Dull Men's Club
An unofficial chapter of the popular Dull Men's Club.
1. Relevant commentary on your own dull life. Posts should be about your own dull, lived experience. This is our most important rule. Direct questions, random thoughts, comment baiting, advice seeking, many uses of "discuss" rarely comply with this rule.
2. Original, Fresh, Meaningful Content.
3. Avoid repetitive topics.
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Use a search engine, a tradesperson, Reddit, friends, a specialist Facebook group, apps, Wikipedia, an AI chat, a reverse image search etc. to answer simple questions, identify objects or get advice. We accept very few questions, and they must be over topics much more difficult than what is easily discoverable with a search. Also see rule 1, “comment baiting”.
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8. All polls must have an "Africa, by Toto" option. Why? Because we hear the drums echoing tonight.
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I've done some bopping around looking at electrical systems for RVs and vandwelling and such, and it shocked me how cheap it is to buy some lithium batteries and solar panels. A couple of years ago, a 200 amp hour battery was like $2000 per battery, but it's gotten way cheaper, really fast and you can assemble for yourself a little emergency setup for the price of a high-end PC or two. Which if you think of it, is crazy, as in the past those sorts of things only happened for like big businesses or whatever. Today, the main 'cost' is the time sink and research cost because there's not a lot of experts out there yet even though the hardware is available, so you have to do a lot of research and be careful as hell because electricity is complicated and dangerous.
(You can also get one of the jackery systems or whatever from Costco or Amazon, which is more 'plug and play', but is also more expensive overall for the amount of electrical storage you get.)
You won't be able to completely replace the strength and reliability of a normal grid connection, and you don't want to use it to produce heating or cooling (because heating and cooling suck power like whoa), but for brownouts and blackouts and storms it's pretty doable to put together a little battery system and some panels and stuff that will at least keep electronics powered. If you understand how much electricity you can store and how much your appliances draw, you can even (carefully) cook on it or keep a refrigerator going.
Like, it's possible to do this in a RV or van, where space is limited, so if you have a house you could totally do a backup battery system that tops itself off of the grid, then is available if/when the grid goes down for X amount of days at Y amount of draw.