There's No Getting Off (The Grid)

boing
42

Here in Winnipeg the whole city was under a Boil Water advisory for two days (likely someone picked their ass before performing the daily tests)… To top it off, there was a power pole fire that knocked out hydro to a portion of the city during all this. Double whammy.

We have two major transmission lines into the city that come from the various generator dams up North (third one being built). Years ago ice took down several towers and left (at the time) about 800,000 people with only one fragile and heavily loaded means of power. It was pretty touch & go for a while.

In heavily populated areas in the States, you have several ways to route power from various providers. No so here.

In process of having a new house built, and I’ve made sure between garage and house roof, I have over 1,200 sq ft of South-facing non-obstructed roof for eventual various solar capture panels.

But the water thing… that is a whole other matter, unless I’m willing to dig a well in my urban back yard to tap into the rapidly diminishing salty aquifer. I’m a few blocks from the Red River so I would have to haul water and purify it.

I can see spending on solar to keep the fridge & lights going, but a water treatment plant in my shed?

Energy is easy to get and it’s use can be regulated, but water? Not so easy. Sure, there is rain & snow, but half the year there isn’t.

43

I think I like your definition best. It never occurred to me that going off-grid had to mean building the shelter using only off-grid methods. If you use any means necessary to build a hut that is well insulated with a pellet stove and a roof of solar panels in the end you will be about as off-grid as you can get. The “grid” used to mean the electric grid, not some shifting definition of “interconnected.”

44

Personally I consider “going off the grid” to be a temporary thing in an emergency. My family and I could go a few weeks without tapping into water, food or power systems, but not longer.

45

By the logic of this, you cannot be “off the grid” if you go into town once a month to buy sugar and flour. To me (way up in the Appalachians), off the grid means that when the power lines get knocked down, you don’t freeze to death in the dark. I am hesitant to rely on a generator because I don’t want to always have two weeks of fuel on hand. We heat with wood, but we have enough land that we never need to cut down live wood.

1 Like
46

The internet analogy is terrible and the premise of the post title is nonsense, because it’s not the spirit of it, it’s the meaning of words which I, for one, refuse to let become less specific through misuse or misappropriation.

Yes, off the grid entirely refers to the physical electricity infrastructure and the reason a petrol powered generator is explicitly off the grid is because it’s portable enough to take anywhere you want. The fact that it’s fossil fuels making the power bears no relation to whether it’s on the grid or not.

A better analogy than the mobile internet one used would be downloading a large chunk of the internet for offline use because, like how using a generator is off the grid, offline use of the internet is indeed unplugging from the internet as it’s no longer, in any way, like the evolving, growing, 2-way network known as the internet.

Other than these nitpicks all I have to say is that building a log cabin with explosives sounds fun.

1 Like
47

3 Likes
48

Not exactly. The charged particles directly influence only the satellites up there; we down here are proteted by thick layer of shielding by a dielectric gas.

The problem is with the upper portions of this gas shield being ionized more than they usually are. Then you get very high currents flowing through the plasma loops, and the associated magnetic field induces significant currents/voltages to the long wires that the power distribution grid is built from. If they are in the right (wrong?) orientation towards the field changes.

Without the long enough wires to catch the current, no damage to be done. A detached solar panel installation couple meters long won’t even register that. A standalone battery powered device likewise. A mains-powered grid-connected device may suffer if the energy gets through the transformers, which I consider unlikely; even direct lightning hits to overhead wires have their damage rather limited.

The bulk of the damage will be confined to the large transformers connected to the longest wires. Which, coincidentally, are the backbone of the power grid. And the transformers are made by a handful of companies, and their worldwide shortage will cripple the power grid for months or more.

Shouldn’t be needed for a CME event. For an EMP pulse from a nearby nuke, maybe; for a really close lightning hit, yes. But a metal-cased device with the external wires disconnected (so there are no attached antennas) should withstand a lot.

That said, on-site spares are always a good idea.

Likely an overkill. These events typically don’t come with a sharp rise time (unlike lightnings); monitoring local geomagnetically induced currents will do more good, without dependence on the comm lines not going down when needed the most.

The GME induced damage is usually not voltage-spike based insulation breakdown, but high-current thermal overload. If you can disconnect the things before they overheat, you won.

…as for nuclear EMP, even that would not disable all the electronics. You’d end up with area littered with a mix of stuff that died (mostly connected to antennas facing wrong directions, or long cables), stuff that survived intact, and stuff with slight damage and shifted parameters or impaired reliability (partial loss of transistor gain, higher reverse current of the junctions, etc., usually confined to the ESD networks on the chips). And these will be strewn in an irregular pattern, due to the spatial factors (or, in what directions the wires were laying when The Event hit), differences between the circuits and even the parts themselves, and what was connected to what and powered on or off. Lightning hits, both direct and nearby, are a good approximation here.

It’s not a magic spell destroying everything. It is just physics, with all its limits and caveats.

2 Likes
49

Here in Japan, the main motivation in going of the [electric] grid is to distance oneself from the corrupt power companies.

1 Like
50

Power corrupts!

6 Likes
51

Most of my friends that are really into the homesteading / prepper / preservationist thing tend to think in terms of “grid-optional”. They use plenty of outside systems, but it’s deliberately out of convenience, not necessity.

Case 1:
I have a friend with a spinning wheel, a loom, and a small flock of sheep. She buys a bunch of stuff from Jo-Ann Fabrics, that she uses to sew stuff to sell on Etsy, ect., but she also makes a small amount of stuff literally from scratch- From sheering the sheep to dying the wool using hand-collected native plants from her own land to weaving or knitting the finished product (often as demos at SCA events). It’s easier for her to just buy whole cloth, but if she couldn’t or didn’t feel like it, she doesn’t need to.

Case 2:
Big ice storm a couple years ago knocked out power for half of New England. A friend of mine lost power and internet access for over 2 weeks. The one gas station in her not-quite-enough-people-to-be-an-actual-town was also without power for a good chunk of that, so no local gas either. But, she lives in a big farmhouse built a hundred years before electricity was even a thing. They have 3 fireplaces, 2 woodstoves, some livestock, a well with a hand pump, and a whole cellar full of homemade canned goods from the garden. They looked at the storm as an opportunity to shut off the cell phones and relax.

3 Likes
52

[quote=“shaddack, post:48, topic:51120”]
It’s not a magic spell destroying everything. It is just physics, with all its limits and caveats.
[/quote]I’m not sure how I gave you any other impression. Seems we’re in agreement overall that solar panels are likely to be fine. I think there are arguments to be made that there’s still plenty of unpredictable things that could happen, so some equipment prepping may be wise.

As far as nuclear EMPs go, I really don’t care what that does to the solar panels. At that point, I’ll arm myself to the teeth, style my hair with a mohawk and raid neocon bunkers via motorcycle with a twink in tow.

4 Likes
53

You didn’t, it was a generic grumble swept over all the “CME event, CME event, everything electronic will diiiieeeeee!” crowd. :stuck_out_tongue:

Need a weapons specialist?

1 Like
54

[quote=“shaddack, post:53, topic:51120”]
You didn’t, it was a generic grumble sweeped over all the “CME event, CME event, everything electronic will diiiieeeeee!” crowd.
[/quote]I was oversensitive to your grumble and it fried my shorts! – rimshot

Need a weapons specialist?
Well, more like a weapons stylist. I really want the sawed-off to match the purple mohawk. -- [rimshot][1]
6 Likes
55

I think there are different problems depending on location. I’m in a major city, and my dad is in a rural area with land like yours. In general, our family would seem to fair much better in the long run surviving on his land than in the city because of easy access to fresh water, game, and wood fuel, and the ability to grow food, but we’d be surrounded by gun-toting survivalists and therefore wouldn’t be able to hold the land long.

Meanwhile, a power outage for 2 weeks – with the certainty that the grid can and will be fixed – would be a pain but much easier to deal with in the city than out by my dad.

It all depends on WHAT the emergency is, and how long it lasts.

1 Like
56

I’ve had the same axe for 50 years.
I’ve only had to replace the handle 5 times and head 3.

4 Likes
57

Public radio station WJFF has its own hydroelectric dam.

58

Tell that to this guy:

Fast forward to 4 min in to watch the beautiful footage of him building all with hand tools.

3 Likes
59

Rather than argue ad absurdium about what The Grid entails, I think the key to this argument is the act of intentionality, and the judicious use of materials and technology.

The promise of technology has been increasingly hijacked by capitalism, which is designed to keep us on the straight and narrow rails of ‘more, more, more’ rather than thoughtfully examining and employing alternatives as each situation merits. As shown by power companies’ attempts to limit personal solar installations, The Grid implies a one-way consumer-based relationship.

With that said, it’s not practical to flint-knap your own tools, but that shouldn’t be the aim anyway, since technology is part of our birthright (viz ‘man is a tool-making animal’), and so perhaps we should be looking at this idea as a way to build intentionality into our collective relationship with The Grid.

3 Likes
60

To the author, I was in Joshua Tree today for my first time. Just went for a drive, turned around at 29 Palms. Looiking around the thought occurred of what I would do to go off grid (at least electrically).

Of course there’s lots of sun in Joshua Tree, so solar and windmills.

Be that as it may, after just a day’s ride I told my wife it would have been more enjoyable to ride around in Palm Springs. I didn’t care for the towns of Joshua Tree and Yucca Valley, seemed like a lot of poverty and meth heads.

Instead of looking for ways to get off grid, the reality is we’re connected and getting more so everyday. That’s what makes civilization and will continue to do so. I’m more inclined toward Matt Ridley’s a “Rational Optimist” .

1 Like
61

This sounds like a false dichotomy, what I am discussing here doesn’t have anything to do with isolationism. Connected means I can choose between several grids, or even start my own.