I was helping a friend with a writing project recently. She was writing this post-apocalypse story. One of the characters was an engineer before TSH. For plot advancement, he needed to come up with some very creative and useful thing that none of the other characters would be able to make. She decided he needed to make a generator using some low-tech mechanical engineering hocus-pocus.
In fact, her solution was a little more dream than reality, which is what I told her. I told her that what she was describing wouldn't work.
The thing is, what she was hoping to accomplish wasn't really necessary anyway, and I find, all too frequently, that people in the prepper world, and especially in prepper fiction, fixate on this one technology that everyone things we need the most - electricity.
Which confuses me, because having unlimited access to electricity is new. My generation is the first in my family to have access to unlimited electricity. Neither of my parents lived in homes that were electrified for their entire childhoods. Heck, my grandma didn't even have indoor plumbing until the 1970s.
John Michael Greer has written extensively about appropriate technologies for a powering down world. One of his commentaries, that has stuck with me, had to do with windows. The R-Value (that is, the insulative property of a material) of a window is, essentially, zero. Basically, regardless, of how fancy, multi-layered, or argon gas-filled your replacement windows are, the insulative properties are not much different than if you had nothing there (the glass keeps out the wind and rain - which is good). Heavy curtains are actually better than fancy windows.
JMG suggests, instead of spending thousands of dollars on replacement windows that aren't really going to do much more than the single-pane windows that are already there, insulating the ceilings, walls, and floors - at what is likely to be a much lower cost than those fancy vinyl windows, anyway. Increasing the r-value of the rest of the house will do a lot more in energy savings and a lot more to keep your home a comfortable temperature than the best windows money can buy.
We had a saying in the military - KISS. Everything is an acronym. KISS means, "Keep It Simple, Stupid." Ignoring the pejorative at the end, the idea is that often the most simple solution is the best, and such is more true than not when it comes to the kinds of things we are going to want and need in a powered down future.
I spend a lot of time thinking about what I really need with regard to appliances and household conveniences.
I need heat, because it gets cold, and while I love cold weather, I prefer it if I can be inside my warm house drinking a cup of hot coffee and watching the beautiful snow flakes as they dance through the air on their way to blanket the ground in soft white. I like having a woodstove, because while it's a lot of work, year round, and a lot of mess, that woodstove provides my heat, but it also allows me to cook.
I also, very much, appreciate that I don't need electricity for heating or cooking in the winter.
In fact, the only two things for which I really, REALY need and appreciate the electric grid are my clothes washing machine and the freezer. Hand washing and wringing clothes is painful work. Yes, I've done it - whole loads of heavy clothes, like jeans, and yes, I have a wringer. It's no wonder that pioneer women had some massive biceps. And there's just no substitute for the convenience of having a years' worth of food safely frozen until I'm ready to use it.
Electricity generation is pretty tricky ... or not. It can be done in a lot of fairly low-tech ways. Wind and solar are the most talked about when it comes to home uses, but much of our electric grid is actually powered by steam generation. Even the fancy-smancy Nuclear power plants are really just simple steam engines. The fancy part is that the process of splitting the atoms makes heat, which heats up the water to make steam, with turns a turbine, which makes the electricity. Coal powered plants do the same thing - burn coal to create heat to make steam and turn a turbine to create electricity. It's curious why someone hasn't come up with a way to create a residential-sized steam engine for home-power generation. Perhaps it would have to be too big and would use too much wood for too little gain (?). I don't know the answer.
What I do know is that running my freezer uses about .8kWh per day (if I leave it plugged in all of the time, which I do) and running a washing machine uses about 2.25kWh each use, which seems like a lot, but I'll have to believe Google. If I only needed my freezer and my washing machine, I would have to generate 2 kWh per day, and I'd need to unplug my freezer while I was doing laundry.
So, when I read the stories and hear the preppers harping on generators, I have to wonder. What is it that they are trying to power that is SO important? What do they need electricity for, exactly?
In the story, the idea was to use human power to produce electricity. If you've been a reader of my blog for any length of time, then, you are aware that we had a bicycle generator a few years ago. I guess I know a little bit about human-produced electricity.
While it's possible to produce electricity on a bike generator, it requires a lot of energy on the cyclist's part. A lone cyclist can produce about 100 watts in an hour's time. If everyone in my house rode the bike generator for one hour per day, we'd have 400 watts of power saved. If we were able to use 100% of the power that was generated, we still wouldn't even have enough electricity stored after a full day of bike riding to keep our freezer frozen.
So, I had to ask. What are they trying to power? What thing could they gain by having the tiny amount of electricity generated by bicycle power? Maybe some electric lights. Maybe a laptop, for entertainment.
And, then, I actually recommended something else for the engineer to do that would be awesome and give the characters a sense of "normalcy."
I suggested he rig up a shower using hot water from the woodstove.
I was thinking about it this morning, when I was enjoying my own shower. It bothers me in those post-apocalyptic stories in which everyone is always so dirty, and I always wonder why they can't stay somewhat clean. Heating up water is useful for a lot of different applications, including making it safe to drink, and while you're sterilizing your drinking water, why not heat up a couple more gallons for a nice, hot bath or shower?
I also suggested the shower for a more base and fundamental reason. There's nothing quite so wonderful in the world as feeling clean, as anyone who has ever been camping ... like, *real* camping, not glamping in an RV or renting an overnight tent plot in a camping resort that includes flush toilets and hot showers. After a weekend of not showering or having baby-wipe baths, there's nothing quite so wonderful as being full-body under a spray of warm water.
In so many of the stories that I've read told by people who have survived societal collapse, one of the things they report missing the most are those little things, like sweet-smelling soap and maybe a little bit of lipstick ... or deodorant.
In the interest of preparedness, do yourself a favor and stock up on toiletries, or learn to make them.
Also in the interest of preparedness, think about the technologies that you most value. Think about the things you know you could live without, if you had to, and think about those things that really DO make your life nicer, easier, more comfortable, more enjoyable. Those are the things that you're going to want to be able to keep when the SHTF.
I will want to generate enough power to keep my freezer - which, according to Google is about .8kWh/day, which would cost me less than $1000 to set-up. Since I wouldn't *need* to keep the freezer plugged in all day, I could have access to the array for charging phones, laptops, and lightbulbs
And for a showers, I found this nifty little gadget. It's just a shower pump. Fill a bucket with hot water, and have a shower anywhere.
What we *need* is actually pretty simple, most of the time.
There are a lot of folks who are predicting resource scarcity in the very near future and have been for decades. We really do have nothing to lose by getting ready.
And, in the case of learning to embrace a lower-energy dependent lifestyle, we might actually gain from it.
For me, for $1000 initial investment, and a willingness to work my biceps, we could eliminate $100/month worth of expenses.
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