Matter of Facts: Who Turned Off The Lights

[00:00:06] Welcome back to the Matter of Facts Podcast on the Prepper Broadcasting Network. We talk prepping guns and politics every week on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. Go check out our content at MWFPodcast.com on Facebook or Instagram. You can support us via Patreon or by checking out our affiliate partners. I'm your host, Phil Ravelet. Andrew and Nick are on the other side of the mic, and here's your show.

[00:00:30] Good evening and welcome back to Matter of Facts Podcast. Nick's on the other side of the mic, Andrew's not, but Andrew is broadening his horizons. He has agreed to be a tester for waterboarding. I don't know what the qualifications are, other than like maybe be able to hold your breath. Don't drown. I would think being able to hold your breath a long time would be a disqualifier. It would make the test last longer.

[00:00:53] That might be a thing. Although, not that I've ever done it before, but I have an ungood authority from people that are very proficient at waterboarding that if you're really good at what you do, you make sure you pour the water up the nostrils. So they can hold, they keep their mouth shut as long as they want. It's going to go where it's going to go. That's fair. Yeah. And that is how the show got demonetized forever because I'm handing out free advice on how to waterboard people. Don't do that, by the way. Don't waterboard people use diesel. Then it's not waterboarding.

[00:01:24] Pretty sure. Yeah, pretty sure that's an entirely new war crime right there. Good job, Phil. You're doing Canada proud. It's only a war crime the first time. Nope, it's never a war crime. It's never a war crime the first time. It's a war crime after someone gets convicted. Geneva Convisions, Geneva Suggestions. I mean, I'm a civilian. So yeah, I was never been a signatory.

[00:01:49] So. Oh, Jesus Christ. And I wonder why we can't get any sponsors for this show except for the patrons. The patron sponsor our lunacy and apparently appreciate it because none of them have ever stopped being a patron because we talk about waterboarding people with diesel. Oh, that's true. I'm actually actually most of those twisted SOBs for probably like crying right now. Just imagining that. Yeah, I'm sure.

[00:02:19] Or they've never had a face full of diesel fuel on accident. Okay, they have. They're definitely laughing because that shit sucks. So since you brought this up, I'm pretty sure at some point I told you that one of the jobs I had working way through college, I was working out on active flight lines. Yeah. Fueling and towing, you know, working in an FBO. Well, we had at the time the the contract for Acadian Air Medical.

[00:02:46] So we had, you know, their their King Air 200s landing on us all the time for transports and we had their helicopters or EC 135s, 145s. They would land, we'd fuel them and they'd take back off. Well, for those of you who have never fueled one of those little helicopters, see there's this funny little thing where some psychotic bastard designed that fuel tank to where if you try to put fuel into it too fast, it glugs.

[00:03:11] And since the fuel neck is pointed upwards on a 45 degree angle, when it glugs, it ejects fuel straight up into the air and directly in design. Oh, it gets better. See where it shoots. The fuel is about head high, right in the direction of where you would be standing if you were, you know, fueling the SOB. And that's what happened one evening while they were hot refueling. They shut they turn them. They idle the engine down. They stopped the blades, but they left the engine running because they need to hurry up.

[00:03:41] Get fuel and get out of there. So I'm in a hurry and I'm in the dark and I'm on a flight line holding a flashlight in my teeth. Thank God, wearing safety goggles, pouring fuel into this frigging thing. And I heard which was the last noise I ever wanted to hear. And then next thing I know, I have a face full of jet egg. Yeah. Yeah. From from top of my head, thank God, no beard. But like from top of my head to about here and it gets around my safety.

[00:04:10] I was wearing safety glasses, not goggles. Well, God. Yeah. Yeah. That's a son of a bitch. I bet. Yeah. So I threw the fuel nozzle down on the deck, tore butt back to the line shack running because I knew where the eyewash station was. Hosed my eyes out, took my shirt off, walked back out onto the ramp in like 50 degree weather. Bare chested to finish fueling this bird because they had to hot refuel in turn. Yeah. Fun, fun night.

[00:04:35] I thank my lucky stars that I made a habit of keeping a spare T-shirt and a spare polo in my wall locker at all times. Just for occasions. No, not smart. Stupid because the first time something like that happened to me, I didn't have a spare shirt. So I stink like diesel for the entire shift. Hey, at least you learned from it. Well, you know, when none of your buddies want to sit next to you because you smell like a diesel truck, it's just kind of a thing.

[00:05:07] Anyway, thanks for that little walk down memory lane. Yes, jet fuel or diesel by extension in the face sucks. What doesn't suck, however, is our merch because it's all funny, funny little T-shirts. And let's see here. We have the two raccoon shirts, which was feral but free. And I forget the other one. Chose violence. Chose violence. Chose violence. We have the choose your warlord shirt.

[00:05:31] And then the what would Bert do, which is kind of a personal favorite of mine, because if you're into preparedness lifestyle and you didn't grow up like low key idolizing or full on idolizing Bert Gummer. I don't know what to tell you. You had a boring childhood. You should probably sue your parents for frigate therapy bills. Like if you didn't grow up watching Tremors. Yeah. You grew up in the 80s and 90s. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's come on. His rec room. That is a life goal right there.

[00:05:59] You know, I've said for years, I'm like the man had a badass mustache, a pretty bad looking wife and more guns than the National Guard. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's like life goals right there. You should aspire to have an awesome mustache, a really hot spouse and a lot of guns. And did you see his truck? Not a bad truck. Not bad. No, not bad at all. Damn decent truck. Then in what, number two, he got the deuce and a half?

[00:06:29] Yes. Sweet. I still to this day say like if I ever, if I could ever get enough property to justify like a dedicated farm truck, I swear to Christ, I'm getting an old deuce. Oh, God. Those things. If they take up so much space for what they do. And? I know. I would buy one too. I would. Okay. But for the, for the sake of nostalgia, see, you have to understand I was born in 1982. I was enlisted from 2000, 2006.

[00:06:57] So carry handle AR-15s, PVS-7s and deuce and a halves is like those three things right there is just peak Phil in his teens and twenties. Yeah, that's fair. Okay. Last little bit of admin work. Cypress Survivalist. It's a cool nonprofit. We teach lots of very interesting things. We don't teach illegal things. Just things. Things like, you know, things that are relative to the preparedness lifestyle.

[00:07:26] I personally taught like kind of an intro to preparedness class. I taught a financial preparedness class that I'm not going to teach again. I'm going to roll some of that content into the first class. And I taught an hour long comms class that now that I have, you know, fully integrated into software defined radio, I'll probably be adding some of that to the class. Nice. Yes. So it's going to be a free event.

[00:07:56] We have to, I actually have to book quickly book the pavilion for it. And it's going to be a come out, come and join us, you know, bring something to cook, enjoy a burger, do whatever. And I'm going to teach probably the beginning of a food pantry class. Yes. Because that was, that was one of the, like, you know, when you got an hour, you got to kind of like cram stuff in there. You do. And that was the one thing I had multiple people come to me.

[00:08:23] Either they had a food pantry and they were just curious how I did mine or they wanted more information. So I figure it's a good place to start. And I'm actually going to cheat and steal our lists that we did on this podcast back in October. I'm stealing those to kind of like front load the conversation of like, Hey, if you want, like, if you want, what did we say? It was, it was one week. No, it was two weeks of food for one person and two weeks of water. As dirt cheap as you could get it. Yeah.

[00:08:52] And if I remember right, I was like right around a hundred, I was under 110 bucks. And I think we were all under a hundred bucks or right about in there. I thought the highest one was like 130, but I mean, regardless, it was a very reasonable amount of money to spend to have two weeks of food and water. And it wasn't, it wasn't like anything unattainable. I think the rules of engagement I set for that exercise were YouTube feed was cut. That was probably because of the waterboarding.

[00:09:22] Oh, for God's sake. That's fine. Okay. Well, for any of you who are still watching this and if anybody's listening to this on audio, because we also got nuked off of Facebook, we also streamed a rumble. And the only thing about rumble that's kind of a drag is that when you comment on rumble, I can't see it immediately because the API doesn't bring those comments back and forth to stream yard. But rumble was very, very pro freedom.

[00:09:51] And I can talk about spicy things without upsetting the alphabet mafia. So that's, there's that. So like I was saying, lunch and learn will be fun. Honestly, I'm looking forward to just like a nice low key thing where it's not us preaching to everybody for like hours on end. And it's going to be a two way range for that. Nice. That's great. You know, I know we talked about that being like, what's the cheapest you could get two weeks of food just to get yourself started.

[00:10:21] But I think one thing maybe to bring up in the pantry discussion is what I always tell people is that what I want you to do is make your normal grocery list. Make your normal grocery list. Yep. And then take that grocery list and see if you can't find shelf stable versions of whatever that's on there. So fresh vegetables and fresh fruit. Okay. Your extra that you're buying is going to be canned of that. Yep.

[00:10:50] You know, and canned chicken, canned tuna fish. I know that Vienna sausages and spam are like the most processed, nasty, like it's like buckles and lips off the floor that they grind up. But yeah, like my point of view is, is like. At the moment you start facing down starvation, anything's better than nothing. Right. And that was one of the things that I was I was surprised because I never specifically said like, hey, make sure you have protein, make sure you have this or the other.

[00:11:21] I can't remember. I think it was you actually that had like more vegetables and stuff like that because you were concerned about vitamin deficiencies. Mm-hmm. I was all in on like just raw calories and protein because I'm like, I'm looking at it from the perspective of like it's two weeks. You're going to be working. You're going to be busting your butt. It's going to be hot outside. It's like post hurricane type of activities where I'm going to be hauling brush and killing myself. So I need lots of protein. I need lots of calories to keep going. Absolutely.

[00:11:47] And you were looking at it more from the perspective of like balance, which was fine. I mean, there was no wrong way to do that. Have you ever been impacted by a vitamin deficiency health wise? No. And one of the things I actually put into this class I'm developing was I actually brought up the issue of vitamin deficiency. I did some research into like what was the time span that vitamin deficiency usually kicks in. And for most vitamin deficiencies, it's more than two weeks. So in the short term, not a big deal.

[00:12:17] But the thing I put in there was I'm like, go get a go get a bottle of multivitamins. Absolutely. Add that to your preps. That's not like a cure all. But now you don't have to worry too much about vitamin deficiencies because you're pumping yourself full of them. True. And the other the other big thing that you get out of fruits and vegetables is dietary fiber. Yeah, I don't do dietary fiber. Well, yeah, but still you need some. No, you don't. You eat more meat. It'll come out in the end. Well, yes.

[00:12:47] But if your body is used to certain nutrients, which we eat fruits and vegetables a lot in my house, you need to you want to keep that stuff in balance as much as you can in an emergency situation because you're already going to be uncomfortable. Nick. Yeah. It'll come out in the end. That was like the most perfect layup. Oh, I know. Missed it. Like I said, I am the disappointer of Phil. Just you wait. The disappointment is only going to increase.

[00:13:16] Rachel, I'm not mad at you. I am on a high protein, high fat diet. So like I don't do I do vegetables on occasion. But like I always prioritize like fats and meats. Nothing wrong with that. That's just me. So like my. Well, we all have different dietary needs. I mean, we're all built differently. But I guess that's kind of a good point, though, since you brought up like stocking the things that you actually eat.

[00:13:40] In my case, the minute I have to get into all my dry goods, I'm officially like quote unquote off diet. Because at that point, the things I normally eat is a lot of beef and chicken and sausage and bacon, a lot of meat. And as soon as we go to rice and beans, like I'm going to be looking for everything I can find to supplement what I normally eat. Yeah. Anyway.

[00:14:04] Well, the idea is just to just to keep you from having to go into any additional discomfort on top of whatever the situation is causing is really what I was shooting for there. Try to get as holistic a balance as possible. Like, yeah, I normally am not a Vienna sausage person. I mean, I eat corned beef hash pretty much every every morning for breakfast with a couple eggs and some toast. So, you know, powdered eggs, stuff like that. You can supplement in corned beef hash is shelf stable in a can.

[00:14:34] That's pretty easy for me for at least for starting my day normally. You know, as long as I've got a heat source and a piece of cast iron, we're solid. Ooh, since you brought it up before we get to topic, I have fallen into a very bad habit since I started going back to the office. I cannot and this might just be a getting older thing, but like I have to eat something for breakfast. Yep. I didn't used to. Used to. I would just cruise all the way to lunch on coffee and I was fine with that. But now I try to do that.

[00:15:04] My stomach and my blood sugar gets grumpy with me. So I got into the habit of just like bringing like a little stack of just crackers, saltines, something in my stomach to get me through until my big meal lunch. Yeah. And then it occurred to me the other day. I'm like, okay, dumbass. Here we are struggling with our weight again and crackers are nothing but freaking carbs. And we all know your body converts carbs into sugar and that's not a good thing.

[00:15:29] So like what I really need to do is to get back to what I used to do, which was eggs and a meat for my breakfast brunch. So last weekend I meal prepped. I took, I had a pound and a half of sirloin steak, cube that up real small and I think eight eggs. And I made a big old thing of scrambled eggs. I tossed a whole bunch of like a pound and a half of sirloin. It was probably like a pound and a quarter after I got the gristle and everything cut out of it. But I made a huge thing of steak and eggs.

[00:15:59] And then throughout the week, every night I'd meal prep so much of that for breakfast the next day. And that's what I've eaten for breakfast the whole week. Not only are all my coworkers jealous as hell because I'm sitting here at my cube eating steak and eggs every morning, but I haven't been hungry. I haven't had, you know, like I've been, it's been great. And I thought to me, I was telling my wife, I'm like, this is what I need to get back to.

[00:16:22] I, meat and eggs has got to stay a regular part of my diet because I just, I feel so much better when I stick to that. Well, you've got, you've got stable long-term energy for the, for the early and middle of the day. And then you're not as hungry at lunch. So you, you know, you're smaller, more quality nutrition meals is going to do you a lot better than any amount of snacking or anything else is going to. So yeah. And Garrick, I, if memory serves me, I think you're in your mid thirties.

[00:16:53] I got a couple of years on you. I will just say that like, I was pretty okay. Just skipping breakfast brunch all the way until lunchtime. Right. And I know it was the biggest trope, but until I hit 40, something happened when I hit 40. Hair started growing in funny places and my voice changed in the whole nine yards.

[00:17:14] But like, you know, something started changing and now I'm, I'm noticing and I'm trying to be respectful and kind in my body and be like, okay, things hurt a little more than they used to. I might need to do a little bit of a introspective thinking about how to manage this thing. Absolutely. But one of the things I've got to get back to is just, I got to get back to the diet. And diet doesn't necessarily mean restricting yourself either. Nope. It just means being mindful in this case of what you're consuming.

[00:17:45] Yep. And at least based on prior experience, I found that if I'm eating the right things, I can pretty much eat until I'm just full and be fine. Yeah. Like I don't, I, at least for my body type, at least as of the last time I've really got stayed focused on things and I got down to like 220 pounds. I'm pushing 245 again. But like, I didn't have to restrict myself calorie wise. I didn't even have to think about how much I was eating.

[00:18:15] I would just eat till I was full, but it was always what I was eating, not how much I was eating. That was the problem. And if I start dipping into the breads and the carbs and the crap again, things start unwinding. And as long as I stick to your body. Yep. And as long as I stick to what I know works, works great. Yeah, absolutely. Anyway, so Stuart tossed this topic at us and I've been thinking about it.

[00:18:43] Unfortunately, I'm going to depend on you to not let me turn this into a five minute discussion because like as I was unpacking this and as Stuart and Stuart kind of talked me through this, I really started to get a feeling like I've been through something similar to this before. Okay. And we've talked about it on the show before ad nauseam. So for anybody who's not aware of the Iberian Peninsula, and I had no freaking clue where it was or what was going on before Stuart turned me on to it.

[00:19:10] Thanks Spain, Portugal, for those of you who are not familiar. Yes. Spain, Portugal, apparently the power grid for the entire freaking country shut down for about 18 hours. It did. Now, I know Stuart gave me kind of the cliff notes version of it. And actually, I think he gave it to both of us. I can't remember if he texted me that directly. We all talked about it in the group as well as talking about it on the side.

[00:19:38] Essentially, what it was is a classic case of a cascade failure. Yep. Now, they're not releasing the actual causes of what initiated the failure. But essentially, what happened was some power plants got turned off or switched off or failed. And that caused a number of other power plants to be in a state of overload or overdraw.

[00:20:05] And they shut themselves off as well as a self-protection feature. And that caused the grid to go down. Once enough of the grid goes down, it's much more difficult to bring individual plants back up into operation.

[00:20:46] Yeah. So, of the affected area, 59% was solar. So, I'm just going to say it. And given how incredibly critical I am of throwing the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to replacing good old-fashioned fossil fuel and nuclear technology with renewables,

[00:21:13] all I'm going to say is I totally understand the idea behind moving to things like wind and hydroelectric and solar generation for your power needs. But the one thing they all seem to run up against is the fact that none of those things are as near with the exception of hydroelectric. If you got a bunch of water running through a dam, that's going to be pretty freaking consistent. It's exceptionally reliable. I mean, you do see fluctuations based on weather patterns and rainfall, but it's a slow fluctuation.

[00:21:42] It's not storm blew over and now all your power's off. But solar and wind are not stable by their definition. And that is the single greatest reason why I've been very critical of heavily relying on those for a nation's power source.

[00:22:02] Because I think that there is a certain amount of agenda and hubris and ideology driving the decision making when you want to shut down some of these coal plants that we know work and we know are reliable in the name of something that a toddler could figure out isn't reliable. Well, I think that eventually we are going to know the true cause of this because let's be honest here. Governments are really terrible at keeping secrets long term. Yes, and media is very good.

[00:22:31] Good at helping them contain it for as long as possible. They are. But eventually, you know, somebody is going to forget something or drop that USB in a coffee shop or whatever. And the story will get out. Or the techs around the world that understand the power grid better than you and I do will look into all the data and they'll pull out the pieces and put the puzzle together. I mean, this stuff is not magic.

[00:22:55] The tech only works via the tech only works via the laws we all know and understand, or at least we try to understand. And I'm sure we'll find out. But regardless of what caused it, this point Stuart brought up is, you know, we should talk about midterm power outages. Yeah.

[00:23:20] And for the audience, like this power outage, even though it was nationwide, it was only 18 hours. And the way Stuart was explaining that, which makes a lot of sense based on what I've been able to read myself. That's because everything worked exactly the way it was supposed to. Every fail safe, every disconnect, there was no damage to anything. Correct. The grid did what the grid was supposed to do and protect itself and its assets by disc unhooking everything when the grid started becoming unstable.

[00:23:49] Well, at least we're being told it all worked how it was supposed to. Fair point. But the point is, it took 18 hours to stand the grid back up in a perfect scenario. Or nearly perfect. No extreme weather that we're aware of, no deliberate damage to the system, no incidental damage to the system. Yeah.

[00:24:12] So it doesn't take a rocket scientist to think about, and this was kind of where I was leading, was like this kind of, to me, echoes my own experience with hurricanes. Yeah. When a good size cat four, cat five, like rips through and wipes out seven zip codes. And you're going to be out of power for, I don't know, five to 15 days. Right.

[00:24:36] And that was what I started, that was where my mind started going when I started thinking about this was, I'm like, okay, let's say you had severe damage to the grid. You had transformers pop. You had, you know, a substation catch fire. You had something serious. And it wasn't 18 hours to get the power back on, but it was five to 15 days. Just like what we deal with down here. Yeah. I mean, you know, this is one of the things I wanted to bring up why I added the banner on the end there called, that I wrote, setting the terms.

[00:25:07] How long are we talking about? Are we talking about just five to 15 days? Are we talking about sub 30 days? What do you want to target as the goal here? So I think we do both. Okay. I think we talk about that 15 days or less. Okay.

[00:25:24] And then we talk 15 days or more, because I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that after 15 days, as well prepared as you are to weather a substantial grid down scenario based on like blizzards or ice storms or whatever else, I'm betting after 15 days you're out of fuel. Nope. Play along, Nick. I've got about four weeks of one hour on, four hours off propane. Okay. The average person will be out 15 hours, much less 15 days. True. Yeah.

[00:25:53] Especially the people that are running it all that are going to run it constant to keep their house warm or whatever. Look, I built my backup power to handle the worst case scenario in my area plus a two week cushion. And the reason why I did that is because I know for a fact I am never going to have all of those propane cylinders at 100%. I'm not.

[00:26:23] Because highly unlikely. Every month or every quarter, however you set your maintenance cycle, you're going to run that generator for a little bit to keep the oil flowing and everything. Keep the battery topped off on the keyed start. Whatever you're going to do. You're going to use it to run your welder or whatever. You're never going to have all your tanks at 100%. No, that's why I built that cushion. Highly plausible. Yeah. Because I could have a tank.

[00:26:51] I don't have a way to know how full the tanks are other than to pick them up and kind of feel how full it is. Because my tanks don't have fuel gauges like on the back of a forklift does. What about that old trick that I saw someplace that like you pour hot water on the outside of the tank and then wherever the frost line is, is where. That's what somebody had told me one time. I've never heard of that. I mean, not like you don't want to dunk the stupid thing. It's calling hot water. No, no, no. It's a bad idea.

[00:27:20] You know, but you pour hot water on the outside. Yeah. And apparently like wherever you will be able to see base, like where the line where the liquid propane is. I've always just done it by the old knocking for a stud method. Once you hear the sound change, you found the level of the propane. And you know about how much it is on the full tank. You know where you are on this, on the other one. So you got a kind of an eyeballer there. That makes sense. I think we need to add a third category there, Phil, but not really address it. Sub three days.

[00:27:51] Okay. Sub three days. Seems reasonable. Less than three days, unless you are in the middle of, say, like polar vortex conditions, your house is probably going to stay livable. Like you're not going to be freezing to death. Most likely. I mean, if you're if you're up in Alaska, sorry, it's real fucking cold there. Have have something sorted out to heat your house. But or if you're down here in South Louisiana, it's August.

[00:28:18] Yeah, it's 95 degrees and 200 percent relative humidity. I mean, you won't freeze to death. You won't freeze to death, but you just might cook. You will cook. That's why we're also brown down here because we're simmering. That'll do it. So I would say, you know, short term, let's not worry too much about that. Three days and less. So let's set that first category, say, anytime after the first 72 hours to 15 days and then 15 to 30.

[00:28:48] That seems reasonable. All right. So, like I said, I mean, you know, that that that three days to 15 days fits really comfortably within the scenario of like a major hurricane being like a four to five blizzard. You're talking about a hurricane Katrina. You're talking about a hurricane Ida. You're talking about some pretty nasty storms that are still within fairly recent memory down here. They wipe out seven zip codes. They knock the power out for a substantial portion of time.

[00:29:15] There will be a ton, a ton of power lines down. They have to be remediated. And you can't start the remediation effort until the winds die down because you got guys and bucket trucks up in the air. Yeah. And there is a maximum wind shear those things can operate in. Yeah. So the rule of thumb down here and it is a rule of thumb. I get that. But the rule of thumb down here is that once the wind speed hits about 80 miles an hour, you're going to start dropping.

[00:29:42] You'll start losing branches out of trees well below 80 miles an hour. Oh, yeah. But at 80 miles an hour, you will have whole trees coming down like sycamores, oaks, like the three trees that land that squashed me for Ida. One was the sycamore and two were oaks. And they didn't break mid beam like a pine tree would. They just laid over and the roots just pulled up out of the soil because of how wet it was. Yeah.

[00:30:08] A lot of your trees have real shallow root systems there because they don't need to go deep to hit the water. Yeah. And the bigger problem, like fortunately, the one house killer we had on this property was a huge old pine tree. And we got that thing cut down years and years ago. But I mean, that tree was big enough. I couldn't wrap my arms around it. And God only knows how tall it was. It was big enough.

[00:30:35] Like, you know the old thing where like you shoot an azimuth at 45 degrees and then from where you're standing to the base is like the same distance it is tall. I did that and that tree was able to literally saw my house in half if it had fallen just right. Yeah. And it was gigantic. So, yeah, that one came down. The oak trees really just, I mean, like it busted a hole in the roof. It glanced off the siding. I mean, it did some damage, but it wasn't severe.

[00:31:05] Yeah. That's fortunate. But, you know, that is like the situation we deal with post-hurricane is that it takes X amount of time to get power restored. And the problem there is not like it was here where it was get the power plant spool back up and bring the grid back online slowly. Here it's more of a, you know, the power plants are usually after a hurricane, they're still running. The problem is transmission. Yeah.

[00:31:33] Which to the end consumer doesn't mean much because it's still my lights aren't on, but that's the critical difference here. Well, and you could get a situation, say, you know, if you had a nasty storm in an area like the Iberian Peninsula where you have a majority, say, wind and solar. If you have really high winds, that can damage your wind production. And now your generation system is down.

[00:31:57] If they get a nasty hailstorm across a lot of those big solar fields, now you're not just flipping a generator back on or reconnecting transmission lines. You have to rebuild the entire generation system. Mm-hmm. So you could be fairly easily losing a considerable portion of the grid in at least a localized area. Yeah.

[00:32:18] So I guess from my perspective, since you know me, I don't like to get drawn into like the how can the state or how can the country fix this problem? Because that doesn't help us as individuals. No. But as an individual, I think you and I are probably sitting on like the proper implements. You know, like obviously I don't have four weeks worth of power generation on standby.

[00:32:43] What I do have is a 5K generator and I think at last count, 25 gallons of fuel. Okay. Which will keep me going for a good long while. And my bigger concern for my uses or for my personal scenario is really hurricanes. So it's like keeping a couple window units running, keeping the house a livable temperature, keeping the food from spoiling in the fridge and the freezer.

[00:33:09] Like those are all things that that 5K, if I cycle it on and off, I can manage pretty well for a period of time. I can keep the house cool enough. How much fuel per hour does it go through? So that is an open ended question because the last time I ran this thing after Ida, I had a severely pissed off carburetor that has since been replaced. So it was over consuming likely. I had to run the choke halfway on to keep it running. Huh? Yeah. I told you a very angry carburetor.

[00:33:39] Apparently what happened was it had it had those little foam air filters and it sucked one of those into it. That's why I don't have the foam air filters. Yeah, I know. But on the upside, it got treated to a brand new carburetor, brand new air filter, fuel filter, spark plug, oil change. It's been given some TLC and it runs beautifully now without the choke running. But even with the choke halfway on, so you can call that like worst case scenario for fuel consumption.

[00:34:08] I mean, it took about four to four and a half gallons to fill the tank. It'd run that about 12 hours straight without stopping. And that was running a fridge, a chest freezer. So a third of a gallon an hour around about. And we were intermittently running like coffee pods. I mean, we leaned on that generator pretty hard. Coffee pods are energy hogs. Well, yeah, but we had a 5K to run a fridge, a freezer, and a window unit.

[00:34:37] We had plenty of extra. You do. It's just that the – so if you are in a power-limited situation. If you are in a power-limited situation. Use a percolator. Don't use induction. Don't use induction heat. Don't use resistance-generated heat. So one morning, our power was out down here. And it was only out for like a couple hours. But on a lark, I was curious. So I took my Jackery 1000 and hooked up the home coffee percolator to it.

[00:35:07] Holy Jesus in heaven, that thing sucked 825 watts while it was blasting. It sucked that Jackery 1000 down, which is 1,004 watt-hours of power. It sucked down 20% battery to brew one pot of coffee. I knew it was going to be bad, but I was astounded and terrified. Yeah, I've got a 10K generator, and I refuse to use my electric coffee pot just on principle at that time.

[00:35:37] I'll just pull out the old Coleman camp stove, toss the cylinder conversion on it, and brew it up out of the old camp percolator because, good God, I can do it in about 3 to 5 minutes on that versus the 10 minutes and sucking all that fuel out of the generator. No, just no. Yeah. But like you said, I mean, that 5K, 25 gallons of fuel,

[00:36:02] it was at the fuel consumption level that I had before with a choke halfway on, figure 8, 9 gallons in a 24-hour period. I am positive. Excuse me, I'm having a burp that doesn't want to come up. I am positive that now with a good functioning carburetor, it'd probably be less than that. That's about 83 hours of continuous runtime ballparking. Yeah. Which is not bad. That gets you well clear of short term.

[00:36:32] Yeah. Well, and the other thing of it is that, I mean, bear in mind that I do have a Jackery and I do have a pair of 100-watt solar panels. Right. So you've got supplemental there for midterm, which is fantastic. And there was a morning when the power was out again. This is becoming a theme. But rather than haul the generator out of the shed, I took and unplugged the fridge from the wall and plugged it into that Jackery 1000. And I let it eat. Nice.

[00:37:02] Again, you know how I am. It's like I want to test the gear. I want to see what it does. And I had honestly, like since I replaced this fridge with an energy efficient model, I had no earthly idea how much power it sucked. So I plugged into the Jackery and let it eat. And it ran it without breaking the sweat. And then after I ran the fridge on the Jackery for about three hours or so, I unplugged it and I plugged the chest freezer in. Chest freezer, by the way, takes like 80 watts while the compressor is running. It's a pipsqueak.

[00:37:31] But, you know, it was one of those things where like it was good to get to use it and to get a real world feel for what it would be like. I know that if push came to shove and the 5K was out of the fight, I could take the Jackery and basically like throw it out in the, you know, throw the solar panels out in the yard and run an extension cord if I had to from where the Jackery was to the fridge and the chest freezer.

[00:37:59] And I know I'm going to be at a power differential because when the fridge was running, best I recall, I mean, that compressor was getting it to like 120 to 150 watts. And the chest freezer is going to pull another 80. So, I mean, I'm 200 watts with both of those things running. That's five hours of runtime without recharging on that Jackery. Okay.

[00:38:21] So, if I can put 100, 120 back into it with the solar panels and I can do that for 8 to 10 hours a day, I mean, it's going to be a losing proposition. But I know that I can stretch that out. Right. At least long enough to the point where I just abandon the refrigerator and I focus on keeping the chest freezer running because that's where most of the long-term food is, you know, the meat, the butter, the eggs and all that stuff.

[00:38:47] At a certain point, if the stuff in the fridge spoils, that's mostly stuff that's like short-term anyway. It is. And a lot of that you're going to eat through fairly quickly. I mean, condiments and stuff, who cares? Throw that stuff out. But you could always do the old standby trick. Take a couple of gallon jugs or two-liter jugs, fill them full of water, stick them in the freezer, freeze them, chuck them in the fridge to keep stuff cooler. Use it as an ice box instead of a refrigerator, which can help.

[00:39:18] We've got to go through a couple of these comments that are coming in. I don't know who James Hay is, but look good yourself. Stuart, I hope it wasn't anything serious. I'm glad your wife's back from the ER. And no, I'm not starting over. You should know this by now. I can't. You could literally put a gun to my head and I'm not going to be able to recreate the last 40 minutes of mayhem. It's just off the cuff. We don't script the show. So if I did it twice, it'd be completely different anyway.

[00:39:45] If we did script the show, I would ignore it on principle. Yeah. Did I ever tell you the story, Nick, about how years passed before we had StreamYard, which is a really nice interface, by the way. There was a time when Andrew and I were using, I think it was Zencaster or something like that. It was another. Oh, when you lost all the audio for the show? Yes. So Zencaster had a really bad. So here's the thing. Zencaster had a bad habit every now and then of dumping the cloud recordings.

[00:40:14] So Andrew and I would also, as a backup to that, we would direct record using a couple utilities straight to Audacity so that we had local recordings. We had Zencaster. If I couldn't get the Zencaster cloud recording to come down, he would take his recording, stick it in Google Drive, get it over to me. Well, on that particular day, we had the world's perfect nexus of fuckery.

[00:40:39] And not only did Zencaster abort the stream, so we didn't have either of our cloud recordings. Nice. But when I went to shut off Audacity, it also froze and dumped my audio. So I had like an hour of a one-sided conversation from Andrew. We actually sat down like 10 minutes later after I got through cursing and yelling. We sat down and re-recorded that episode. Sometimes you have to.

[00:41:08] I was so freaking mad, though, because like we had banter and we were joking and it was fun. And then like the second time, you just can't recreate that. It was very frustrating. Yeah. Yeah. It's a completely different conversation because you've already had it once. Yeah. And it looks like my wife is back home. She's on the other side of this wall someplace looking beautiful as always, I'm sure. And this is the best time to compliment her because she can't argue with me. There you go.

[00:41:37] And Stuart, yes. Always keep empty space filled with water, frozen water bottles. I have a... The family water rack is actually right next to the chest freezer. So, if we know we're having a big storm come through, I'll... I have a couple of those that actually have about like that much water taken out the top already. And I know they should be filled to the brim, but get over it, nerds. But I have that... I have a bunch that already have that much water missing out the top and I just take them out of the rack and I throw them into the chest freezer. Just stuff it all the way to the top. Let it freeze. Makes sense. And they're good.

[00:42:07] Yeah, nothing wrong with that. So, we're talking about frozen water bottles to reduce your airspace. So, that way you have to expend less power to keep that stuff frozen or cool. We're talking about cycling your generator on and off to stretch that as far as possible. You know, what kind of heat system do you have, Phil? Natural gas. Okay. So, I was...

[00:42:35] We're having a new natural gas heavy pipeline put through my county right now. There's a pair of them going through Illinois. I got to talking with a couple of guys at the hardware store that they're in town to work on that pipeline. And I asked them, I said, you know, I'm just curious because I've got natural gas heat in my house too. Power goes out in the winter. How long is the natural gas going to stay flowing on like a large area power outage?

[00:43:03] He said, oh, in this big pipeline? He said, this pipeline doesn't even stop in your state. You can't tap into this pipeline at all. I said, no, just like, you know, your household natural gas. He said, oh, you know, more than likely two to three weeks. Because a lot of the generators that pump the natural gas are... They burn natural gas. Mm-hmm. Because why would you haul in diesel fuel when you can use natural gas to pump it, I guess? Makes sense to me.

[00:43:31] He said, yeah, but those generators are good for about two or three weeks before they break down or go down for maintenance or whatever. So, yeah, you got a couple of weeks. Yeah. So, in this case, if you do have natural gas service and you are fortunate enough to be able to afford to hook up one of those really big, nice natural gas generators that I don't have,

[00:43:50] you can count on, at least in this midterm, the three to 15 days, that you will probably have fuel for that entire time running the entire time, assuming you do your maintenance. Yeah.

[00:44:04] And then, you know, in the event, in the absence of a gas generator or in the absence of a natural gas generator, I mean, I would never advocate for a Jaguar, like a Jaguar 1000, like what I have on that shelf back there, as your primary backup power source for a home. Because it is woefully undersized for that use. It is.

[00:44:28] And it is also, like, the PV input circuit, like, caps out at 100 and I think the highest I've ever seen it was 140 watts. And that was, like, perfect sun, blue sky, panels aimed directly into the sun. And I couldn't maintain it. Like, that was, like, you know, the Hail Mary into the end zone type of thing. So, you know, on an average day with those two panels, you're doing 100, 120 watts. If it's overcast or if it's cloudy, you're screwed.

[00:44:58] But, like, it's just a situation where, like, if you're going to depend on solar as a backup power source, you either need a much, much larger off-the-shelf solar, you know, solar generator like this. And you need a lot. Not, like, stupid amounts. But I'd say 400 to 800 watts worth of freaking panels, if we're really being honest.

[00:45:23] Because it's not about, oh, I've got 8 to 12 hours to freaking, like, you know, get sun into this thing. It's like, no, no, no. If you've got two or three hours of good sun and then it's going to be cloudy the rest of the day, you've got two or three hours. So, you better overpanel the crap out of it up to the point where you end up breaking something. Yeah, you know, the thing about solar, too, you have to remember is those panels do have a lifespan on them. And their efficiency drops for every year they're in use.

[00:45:53] So, if you have, I don't know what the fall-off is. So, I'm just going to make some numbers up here because I don't have them off the top of my head. If you, say, lose a percent a year or 5% a year in performance, now what was an adequate system, a barely adequate system, five years down the line, is now a sub-adequate system. And you're not going to be able to refill that, that drawdown. And Stuart's beating me to the punchline, yes.

[00:46:22] For the cost of a jackery, you can fairly, I wouldn't say easy, but it's not rocket surgery. And YouTube University is so good for something like this. But, like, you can- If you can solder and follow instructions, you can do it. Yeah. And honestly, like, I don't know. This is the thing I keep beating myself back and forth on when I start thinking about, like, our- Hang on a second. Nick Stewart has the answer as usual. Beautiful.

[00:46:50] Solar panel life is, in 20 years, you'll be at about 80% efficiency. Okay. So that's not bad. That's really not as bad as I thought. And maybe they have improved since I last looked at them, and that's probably true. I mean, that's- Stuart knows a lot about electronics. He's a big gearhead. That's a percent a year. So you were pretty much on. Okay, so a percent a year. That's not bad then. So, you know, realistically, so if you say you do your 400 watts, you lose 20%.

[00:47:21] So you're at, like, what, 320? 320 watts after 20 years? 80% of 400, you said? Yeah, it should be, like, about 320. Because it'd be 20 watts out of every 100. Yeah. You're right. Yeah. Yeah. My math wasn't mathing for some reason, but you're right. That's all right. You're almost out of coffee for the day anyway. You're totally out of coffee. I am totally out of coffee.

[00:47:51] The brain is underfueled. Yeah. But yeah, Stuart's right. I mean, I've actually looked into, like, something like a, you know, a decent, like a 1,000 or even a 2,000 watt power inverter. Just have some head space to 200 amp hours worth of battery or get a big, big friggin' S. It'd be, like, a 400 amp hour battery and get one of those, like, the little panels, the all-in-one, like, TV.

[00:48:20] And it'll also have an AC charge circuit on it. Yeah. It's everything in a box. Yeah. And, I mean, you could put, you could throw all that into, like, a reasonable size, like a roll-around tool chest. You know what a lot of guys use is those knockoff Milwaukee packout boxes from Harbor Free. I can see that. Or the Apache hard cases. I've seen a lot of guys do that. It's a good idea.

[00:48:47] Unfortunately for folks like me, I have a yard that has 80% shade at any given time. You're screwed. Yeah. I don't get to have solar. I just don't get to have solar on my property. Not without cutting down all of my nice, mature hardwood trees that I, that I specifically selected the yard for. I mean, that seems fair. I won't, I won't even, like, needle you about it. But, you know, like, that's, that's one of those things that, like, to me, if we're talking

[00:49:15] about anything under 15 days, we really are, we really are still in the realm of, like, we should be talking about a backup power generation strategy that whether, no matter what you choose, and that's based on your environment, your situation, your shit. But no matter what you choose, we're still talking about a backup power source to maintain normalcy into that event. And I think up to 15 days, we're in the range where, like, people are going to start running

[00:49:44] out of fuel or people are going to start running out of stuff. But up to 15 days, I feel like you can still make that work for most people. I mean, I think so. I mean, if you're running off a gasoline generator, it's going to get expensive and it's going to get really expensive really fast. But, you know, nowadays you can get dual fuel and even tri-fuel generators. In fact, there's a carburetor kit I've been, I've been putting off buying for my generator that makes it a tri-fuel. So I can hook it up to a natural gas line.

[00:50:11] It's just been one of those things that's on the back burner because the propane system that I have, it works very well. It's fairly cost effective and I can get well through my goals. But it sure would be nice to not, if I'm not home, to not make my wife handle a 60-pound propane cylinder. I understand that. Yeah. So let's pivot. Mm-hmm. Remind me, what were the rules of engagement? Was it 15 days plus or did we go all the way?

[00:50:39] So 3 to 15 days and then 15 to 30 days. Okay. So I feel like at 15 to, you know what, let's take the upper limit off. 15 plus? I feel like at a certain point, and if your individual power strategy is more than 15 days, what I'm talking about is from here to zero, you have backup power. Yeah. From here to infinity, your backup power is going to run out. Right.

[00:51:07] Because there is a reasonable limit at a certain point. Unless, like Stuart was mentioning, if you build a solar setup, if you have decent sunlight, if you plan it appropriately, you could ostensibly make the argument that I have infinite power because I've over-generated and over-paneled my relatively small number of appliances to such a great degree, I can run with impunity. Like that's an argument, but sooner or later, your battery is going to die. Your, your PV generator is going to die.

[00:51:37] Your panels are going to get broken. Something sooner or later is going to happen. So no matter what scenario someone in the audience is cooking up in their head to say that there is no point at which I will run out of power. You will sooner or later, something will break. Something will catch fire. Some bad's going to happen. I feel like this is one of those moments that I almost get like a little weird talking about because I was just talking to somebody today about how like within the preparedness community,

[00:52:07] you do have those people that their brain immediately goes to SHTF, Mad Max, Waterworld. It goes to like prep or fiction. Like the lights are never coming back on. We're going to run around in loincloths. Like it is, it goes to that stage immediately. But realistically, whether, whether you run out of fuel on day three or you run out of fuel on day 30, sooner or later, you will run out. So what's the strategy at that point?

[00:52:36] I mean, or let me put this in really, really easy terms. After Hurricane Ida, my neighbor, bless their freaking hearts. They're not the brightest crayons in the box. They bought a generator. Good on them. They didn't get any daggum oil. They don't come with oil in the box, Phil. Well, it had just enough oil in the bottom not to, not to shut itself down because it threw the, it had one of those automatic shots where the oil level gets too low and it'll kill itself.

[00:53:06] Yeah. And it had just enough oil in it to run for about half a day. And then it tripped. Now, fortunately they came and knocked on my door. I'm not a jerk. And I happened to have like several bottles of like old, like 10 W30 conventional oil. It was oil that was kind of like leftover. And I was using it for like, you know, like lubricated drill bit every now and then or do stuff. It wasn't stuff I put in an engine, but I had some oil line around. So I just gave them a bottle.

[00:53:35] Well, I gave them a bottle, sent them on their way and they got the thing going. But what happens if your generator goes down? What happens if you're in Stewart's position? Stewart was in a situation years ago and he will remember this better than I do. I'm sure. But he went to start his generator and it turned out like a hitch pin or something had fallen down into the sumbitch and locked the frigging crankshaft up. Well, damn.

[00:54:01] He will remember the situation better than I do, but he could not get that generator started. I bet not. Until I think like a day or two later, he finally like started taking stuff apart. The pin fell out and it was free after that. But it was it wedged itself in such a place that when he tried to pull, it just bound up. What happens when your generator dies? What happens when it doesn't work? What happens when it eats its air filter and it doesn't want to run because the carburetor is all gummed up?

[00:54:28] What happens whether it's on day zero or day 100 when your power generation strategy falls? Because sooner or later it will. Biggest thing for me is going to be raw meat. I typically have, you know, anywhere from, you know, 270 pounds of beef and less in my freezer, depending on the time of year.

[00:54:56] Because me and my wife tend to buy reasonable fractions of a cow for two people. It's more than enough meat to get us through an entire year. I tend to turn whatever's left over into jerky, which is fantastic, by the way. Not questioning your life decisions so far. Yeah, yeah. I've got a meat slicer for it and everything. It's phenomenal. I should make some for prepper camp. Now that I'm thinking about it. Or not prepper camp, summer camp. Summer camp.

[00:55:23] Yeah, so my big problem is going to be when the fuel for the generator runs out, do I still have beef in the freezer? And my solution to that is going to be pressure canning. And I'm assuming because you're bringing that up, you can do that without power. Yeah. Or are you talking about doing it before the power runs out? Well, it depends.

[00:55:49] If we're at day 15 and there's no power and I've still got two weeks of power left, that means I've still got about two weeks of propane. I would probably sacrifice the generator runtime to can the meat. Unless your generator on day three, like, crap, it's connecting rods. In which case, the propane is still good for my stove. No, that's a good point.

[00:56:19] To circle back on Stuart. Bitlong's a good call. He got his generator fixed an hour later and it was the 2021 Valentine's Day Snokepocalypse. Oh, yeah. I remember the story because I remember Stuart being extraordinarily frustrated. I bet he was. He's a man that knows how to fix a thing. Yeah. And I think once he figured out what the problem was and realized how simple it was, that made his anger much worse. Yeah.

[00:56:46] Like, if it had been the connecting rods and the pistons, you know, in the pavement underneath the generator, it would have been like, well, damn, I can't fix that. But it was the fact that it was something that could be fixed fairly easily. Yeah. I mean, it's nice that it can be that it wasn't an expensive fix, but still, it's like going to use your chainsaw for the first time of the year. Recoil cord breaks. Yeah. It's always the first time you use it for a year. Yep. Exactly.

[00:57:12] But, you know, biggest problem, like I said, we're going to have is there could be 200 pounds of beef in my freezer. And you're not going to eat that in 15 days. I'd try because I like to eat, but some of that is going to have to get canned or traded away. And see me, on the other hand, I don't rightfully know how much freaking meat is packed away in that chest freezer. I have no earthly idea.

[00:57:42] I've never stopped. I've never stopped long. And this is like my own personal failing. And I understand that. But like, I don't stop stacking the food preps to analyze how much I have and how long it will last and blah, blah, blah. Because I don't care. It's not as I still have room. Keep buying. I'm out of room. Let's go find more room and then let's put more away. You know, so like I have no idea how much meat's in there.

[00:58:09] I know that it's a it's a whatever the small chest freezer is. I forget what size it is. Well, they make a wide variety of sizes. I know the smaller ones you can fit about one deer in. Well, I know that this thing fit a quarter beef and is still and was not even half full. Probably like three or four cubic feet. Feels like it might be bigger than that. I don't know.

[00:58:35] I've got a full size and I think it's 10 cubic feet. Regardless of how many cubic feet are in there, because I don't remember. I know that I flat pack my ground beef, which is probably the biggest thing that's in there. And I mean, the last time I had to dig around in there, there had to have been like 40 or 45 of those packs of ground beef plus steak plus chicken plus everything else that's stuffed in there. So to me, it's like there's a lot.

[00:59:05] There's a substantial monetary and time to amass all that because it's not like I went to the grocery store and just, you know, smack down the debit card and bought them out of meat. Like that's it took time to put all that away. And once the power is out, I mean, that chest freezer is going to fall inside of a couple of days, inside of a few days. The fridge will open it. Yeah. The fridge will go much faster than that.

[00:59:33] But this this kind of begs the question to your point about turn all the stuff in jerky. Like I had literally told my wife, I'm like, OK, if if the generator goes to the moon, everything that's in the freezer. We're eating like I'm going to friggin clear out the freezer, all the bacon, all the sausage, the eggs, the dairy. We are going to eat like frickin kings. I'm going to cook a lot of it. I'm going to salt the crap out of everything that we can't cook the first day.

[01:00:04] We're going to friggin like, you know, take the milk and the butter and everything. We're going to bake a whole bunch of stuff with it. I'm like, because I know that if I bake now, you shouldn't be like trying to live off cookies for a little long period of time. But like I know if I bake a lot of that stuff into cookies and brownies and stuff like that, I can use as a morale boost for the neighborhood. And it will last longer than just raw milk sitting there in the fridge waiting to spoil. So I literally told my wife, I'm like, if it comes to that, we're going to cook the hell out of everything in this fridge.

[01:00:33] Everything in the freezer is going to stay and we're going to leave the lid shut. So keep that as far as long as possible. But we're going to eat and we're going to eat good and we're going to eat a lot because calories in your belly is what's going to help us go further. When we start getting to the point of like, we can't eat like we used to. We're going to be on. We're going to be into the dry goods at a certain point. Right. But that's also why I have a substantial portion of dry goods put away because. Same. Again, haven't stopped to add it all up.

[01:01:03] Don't really care. I know I've got two more empty five gallon buckets. So that's on my list eventually to fill those. Makes sense. You know, I, I don't have infinite space. None of us. Nobody does. Nobody does. And for the area I'm in two weeks is a pretty long series, a pretty long time for the grid to be down for us. That's the longest we've had in this area.

[01:01:33] In. Gosh, I think it's like 80 years. So. And you built your power strategy to. For that plus two weeks. Yeah. So about 28 days. If the generator dies. If the generator dies.

[01:01:51] Now, I'm fortunate enough to live in a neighborhood where I would say, geez, I knew the actual answer at one point, but it's over 70 percent of the houses have the fixed in place generics. Yes. The whole home generics. Yeah. So if my, if my freezer goes down, my generator goes down pretty good odds.

[01:02:13] I could parlay some, something with my neighbors, figure something out that we could stick my freezer in their garage and run off of that. You could rent floor space with jerky. I could. Floor space for jerky is a good call. But that's one of the reasons why we really like this neighborhood is because a lot of the neighbors.

[01:02:33] Now, we wanted to be out in the country, but we wanted to be out in the country in a place where the people around us were also prepared to be out in the country because we're the last ones to get their power fixed when it does go off. Yes. No, I mean, if you live, it was nice to see if you live outside of a certain radius from a major metro area, you better have a backup generator because your power is going to go out and it's going to stay out for a while because that's just what living in the country is. Well, it is.

[01:03:03] And, you know, this is an older neighborhood. Like I said, there's a lot of large mature trees in our neighborhood. If one of those big trees goes down on a power line midway up our street, congratulations. There are four houses on this street that are out of power. And they'll stay that way for a bit. They're going to stay that way until every power outage that affects five people or more is dealt with because that's what they do. They work from the biggest benefit down to the smallest, as they should. It's triage.

[01:03:32] I mean, you can get the most restored faster that way. No, that's fair. At a certain point, I cannot generate power beyond that. I just can't. You know, and personally, I don't feel it is necessary for me to have power generation beyond a four week time span. No, and that's a perfectly reasonable. It's a perfectly reasonable conclusion to come to.

[01:04:01] To be perfectly fair, four weeks of power generation is more than I would say probably like. I don't know. I want to say at least have probably 80% of the preparedness community doesn't have backup power for four weeks. Probably not. But, you know, my power needs are so minimal. It is very convenient to have that much because it ends up being a not burdensome amount of propane to keep around. Yeah.

[01:04:31] And after the initial cost of buying the tanks, I think it's like, gosh, it's less than $250 for the propane. Propane, if you're filling a refillable tank, is ridiculously cheap. It really is. I think the tanks each were like $120 and then it was like $35 or $40 to fill them. So I think right now, including the tanks, it was under $300. If memory serves me, I have a three gallon.

[01:05:00] It's a tiny little thing. It's a three gallon tank. It is adorable. It's also the tiniest refillable tank that the guy at Tractor Supply has ever seen. But I got it because it is exactly the amount of propane I need for like four days if I'm not using the little buddy heater. Oh, okay. That's great. So like I can fill this thing up for like under three bucks easily.

[01:05:28] I think the last time I topped it off, it was like a buck ten. It was like a dollar and ten cents for like three days of camping. That's not bad. Cost nothing. And it's I don't have to carry around one of the great big old like, you know, the grill pots is what I've heard referred to as. Yeah, the 20 pounders. Yeah. And I'm not burning up the little one pound green Coleman cylinders that are like, you know, eight to 12 bucks a whack and they're not reusable.

[01:05:52] I think I bought when our Ace Hardware in my parents' hometown went out of business. I bought a dozen of those cylinders about 15 years ago for pennies. And I'm still using those little green Coleman cylinders because you don't go through much on those little camp stoves. No, I have relegated all those to backup like emergency use only.

[01:06:15] Only because most most of the ones I have are so old that once you like once you screw something into them and unscrew them, they don't seal. Yeah, the valves aren't sealing. Yeah. So it's one of those things where it's like I carry I keep two with my grill and I keep two more in the in our camp pack out. Yeah. But then I only use that three pounds that that that little three pound cylinder for for like go to use because it will seal itself. It's a it's a head.

[01:06:45] I mean, it's it's built just like a grill pot. It's just teeny tiny. But in any case, no, I mean, I don't see anything wrong with you saying that I don't need power beyond two weeks. I guess I guess to I guess to me, like I think of it as any time we start talking about these really farfetched, admittedly low, low likelihood scenarios of like the power is going to be out for so long that everything is going to go down.

[01:07:13] I think at that point, the only thing that I can think of to tell people is like kind of the same conclusion you and I came to is we have to salvage everything we can. And start your salvage a little bit early if you have to. Oh, yeah. Definitely don't be waiting until like the generator sputtering to suddenly make that decision. You know, I one of the reasons why we bought the house we bought is I have a naturally aspirated fireplace with heat elators. Now, I don't know if you know what that is.

[01:07:42] It's it's essentially you've got your fireplace box with your chimney coming out the top of it. But on either side of that, there is an air channel that pulls air in at the floor level of the fireplace. And brings there up alongside the firebox and out into the house. It's one of the old school ways of making a much more efficient thermally fireplace in the classic style where you've got the open mantle and everything like that. That's one of the reasons why we really like this house.

[01:08:11] That fireplace with just a moderate fire, not an aggressively burning fire in there, kept my house 72 degrees when it was like 20, 25 outside without the heater running at all. That's not bad. Me down here. That's my generator load in half because it's a three. It's the boilers right next to me. It's a 223. It's a 220 pump. So draws a lot of power to push that water.

[01:08:41] Me, on the other hand, like keeping warm is not usually my foremost concern. No, it's we have the house livable. Yeah. Although keeping it cool enough that you don't cook. I mean, it did snow 10 inches down here this year. It's this past year. So it's always possible that you can get those freak weather events like that. But that is a freak weather event. Let's let's be clear. I mean, like us us having 110 degree days does happen here. It happens pretty regularly.

[01:09:09] It happens every summer, but it doesn't happen for weeks at a time. Usually we just call that summer. Right. That is your entire summer. Or like my wife refers to it, the time of year where you can't tell where your body ends and the atmosphere begins. It has become soup. Yes. So is there anything else to toss into this before we break up for the evening?

[01:09:34] I've got I have a couple of SDRs and a laptop right here that's been charging. I've actually been playing with Air Spy SDR Sharp for most of the afternoon, getting some things programmed into it. Yes. Because I am going to go satellite hunting tonight and see if I can pull down a half decent image from NOAA 19 at about 10, 15 tonight when it flies overhead.

[01:10:03] That'll be cool. So. So if I can get a half decent, if I'm frankly, if I can get any kind of decent image out of it, I'll put it on on our social media on the Instagram just so that everybody can marvel at what a freaking concept man. Work. I am concept. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, we talked about SDR a couple episodes ago and like the various things you can do with it, which I thought was pretty interesting.

[01:10:28] I think everybody else mostly just thought I was a nerd, but the ability to the ability to use it to get off grid satellite imagery for weather purposes is interesting. Although it is worth pointing out, I found out recently that NOAA is actually they're decommissioning NOAA 15, 18, 19, the last three satellites that use APT technology. Huh?

[01:10:55] So what's, will you be able to then use that in the future or will you have to configure, reconfigure your setup? So that is an open ended question because several people have asked NOAA and NOAA so far saying that they don't have any, they, they don't have any plans to like drop the satellites down or turn transmitters off. They're just not supporting it anymore.

[01:11:18] So they're going to stay, they're going to stay up there basically unsupervised until they eventually crash out, burn up, blow up or whatever happens to them. Or fail. Well, that's what happened to most of the other NOAA satellites is because I think they only had like each, I think each one only had like a 10 year design, design life. And NOAA 19 is the newest one. It's, it's already past that. Okay. So. Hard to say.

[01:11:44] Now there are other NOAA weather satellites and they are still being supported, but they are much newer and they're not using the old VHF transmitters and APT technology. They're using, I want to say it was L band. So they're using microwave technology to get the images down and it's a lot more efficient. That's going to be rougher. Yeah. It's a lot.

[01:12:06] I, it's still possible for like a lay person with some computer nerd nonsense to go and pull those images, but it takes, you're not going to do it with. You're going to need a much more sophisticated antenna for sure. Yeah. You're really going to need a little satellite dish to do it. And I don't, I just don't know if I'm going to chase the hobby that far into the rabbit hole. But for me, for tonight, NOAA 19 and I have a date between 1015 and 1030. Nice.

[01:12:35] And I'm going to see what I can get out of it. And sounds like a fun project anyway. Yeah. Well, it was a frustrating one the other day when, um, I was using an app on the iPhone that I've since deleted because stupid thing lied to me. And it was predicting that my satellite pass was at a certain time. And by the time I walked out, the satellite was already over the North pole. Oops. So this time I used a website called, I think, N2YO.

[01:13:03] And I used a hardware or software application called Orbitron. And those two separate sources both agree that that satellite should be over my head at between 1015 and 1030. And I think they only varied by a minute. Interesting. So I feel good about that. That's probably a rounding error then. Very potentially.

[01:13:25] Because, I mean, literally what, what Orbitron is doing is it's saying that based on the TLE data that I went and got from a cell stack and imported manually because the auto update feature is being a pain in the ass. Because it's broken. But when you're a nerd and you're hard headed, like I figured out how to like go find the information in some little NOAA repository and then manually update the frigging, um, the TLE files that drives Orbitron. That's any kind of tinkering project like that.

[01:13:54] Sometimes you're just going to run into those errors while the automated systems. Don't automate. But yeah, once I got all that done, I mean, I just literally like from the track where it predicts or the NOAA 19 is, I just advanced it forward and it figures out, okay, along this track, it should be here at this time. Great. And then like I was telling you earlier, I found, um, Orbitron also has a prediction feature where you feed in your GPS coordinates. And then it basically says, this is a fixed point. This is a moving object.

[01:14:24] At this time, they'll intersect. It's pretty cool. That is pretty cool. Anyway, hour and 15 minutes. Nobody wants to listen to me talk satellite hacking nerd nonsense for the rest of for another hour. But I'm going to give it a whirl. And if I get a half as decent image of it, I'll throw it up on Instagram, see if anybody else is interested in it. I mean, I can certainly talk through it at a later date. It'd be interesting to bring to summer camp too and see if we can't get a flyby on one of those nights.

[01:14:53] Um, I can just about Garrett. Well, bear in mind that those NOAA, there's three, there's like I said, there's 15, 18, 19. So there's three satellites. I guarantee you we're going to be up there, I think four or five days. Yeah. We're probably getting a multiple passes throughout the time because they pass through roughly 12 hours apart. Okay. Well, like NOAA 19. Be worth a shot to see how it works. Yeah. NOAA 19 passes through any rough geographical area twice a day. And so does 15 and so does 18.

[01:15:22] So it's not always directly overhead though. And that's why I'm really excited because 19 is going to go right over the top of my house tonight. So it's like, it's the most ideal shot I'm going to get at this thing for a while. But anyway, let's go ahead and roll this one out. I got to go check in with the wife, eat some dinner, and in about like an hour and a half,

[01:15:46] go look like the biggest freaking weirdo in front of all my neighbors with an antenna and a laptop on the tailgate of my truck. It's not the worst thing you could be doing in your front yard at night. I mean, I could grab a plate carrier and the nods and really scare the crap out of them. I mean, if you're going to play the comms guy, just saying, you might as well go ham. They already think you're weird. Oh, that is an excellent point. All right.

[01:16:14] If you live in the vicinity of my home and you see me out there horsing around tonight, either wave or mind your business. Talk to y'all another week. And I'd everybody. Night.