lived in a rural small town my commute was an hour and a half, 60 miles each way. That's less than half of my current range.
And for those who are like "But muh roadtrips!" I reply immediately with 1) Most families have 2 cars, the obvious solution is to have one EV for 95% of your driving and keep the old ICE for longer trips or 2) shockingly enough, you can rent a car to go on a roadtrip. Hell I did that already when I went camping. People say "I need a truck for when I go outdoors or move" - but here I've been renting trucks for that for years.
People are so terrified of change that they'll just throw up whatever they can think of (or whatever the oil lobby tells them) rather than think critically. Both of those arguments I've made with gearhead friends, and every time they don't have a response to them. Same as what other people have said below, changing just 10% can have an impact. So for people with big trucks I tell them "no one says get rid of your truck completely, but be smarter about what you drive and when". Commuting? Take an EV. Camping/towing? Sure take the truck. That can have an impact too.
the range of the truck is definitely longer than the range of the EV
Depends on the truck and EV. Compare a Regular Cab F150 Raptor to a Lucid Air Pure, and the EV probably gets more range. Obviously looking for edge cases that probably aren't the case in Scrumbbles's story, but there's no way you can know the EV's range is shorter from their post. In a couple years, we might have 1000 mile range EVs delivered to customers (and cheaper than the Lucid Air), in which case the range would be more than the majority of ICE vehicles.
Triforce, Pokeball, [too small to make out], Super Mushroom, sun? The others are clear Nintendo references, so I'm scratching my head at the sun at the end.
