How to prepare your family to survive and thrive in todays uncertain world
A couple of you have asked recently where to find some of the parts needed to build an alternative energy system, in particular some of the hard to find items for wind turbines. Today I want to tell you where I found most of the stuff I used when building them. Motors For Wind Turbines [...]
In our last segment we discussed power inverters in the context of medical equipment. That was the main part of this series that was primarily targetted at medical equipment. For the rest of the series, we’ll cover it from a more general perspective. Today we’re talking about power storage, specifically storing them in battery banks. [...]
In part one of this series we discussed some of the basic concepts behind providing backup electricity for medical equipment. In this part, we’re going to discuss one of the most important, if not THE most important, parts of the system. The power inverter. There are two (well, three really) kinds of power inverters. The [...]
Recently a reader asked a question I wanted to answer more broadly and definitely publically. The topic was about how to deal with electrically powered medical equipment in an emergency. The actual question was for a specific type of equipment, but the answer is definitely broadly applicable. There’s three major things to consider here, and [...]
Fuel gas produced in a gasifier unit, or a wood gas generator, was often used for heating homes between 1840 and 1940. Wood gas generators weren’t extensively used, but folks were still pretty familiar with them. In World War II thanks to oil shortages the folks in Western Europe started using them for transportation. Charcoal [...]
Last year, I believe it was, I worked with a friend of mine to put together an e-course on DIY alternate energy. It’s been sitting on a shelf for a while, and I thought now would be a good time to throw it out there for folks to try and get some feedback. Well, technically [...]
I want to take a few moments today to write about alternative energy. Now I don’t advocate this because I am a believer in man-made global warming. Quite the contrary, I believe it is a complete fraud. However, that doesn’t mean that we should ignore alternative energy sources just because the Al Gore crowd thinks [...]
Lately there has been an upswing in the amount of news I’ve read talking about internet surveillance, snooping, and the like. In fact, China redirected massive parts of the Internet’s e-mail flow through its own servers for a few months before it was detected. Wonder why they’d do that? Sooner or later, we all have [...]
A reader recently emailed me and asked about choosing a generator. She in particular wanted to understand the differences in fuel types. So I thought instead of just sending her a reply directly I’d post my response here so everyone benefits! The broad answer is that there are two main things to consider when choosing [...]
This post is a hands on how-to which will show you how to size and build your own emergency power system. We’ll talk about what we want to power with the system, and then design an appropriately sized power system. We’ll talk about how to use it in an emergency and how to keep it [...]
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