How we got here

It's been on my mind for a while, as I've watched the degeneration of this country from what I grew up believing it was into the politically-correct, socialist, bastion of non-responsibility that we now look around and see, that some day stuff's gonna just shut down and not come back on. I've asked myself, Do I want to wait until then and suffer with the rest of the sheeple? Or do I want to at least start putting together a way to survive the end of life as we know and expect it?

I do not intend to meekly just accept this "new normal" puke that is being promulgated by our head Kenyan. "New normal" to me is supposed to be a higher and higher standard, not an acceptance of less and less as a suitable environment. A "new normal" that requires that one forget one's past to be happy with one's present is psychotic and self destructive.

So, on to how we got here. Thumbnail sketch: The local electric co-op ticked off the wrong guy. For want of fifty four dollars and some cents being paid Sunday, our meter was removed by a technician who couldn't either take my payment in cash and give me a receipt (I was on the way out the driveway to town to pay the bill!) or wait thirty minutes for me to drive to town and pay the bill, thereby cancelling his work order. The lack of sanity at the office, combined with the dearth of anyone willing to make a decision that might be contrary to the rule book, was the last straw.

So. We started with one group 24 deep cycle marine battery, a 400 watt inverter, and a 3500 watt generator. First order of bidness was to get the refrigerator and deep freeze going--either that or send out invites for a HUGE barbecue!

I built and wired this house with in mind having to power parts of it with a generator in case of something like a hurricane making landfall nearby, or possums getting into the transformer substation in Orange Grove, or a general collapse of civilization, not to mention inflation outpacing my ability to pay the damn bill. Looks like the latter is going to get us all shortly, but that's beside the point.

At any rate (even an obnoxious one such as the rate per KwH of electricity from the co-op!) my first action was to shut off the breaker in the main box that goes to the branch on the back wall. This branch box serves most of the ceiling lighting in the house, the plugs in the kitchen and most of the master bedroom, and the back porch power, which runs our water pump and washing machine. I removed the supply from that box and in its place ran a 12/2 romex over to near where I decided to situate the generator and installed a plug on the end of the romex. I then plugged that into a pigtail, ten foot extension cord with 12 gauge conductors and plugged that into the generator. The reason for the extension pigtail is that romex (house wiring) is solid conductor and is susceptible to breaking from the vibration of a generator, where an extension cord is constructed with stranded wire which is much more tolerant of vibration. So by using a short extension cord to act as a vibration dampener I kept the romex physically insulated from the vibration.

I will post pics as soon as I have the chance to learn how to do that on this venue. Please forgive the lack of them for now.

Come bedtime last night we shut down the generator and used the one battery with the inverter. Not enough for the old tube-type tv (62 watts) and fan (unknown wattage, haven't found the name plate on it yet). About 2 hours to alarm and shutdown. Also, I hadn't planned ahead and we're not sure if the battery was at full charge or not. It had been used to start and move an old pickup around the place, but probably hadn't been run long enough to recharge. Could have something to do with the shortness of power output. We'll know more tonight.

So far have run since 5 p.m. (it's now a bit after 9) on the 3-battery setup. Charged them at 40 amps for an hour this afternoon right before shutting the noisebox down. I also connected a voltmeter to the system to monitor the DC voltage on the batteries from inside the house. It was showing still over 12v when I cranked up the generator again a few minutes ago to start dinner. (Reason for starting it to fix dinner is to keep the fridge cold while opening and closing it through dinner prep. Also to make sure we don't have a repeat of last night with the loss of battery power before we were ready for it :) )

More as I think of it. Questions so far, email me and I'll answer 'em.