Best strategy for power backup in case of cuts?

If you can use it all. Brand new smaller batteries are available at a similar rate (e.g. Braun 15kWh around £1500, 2.4kW out)

No doubt. But for home power you want something that can be pretty much emptied time after time. Which you can't do with lead acid. And I'm not sure they're as durable as lithium.

Some of them seem to see an apocalypse simply as an opportunity to go medieval on someone's ass.

Guns before butter - lots and lots of guns.

At the end of the - still perfectly valid, educational and entertaining "Connections, part 1", James Burke puts us in a long term breakdown of society and imagines how it could play out.

The prognosis was not good. We are simply far too interdependent.

"When was the last time you built something for yourself ? . . . . Including the tools to do it with ?"

Anyone here smelted their own ore to make their own steel to make a screwdriver ? (Let's starrt with that before we start making screws).

At that point you realise that "prepping" can only take you as far as the next delivery from wherever. You ain't gonna last forever without it.

Just for starters how many people would think to boil (with what ?) any water from rivers, lakes etc before drinking it ?

I set my parents up with an inverter in their garage several years ago. It was based on a 48 hour set up and was primarily to keep the CH running even if just for short bursts not 24/7.

It's a basic set up to allow the CH to run, power a couple of table lights, boil a travel kettle and charge up mobile phones.

I'll be doing Bill Wrights house with a much better setup at some point. But neither will be automatic changeovers.

Cheers

Adam

I;d rather hear how many people wouldn't.

mountain stream, well or spring ok...

-- “It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe it, but the power that it confers on intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world. And since...it is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into, we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought.” Sir Roger Scruton

Its far from clear that you would need to boil it once the number of people has dropped massively

And trivial to boil it with any metal container, saucepan etc on a wood fire

How many would find the means to boil it, if their gas and electricity don't work? Making a camp fire on the 11th floor of a tower block might be tricky.

An ebay scrapyard offered me £615 for a 27kWh Dacia Spring battery a few weeks ago.

Hook it up with an inverter and a microcontroller to convert CAN protocols and you can use it as a house battery:

Theo

It would be impossible to bootstrap a bronze age society today - all the surface copper and zinc deposits are worked out. But you don't need to - you can mine landfills or scrap littering the landscape for metals, which are easier to separate than any ore.

So you only need to make screws once every single screw ever made has rusted away.

More of an issue is forgetting how to do things, if the internet and books were to disappear.

Theo

that won't remove the dead sheep upstream

Wouldn't mind of these in my back yard:)...

All would when they notice others lighting fires to cook etc

So you do that on the ground outside the block if you don't have a balcony

No reason why there would be dead sheep in it

And even if there was, you don't need to boil the water for that reason

I spent months camping in an abandoned house doing scientific research in the Jounama State Forest pine forest in the snowy mountains of australia. We used the water from the still working fine rain water tank.

Can't remember why now, but after months we had a look inside the rain water tank and found that it had a massive great orange sort of water weed growing in it and quite a few dead birds, because the main inlet had long since stopped the birds getting in

We never had any downsides from drinking that water and never boiled it

They would steal wooden furniture and burn that

tin deposits...

In fact once you know how to do it, iron is rather easier to smelt

I read an amusing SF short story, about an advanced spaceship that landed, said 'hi' and left.

It used unknown technology, but once aware that such technology existed, those doughty earthlings duplicated it. Or so they thought.

When the aliens returned they said 'f*ck me, no one else has ever done it that way'

The foxes will do that.

You're right, I was getting confused with brass. Wonder why we never got a Brass Age? (I don't think Victoriana counts)

True, and I don't think late medieval iron furnaces (the Weald, etc) used any tech that wasn't available in the prehistoric world. Maybe water power for the bellows, but you could do that with animals too.

:-)

Theo

There's a school in I think Wales where you go to learn how to do it. Bellows are human powered, First you build your furnace out of clay and make your charcoal