[K2 to K50]

What about a set of solar panels with battery backup? Well, since the storm ripped 50-pound cement cistern tank lids off and flung them through the air like frisbees, it isn't likely that solar panels would have survived the damage event. Secondly, batteries don't last as long in tropical heat and humidity. Grid-tie solar has super fast payback (2-3 years) given the electric rate structure. But battery-run solar systems would be high on-going maintenance and replacement. The more economical solution is a second generator with a different type of non-expiring fuel.

Background reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Isidore

I truly don't know how people cope with that type of situation - in many cases, year after year. I'm sure I couldn't. But if you are living in that kind of environment, with the threat of hurricanes and tornadoes every year, the only possibly safe solar system would have to be very low to the ground, embedded in a concrete foundation. If even that would be safe - I don't know. (Maybe a system that could be lowered below ground, if sufficient warning is given???)


But the only "non-expiring" fuel that I know of (talking, that is, in human life spans) is sunlight and wind (maybe in some locations river current and ocean wave/tidal motions).

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Last edited by K2 to K50; 01-13-2022 at 04:38 AM.

[StiffLegged]

… But the only "non-expiring" fuel that I know of (talking, that is, in human life spans) is sunlight and wind (maybe in some locations river current and ocean wave/tidal motions).

And hot air, like this discussion thread!!

[Jonathan Mac]

When the zombie apocalypse comes I will be shooting B&W film. I'll need to scavenge developing chemicals but I hear developer can be made from many things that are more readily available.

[Lord Lucan]

Your only hope for power would be wind generators and solar panels, and Tesla-type home power batteries - all installed before the apocalypse.

If you are talking about local ones, they will soon be stolen after the apocalypse. Bear in mind that law and order will have collapsed. The output from large scale ones will have failed for the same reason as everything else will have failed.

Your best chance will be to get in with a gang of other people capable of fighting their own corner. There are plenty of historical precedents, and the UK is littered with pre-historic hill forts that served that purpose at the time. Then there is literature - try The Day of the Triffids.

[house]

Until power returns I'd be happy going through old prints as the main photographic activity.

All research shows that the best prepping is being liked and friends with lots of people. So my prepping consists of being nice and helpful to the people I meet

[Kombivan]

Maybe install a windmill and run 12v alternator off it and charge up batteries most things will run on 12 volt with an inverter, I already have a generator, a cigarette lighter in the car a USB stick I can run the nbn ok from genny through ups. the trick would be to harness lightening 300,000,000 volts of electricity in lightening how do I know this I got hit by lightening in 2016 so I looked it up. If the network goes totally will we share photo's by smoke signal decode the images to numbers then send out the smoke signals to be decoded again bit like Morse code. or put a paddle wheel in a waterfall and power a generator with it. There will be many options like the steam powered generator rub two sticks together to start it. You know I have a photo of a centuries old aboriginal mixing bowel somewhere and it would have gone in here perfectly its possibly thousands of years old the depth its ground to.

[MossyRocks]

I've seen similar questions posted elsewhere with people usually asking about how do I keep my internet business running during a Carrington Event type situation but against the modern grid and infrastructure. In general the answer is sort it out once things are back up as you will have greater concerns. A lot of thinking about this has been prompted by the Tom Brokaw book Lights Out which is a rather garbage piece of writing meant to scare people written by a journalist who has no real knowledge on the subject with input from others who don't know anything about SCADA security. Grid security, which includes availability, is the very specific area in which I work. Are there concerns about it, yes. Is America unprepared, much less so than Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, and Oceania (mostly Austraila for those who use the old continent naming).

So lets look at some failure scenarios and think about what needs to be done:
1. Large storm knocks out power for a week to a month in a fairly large area- This is fairly common, look at the recent event Texas last year or areas hit by hurricanes. During such times most infrastructure is very badly damaged including such things like roof top solar. If you have a grid tie solar system with battery backup and it is still intact hopefully you have an auto disconnect that didn't disconnect you from your panels. In that case you still have power but limited and you will likely be trying to conserve it so that you can ride things out. Also hopefully you have non electric means of cooking and creating potable water since if you don't you will burn through electricity fairly rapidly. Depending on the time of year and what your other utility providers use to keep their systems going you may or may not have running water or natural gas or may have it only for a while until they run out of fuel. Here in this situation cleanup and depending on weather survival becomes an important issue. Having a generator helps assuming it works as many people buy one and it sits there and rots so when they need it the fuel has varnished or it has rusted in place. While a concern is something grid operators have been dealing with for ages now and know what to do and how to recover. Recovery is limited by the available resources, man power, and ability to roll trucks.

2. A Carrington event. - Well here the grid will now be proactively shut down, we have solar monitoring satellites and will get enough warning to shut things down without too much damage. Some plants really don't like fast shutdowns and in such a situation will require a much longer startup time as there will be things that need fixing. The goal here is mostly to protect the transmission system since the loss of big transmission lines and big switch gear can cause lots of issues that take a long time to resolve if too much damage is done. The local distribution system will also be shut down since there won't be anything feeding it but damage there is a lot easier to deal with and takes less time as things are more standard. Here personally one would again want to disconnect as much as they can of their own stuff to protect it and make sure batteries and fuel are available for your stuff so you can recover and be in relative comfort. Then just ride it out and shoot some pictures with some nice dark skies and auroras to die for then process things when the regular power is back. I have been involved with planning for this type of event with my job as it is an actual concern.


3. Smoking hole in the ground - Let's look at the case where there is an attack that takes out one or more control centers for an RTO or ISO. This is an interesting situation as we would immediately be at war as a nation and is something that I have looked at in detail. Here these types of operators do plan and practice for failure regularly. Single point of failure is avoid and redundancy is king. By redundancy think layers upon layers of redundancy as these are systems that actually do produce 5 nines of reliability (99.999% uptime). While single point of failure is what is mandated the systems are actually even more robust as eliminating every conceived single point of failure actually results in usually being able to survive many points of failure. Still this is very bad and continued attacks against multiple operators will cause massive problems. Even in such a case there is still the ability to manually control the grid it just requires lots of manual intervention and rolling lots of trucks. In this case once the main infrastructure is back up life is still going to really suck.

4. Cyber attack - This is much harder to carry out and would require Stuxnet type inflatration to harm the grid control portion. That isn't to say a cyber attack can't happen to billing and office machines as there have been reported cases where it has. There was a notable case where such an attack was carried out last year against the billing system of a pipeline operator which resulted in them shutting down the pipeline. So there the control system was just fine but the company couldn't do billing correctly so they shut it down. Interestingly the power grid is one of the most heavily regulated things in the country with a vast set of regulations regarding how to prevent and recover from such events that do not apply to other infrastructure. I am actually very involved with this aspect as I work with all concerned parties and with all aspects of this. Because of this I know that what is in the book Lights Out is just hype but won't go into more detail as that just makes attackers' jobs easier. Above is information that is publically available and known so it can be disclosed. In this case having your own backup system would work well but expect that if a successful attack happened it woudl be much like the same for the smoking hole in the ground scenario.

There are more cases but these seem to be the big ones that most people think of. Prolonged outages lasting many months will result in general societal issues and electric power won't be your only concern so don't worry about photography worry about food, water, and shelter. That isn't to say one should be prepared but it comes down to being reasonable with things. Personally I have a fair amount of storable food, not because I am a prepper but because I grew up poor and know the value of shelf stable food and how to can and preserve things so that I can buy in bulk or grow it, preserve it, and consume it over the next year. I also have a grid tie solar system (14Kw installed capacity) with battery backup (20Kwh of Iron-Nickle batteries) and auto grid disconnect so if the power goes out I'm good even in the winter for heat (ground source heat pump).

When talking battery backup for intermittent renewables lead-acid and even Li-Ion suck for long term durability as they do wear out. Iron-Nickle batteries while costing a bit more up front than Li-Ion have a much lower owner ship cost as they are basically indestructible and last decades with minimal maintenance. Li-Ion batteries do last longer than lead-acid ones but have a much higher upfront cost. Nickle-Iron batteries also don't really care about abuse and take it well including over charging, over discharging, constant charging, wild temp swings, etc. that also wreaks havoc on other batteries. Their main problem is that their energy density by weight or volume is worse than lead-acid or Li-Ion but for stationary situations doesn't matter much they also have a high internal resistance and higher self discharge rate which isn't bad if one can mostly be pumping power to them and the rest of your system continuously.

Unfortunately if there grid does crap itself I won't be someone who has to worry about persuing my photography hobby but instead will likely have to drive into my office and be basically camped out there until things are sorted out working tirelessly until it is fixed or until I pass out from exhaustion and then waking up to do it again.

[ThorSanchez]

.
Recently we had an extended shut down of our electrical grid. Some of us (e.g. preppers and survivalists) expect long term (or even permanent) grid down conditions in the future. Should such a collapse happen (for whatever reason) what if any preparations have you made that would enable you to continue to enjoy your photography hobby? As we all know, without electricity, our computers/monitors/cameras will not operate.

Personally, I'm in pretty good shape as I have:

• a generator that runs on gas
• electrical inverters that make AC power from my car
• a solar panel system

Are you prepared? If so, please feel free to share the details.

I'm 50, and in my lifetime the power has been out wherever I've been living more than 24 hours... I think twice. Never more than 3-4 days, and that was after a major hurricane. After that hurricane I'm sure sales of multi-thousand-dollar whole-house generators went through the roof, since every time the power went off for 20 minutes after that (which is rare enough in itself) I could hear multiple annoyingly noisy generators kick on at neighbor's houses.

Now more than 10 years later, and almost no power outages of more than a few hours, I'm guessing a large percentage of these expensive generators work about as well as the wood chipper and the leaf blower I have that got clogged carberuators from sitting unused for a long time. So if/when the power does go out they'll be useless.

I have no intention of prepping for any apocalypses. The closest I'd come would be solar panels and perhaps something like a Tesla power wall, but that would be primarily for long-term cost savings and hastening a transition away from the local coal-fired power plant than hunkering down and waiting for the world to end.

As it is, I have no problem keeping a few spare charged D-LI90s around to take a few snaps of whatever bad weather knocked down a power line for a few hours.

[Dartmoor Dave]

A total grid failure?

You mean a. . . total. . . grid. . . failure?

Holy moly! Last month my electricity supplier sent me a letter saying that my power would be switched off at some time between 8am and 10am on a Wednesday morning for approximately thirty minutes, and after eleven minutes and thirty three seconds of that I'd already killed my nearest neighbour and started chopping him up as emergency food supplies (turns out to taste great with BBQ sauce).

As for electricity: I've constructed a sort of giant human-powered hamster wheel generator. My plan is to capture random survivors who look capable of keeping working for a few months on minimum rations, then I'm going to shackle them to the big wheel to keep it turning to supply my electrical needs. They'll have shock collars around their necks to encourage them to make more of an effort if they let the voltage drop too low, and any who fail under the strain will serve as a useful food supply.

Which serves as a reminder. I really need to stock up on BBQ sauce. You wouldn't believe how much like pork those critters taste with a hefty dollop of Levi Roots on them.

Edit: I'm sooo going to get banned for that one, but I don't care. It was worth it. Survivalist preppers. . . gods below, what nonsense!

[biz-engineer]

I've seen similar questions posted elsewhere.. ..until it is fixed or until I pass out from exhaustion and then waking up to do it again.

I don't get your photography strategy in case of blackout. If you work with SCADA, I would have expected a different response such as: "I keep the power down long enough so that I can go shooting stars and the milkyway during the night without any light pollution since all city lamps would be off".

---------- Post added 13-01-22 at 19:18 ----------

after eleven minutes and thirty three seconds of that I'd already killed my nearest neighbour and started chopping him up as emergency food supplies (turns out to taste great with BBQ sauce)

You don't sound Vegan at all.

[MossyRocks]

I don't get your photography strategy in case of blackout. If you work with SCADA, I would have expected a different response such as: "I keep the power down long enough so that I can go shooting stars and the milkyway during the night without any light pollution since all city lamps would be off".

God I would love that but I don't think anyone else would. Not having to drive 45 minutes to get to a kind of somewhat dark spot would be nice, but if I did that I likely wouldn't have a job once the power came back on.

[jumbleview]

In case power grid is down for a long time non-ability to enjoy the photography will be not my first worry.

[MarkJerling]

A total grid failure?

You mean a. . . total. . . grid. . . failure?

Holy moly! Last month my electricity supplier sent me a letter saying that my power would be switched off at some time between 8am and 10am on a Wednesday morning for approximately thirty minutes, and after eleven minutes and thirty three seconds of that I'd already killed my nearest neighbour and started chopping him up as emergency food supplies (turns out to taste great with BBQ sauce).

As for electricity: I've constructed a sort of giant human-powered hamster wheel generator. My plan is to capture random survivors who look capable of keeping working for a few months on minimum rations, then I'm going to shackle them to the big wheel to keep it turning to supply my electrical needs. They'll have shock collars around their necks to encourage them to make more of an effort if they let the voltage drop too low, and any who fail under the strain will serve as a useful food supply.

Which serves as a reminder. I really need to stock up on BBQ sauce. You wouldn't believe how much like pork those critters taste with a hefty dollop of Levi Roots on them.

Edit: I'm sooo going to get banned for that one, but I don't care. It was worth it. Survivalist preppers. . . gods below, what nonsense!

Remind me to bring some fava beans and a nice Chianti when I drop in for lunch.

[MarkJerling]

You don't sound Vegan at all.

Post of the day.

[clickclick]

I did some stone sculptures way back. Figure I'll dig out my chisels and a stone tablet and start a religion.