Please wait...
Ok, auto-destruct dropped a word for me "I'm" not prepared ( to bail yet.. ) not the property wasn't prepared. ( tho the house needs some minor work )
Dont have my ducks in a row .. but it would have been perfect for me.
Thu Jul 03 2025 23:48:39 UTC from Nurb432but not prepared
Tho you know this, you would be welcome close to us.
Thu Jul 03 2025 23:48:39 UTC from Nurb432
Out in the Appalachia,
lol. power went out. ( not due to storms. just poof. gone. no noise either. ) "eta 4 hours" from the power company
Waited an hour. Drug in one set of batteries ( for fridge, freezer and fans ). Got out the 2 'extra' solar panels ( i can move them around the yard as needed.. not attached to anything ) and hooked them up to charge that battery set while being used, since its super sunny today. ( other set, in the closet used to swap with the first, fed by panels on a roof, or generator if needed )
Got it all hooked up, extension cord run to the fridge, started to plug it in.. BLINK.. power is back on.
Oh well, better prepared and not need it, than need it and not be prepared.
of course if its an extended period, i just use a 220v suicide cable and hook up the generator to the house during the day. Batteries at night.. But that is last resort. ( and, yes, id turn off the breakers to the outside feed first....)
2025-07-12 16:07 from Nurb432
lol. power went out. ( not due to storms. just poof. gone. no
noise either. ) "eta 4 hours" from the power company
Well, I have heard Portugal and Spain and France had a 6 hour long crisis of no power at all because Mediterranean communists don't know how to run a power grid.
Having your own means of producing power and water is so fucking important. You never know when your country is next.
Got it all hooked up, extension cord run to the fridge, started
to plug it in.. BLINK.. power is back on.
Heh. That's kind of how it is here with our generator, but for the opposite reason. The lines on my street feed a large number of customers downstream from here so we end up pretty high up on the priority list to restore. (At our old house it could take days.) When the power goes out we have to decide whether it's worth it to bring out the generator and hook it up.
At some point I want to build a "real" generator enclosure with an exhaust stack so I can just run it where it is.
Mine is a 5kw unit. it lives in a Rubbermaid 'house' out back. ( one of those smallish yard shed things. about 2x3x2, both with front doors and a top that opens so it wont over heat, pretty much fills it up ). The generator is not huge, but not something you stick in the corner of the garage and drag it out every time you need it either. Its got wheels, you need them, or 2 people to drag it around..
I added air intake out the side opposite the exhaust, and a copper pipe for exhaust i can run up in the air.
It is manual start, didn't want to spring for electric start.
Batteries are great for when power is out and its still bad weather tho. Would not want to run that thing with the 'box' closed. it would melt. I suppose i could rig up some sort of water cooling and hang the radiator out side the box. but that's a lot of work for how rare its needed.. ( now, when i move out of this concrete hell hole soon, that might be a different situation ). Garage doesn't have a window, so no good way to vent the exhaust. ( other than the attic, but its way to hot for that.. catch the place on fire )
Thu Jul 31 2025 13:59:47 UTC from IGnatius T FoobarGot it all hooked up, extension cord run to the fridge, started
to plug it in.. BLINK.. power is back on.
Heh. That's kind of how it is here with our generator, but for the opposite reason. The lines on my street feed a large number of customers downstream from here so we end up pretty high up on the priority list to restore. (At our old house it could take days.) When the power goes out we have to decide whether it's worth it to bring out the generator and hook it up.
At some point I want to build a "real" generator enclosure with an exhaust stack so I can just run it where it is.
I went with a regular gas one. Then got a kit to run it off natural gas or propane. ( if things go down hard.. gasoline will be hard to get.. so to the gas line.. then eventually the natural gas lines run dry.. then last resort. find propane somewhere and drag it back )
And ya i agree on the exhaust, its why i rigged up a copper pipe to get it out of the box.
Tue Aug 05 2025 19:57:25 UTC from IGnatius T FoobarThat's what I've got mine in too, it was originally for garbage cans. I haven't dared to run the generator inside the enclosure, as it would definitely melt from the side-firing exhaust. It's a diesel, so it's a very heavy generator for its size. And I don't like having to drag it out to use it. So for me it'll be at the very least a concrete pad and a vertical riser for the exhaust.
It is manual start, didn't want to spring for electric start.
I hate manual start for these things. I get it for small lawnmowers and the like, which are too compact for you to fit an electric starter. FOr anything you are not supposed to move around I think an electric starter is a no brainer.
I mean, if you are having a blackout and you need to restore power in order to get the well pumps going, the last thing you want to do in a winter day is pull once and again and again and again from the damn manual starter. I'd rather tick a key in and turn and see the whole thing start. It adds another point of failure (ie. the electric starter itself can break) but as long as you use and test your equipment frequently, it won't break when you happen to need it.
Actually I realized I am a posh bastard because my generator has a control corcuit wired from the generator shack to my house, and I can turn it on by pressing a button from here.
Actually I realized I am a posh bastard because my generator has a
control corcuit wired from the generator shack to my house, and I can
turn it on by pressing a button from here.
That *is* nice. I have electric start but it's not automatic. I have a generator from the very last generation of the single cylinder air cooled diesels. But the fact that you've got a generator shack says that you get power cuts in your part of the world a lot more than we do here.
Of course, I bought mine when we lived in a neighborhood that was always among the last to get repaired when there was a big storm or something. Its purpose was to wait out a long repair time, not civil unrest. But diesel actually does store very well if you put stabilizer in it.
2025-08-07 15:19 from Nurb432
A shot of carb cleaner, and it only takes one pull.
For my small engines, it is usually the sparker that gives trouble.
A common trick is soaking the air filter in alcohol or fly killer. When you pull it will pull it into the carb and it will make it easier to get the thing started.
2025-08-11 00:41 from IGnatius T FoobarActually I realized I am a posh bastard because my generator has a
control corcuit wired from the generator shack to my house, and I can
turn it on by pressing a button from here.
That *is* nice. I have electric start but it's not automatic. I have
a generator from the very last generation of the single cylinder air
cooled diesels. But the fact that you've got a generator shack says
that you get power cuts in your part of the world a lot more than we do
here.
Of course, I bought mine when we lived in a neighborhood that was
always among the last to get repaired when there was a big storm or
something. Its purpose was to wait out a long repairtime, not civil
unrest. But diesel actually does store very well if you put stabilizer
in it.
I don't think my setup is representative at all. It is apocalipse prepper level. I know absolutely nobody else who can keep utilities going for so long as I can after society collapses.
It obeys practical, non conspiranoic purposes, though. We don't have many actual supply cuts, but we have supply inconsisntencies. See, if you bother to meassure the quality of your electric supply, half of the day you get 20% more of the nominal tension and the other half of the day you are 20% bellow. That kind of works but it also kills house appliances in the long run - and if your father uses to run expensive electronic machinery for his job, it is very bad news. Water is the same, in that the pipe preasure you get might be very low one day and be way above safety limits the next. It grinds my gears when you are doing something and the security preasure valve triggers and vents excess water out of the house because the people running the water supply is 3 athmospheres out of bounds.
Regular people is piss poor so they have no recourse but to soldier on. I am an engineer so I chose to save money for some years in order to build my own infrastructure in order not to depend on society, since society does not give crap about me.
What bothers me is that when you move to a big city, such as any on which I have a $job, electric tension and wave frequency are so accurate you cannot notice any deviation from the standards with home equipment... for 99.95% of the time. The other 0.05% you get a power surge that destroys some mission critical equipment because the boss is too cheap to buy surge protection.
I have never bothered using fuel stabilizers, though. I have a large stash of fuel, but when a can is more than a couple of months old it gets poured intho the boiler tank.
We are not to that level around these parts, and i'm not alone in being ready for the latest weather related outage, but its always been a concern if there was a total collapse of society.. " what if they hear the generator, they know we have power". or later on when all fuel supplies are gone: "if they see our lights on at night from the batteries" The solar panels, are hidden from street view , on purpose. and i guess if we go that far down, id get them off the shed and put them on the ground. ( wood fencing, so no one would see them )
And yes, i know. Overly paranoid.
Mon Aug 11 2025 11:12:48 UTC from darknetuser
Regular people is piss poor so they have no recourse but to soldier on.
I have never bothered using fuel stabilizers, though. I have a large
stash of fuel, but when a can is more than a couple of months old it
gets poured intho the boiler tank.
That's actually one of the reasons I bought a diesel. I was living in a home with oil heat at the time. Since diesel and #2 home heating oil are basically the same product, they are sort of exchangeable.
The manufacturer, who I became friendly with at the time, said "nooooo never use home heating oil as diesel" but the rationale was that depending on the quality of the product it might have some kerosene in it or it might have some water or other impurities that would just burn through in the furnace but could damage a compression engine.
I understood that and monitored the quality of my fuel, but in the end I never ended up having to use it in the generator. The opposite however, was true -- when my diesel got too old I just dumped it in the heating oil tank and got a fresh can.
Nowadays I don't have an oil burner, so the fuel gets old. The supply I have now is several years old but it is still burning clean when I run a generator test. I have a similar situation at my data centers though -- we keep many thousands of gallons on hand and we don't burn it just because it's getting old. Scheduled tests, the occasional demand generation event, and rarely, an actual outage. It's rare to burn through much fuel though. Properly stabilized, it doesn't seem to go bad.
I still have that underground tank full of the stuff. .you are welcome to it :)
I was going to try to finish what i started a year or so ago and empty it, but this summer has been too hot to even think about outside work.
Mon Aug 11 2025 13:33:56 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar
Since diesel and #2 home heating oil are basically the same product, they are sort of exchangeable.
The professionals will pump it, crack the top open, scrape the sludge out, and then excavate and replace the hole with clean fill. I think the typical DIY approach is to empty it and then fill it with sand. Cut away any pipes whose presence would suggest that it was ever there.
(Not that I would suggest violating any environmental laws, no no no...)
When I bought my first house in 1995, the inspection company wrote "abandoned pipes may indicate the presence of an abandoned oil tank". I never found one, but I sure as hell cut off and concreted over those pipes before I sold the house in 2014.
2025-08-11 13:05 from Nurb432
We are not to that level around these parts, and i'm not alone
in being ready for the latest weather related outage, but its
always been a concern if there was a total collapse of society..
" what if they hear the generator, they know we have power".
or later on when all fuel supplies are gone: "if they see our
lights on at night from the batteries" The solar panels, are
hidden from street view , on purpose. and i guess if we go that
far down, id get them off the shed and put them on the ground. (
wood fencing, so no one would see them )
And yes, i know. Overly paranoid.
When there is a bad supply crisis, people tends to leave the valley and my family is the only one that remains, lol. But yeah when things get really bad (which they sometimes actually do) we only run the essentials, such as the fridge and the water systems, as not to draw attention upon us. I think nobody ever notices. When they ask us how we have fared I always say batteries lasted 2 hours and then we were back to stoneage.
In practical terms I don't need electricity or water that much. I can cook on wood and heat the house with a fireplace. The river is close enough that I can take the horses there to drink in turns and then come back home with a bunch of buckets. Heck I have heated water up in the fireplace and then used it for having a bath middle age style the times things got bad and I had no prepper setup yet.
The manufacturer, who I became friendly with at the time, said "nooooo
never use home heating oil as diesel" but the rationale was that
depending on the quality of the product it might have some kerosene in
it or it might have some water or other impurities that would just burn
through in the furnace but could damage a compression engine.
I guess it depends on the engine. There are cars you can feed with a mixture of gasoline and seed oil and won't complain. Not that I recommend such thing. You can definitively burn oil and animal fats as a stable fuel.
Fuels here get rated for different purposes because they are taxed differently. The theory is that house heating fuel is "high impurity" and you can only use it for burning or for rudimentary engines. In practice I think refineries have a single production line for all the fuels they manufacture, and then they tag the barrel with a different identifier depending on who they are selling it to. I know this to be a common practice in lots of industries, I can't picture it being any different here. Fuck, lots of times you ask for car fuel at the petrol station and they give you a different one because they have too much of it and they can't sell it.
I was thinking cat litter instead of sand. Its actually approved for disposal of oil... Sand would not be. Perhaps not 100% following the rules but only bending, not breaking.
I figured it was empty, but after a couple of decades i was curious anyway and the pipes were in my way of something i had planned there, so, i dropped a stick in and I don't think there is much in there judging by the average size of a tank around here ( im guessing... cant be sure ). but enough i don't want to seal it up and walk away, just in case. When i bought the place, the inspector " i don't see this, but you should do something about what i don't see " I guess here, if they find that, you don't get loaned the money.
Having it done professionally would be stupid expensive, for what i think is little risk in reality.. I have heard some will fill it with foam instead of pulling. Slightly less expensive and far less destructive. but still not cheap.
I wish i could find the outlet that went into the house. be far easier since its designed to come out that hole... . but its gone..
Ooooh ... yeah, get that outta there. If it's still full of oil when you try to sell the house, that's an expensive remediation. Or if it leaks into the ground, that's an even more expensive remediation.
The professionals will pump it, crack the top open, scrape the sludge out, and then excavate and replace the hole with clean fill. I think the typical DIY approach is to empty it and then fill it with sand. Cut away any pipes whose presence would suggest that it was ever there.
(Not that I would suggest violating any environmental laws, no no no...)
When I bought my first house in 1995, the inspection company wrote "abandoned pipes may indicate the presence of an abandoned oil tank". I never found one, but I sure as hell cut off and concreted over those pipes before I sold the house in 2014.