Your Home Fortress: BACKUP POWER

Welcome into the home fortress, folks. Not a bad intro. Threw it together pretty quickly before we got started. I said, you know, if we're going to do multiples of this series, we might as well have a cool little fun little intro. What do you think? So, let me take these headphones off. We got our people over on Instagram. Into the broadcast. For those of you who are uninitiated, don't know what it is we're doing here today, we are... Digging into the sort of fortress initiative on a civilian level with tips and tricks and the whole nine yards. Today, we are talking back of power. I have a great article from our friends at Be Prepared Solutions. All right. Be Prepared Solutions dot co. You are going to see in all your show descriptions in your link over at Instagram, a chirp dot me slash PBN link. OK. OK. chirp.me slash pbn link and that's going to take you to everywhere these resources I'm about to talk to you about are located. You will also see a link to the critical loads article that we're going to review here because there's serious information in these loads in this article. There are graphics here and worksheets in this article that will make you Make it easy for you to understand what it is you really need. You know what I mean? If you want to know what it is you really need. Do you want to know what it is you really need? Do people want to really prepare or do they want to get freaked out? Bear world order in the chat. What is up, my man? How you doing? So, we're going to talk about some cheap and immediate fixes right off the bat. Okay? What's the best way to do that? I guess we probably need to bring my Amazon up real quick. Hold on. The one thing that I feel like we lose out on a lot is sort of like give us something actionable right off the bat. You know what I mean? Give us something actionable. And more important maybe even than actionable is give us something cheap right off the bat. Something that we can operate on. Some deals, right? And what I got for you are a selection of things here that are all affordable. Okay, let me see if I can bring this. I think I have to stop the article share and bring up this real quick. Hang with me for one second. I'm going to take you to my Amazon storefront in our backup. It's a very limited amount of stuff because I just want you to see kind of what's available. Things that you can use right off the bat. to affect what's happening in the world right now, right? So in other words, I don't know your income situation. I don't know the budget that you can apply to this problem, right? The items that I have here, a lot of them are things that I depend on. Maybe not with this exact same branding, but I have a 5,500-watt inverter gas-powered generator. The one I have here is by a company named Oxersen. And the reason I have it featured here is because I think it's a pretty great deal at 4,400 watts for $ 262 on Amazon. If you go to my chirp.me slash PBN, then you'll get a link to all this stuff. Just go to the backup emergency power in Shop My Preps. It's like Shop My Preps section in the chirp.me slash PBN. These Best Luz battery-powered LED strip lights are, they are what light my house in an emergency. They are literally next to headlamps and battery-powered lanterns. Well, what they are is the first thing that I turn on. The first thing that I turn on are the battery-powered LEDs because they run on my railing near my steps. They're installed in our bathrooms and we hide them behind our television sets. in sort of a square pattern behind the television set so that when the power goes out, boom, you press that button. There's a button on that box there. You press that button, and the lights come on. And you can hide these things behind your couches. You can put these things all over the house and just leave them there. They're battery-powered, three AA batteries. And that's it. Power goes out. You walk around the house, particularly in the dark areas, right? Pantry, we have them also. We put them in the pantry just to increase the lighting in the pantry, okay? This six-pack of under-cabinet lights you can get real creative with, too. I like the LED strips better than these because they're smaller. They're more maneuverable. You can really create any shape that you want. You can hide them almost anywhere in the dark places. They're great for utility, too. You put them in a shed. You put them in an outbuilding. You put them in a crawl space where you might not have power, and they light areas up like that. Huge, right? Immediate fix, right? So you get, how many get of these? A three pack for 26 bucks, so less than $ 10 per. They're 40 inches long, the strips, so you can do a lot with them. And this is an immediate lighting fix. You know what I mean? This inverter, this generator, gas power generator is an immediate backup power fix. Like I said, one of the biggest reasons I literally added this this morning, 262. is maybe not an immediate fix for everybody, but man, what's up, Ezra? How you been, bud? Maybe not an immediate fix for everybody, but something that I like. A larger and more powerful solar generator like the one you see here. The EcoFlow, you're paying for brand here. You know what I mean? You are. You're paying for brand. You can get this kind of wattage for cheaper nowadays. And if all of this stuff, all of these backup power, gas generators, solar generators, if that's like, too much money man i don't have that kind of money then you have the mayor barrow uh 88 watt 120 watt sort of eight under a hundred dollar backup power station right this thing is rechargeable this thing has a big old light on the front of it and uh as you can see there's a bunch of ways to plug it in so all of this stuff like i said go to shot my preps at the chirp.me slash pbn if you want some This is my answer to immediate fixes. Power goes out. What do you want to be able to do when the power goes out immediately, right? Well, if it's the middle of the night, then you want light. You want to have light. You can install these strip lights next to everybody's bed in your house. Just run a line right across the bottom of the room, right across the baseboard. Nobody's going to notice. You can run it behind the bed, whatever. And then as soon as the power goes out, all you do is you wake up and you click. You just click. You know what I mean? Oh, God, honey, I think the power's out. Click, lights are on. That simple. You know what I mean? I can't remember if they come with double-sided tape or if I added double-sided tape to those boxes. But if you have double-sided tape, man, you could do anything with these. You can install these anywhere. And get smart about it. You know, they don't have to stick out like a sore thumb. But to me, in terms of emergency lighting, they're one of the greatest things that I've ever installed in the house. And I say installed lightly, right? You know what I mean? Double-sided tape and the LED lights have a stick, like they're sticky on the back too. It's not installation. It's as easy and effective as backup power can get for you, really. If you want to get your bases covered on this thing, you want an immediate fix, it's not going to cost you an arm and a leg, right? At the very least, you can light the home. And the backup generators, I think, are a great call too. That's my take in terms of like, let's get this thing going and let's get immediately. Let's get things taken care of. Right. Um, let's also pause for coffee. Let's all, I didn't mean for this to work out this way, but I really do love it. How we have the, uh, the logo yellow, the tree line, yellow, the scripts is a little off yellow, orange. And then the background matches kind of the, the hat and the, uh, Does this aesthetic stuff even matter to you guys? Morning, Jay Ferg in the chat. What's up? So those are sort of my quick and easy fixes. I'll clip that and probably throw it around the Internet. I don't know. Maybe possibly. If you're looking for that kind of a solution, then you can have that kind of a solution. Right. That is possible. What I want to look at now, and this link is also linked. The only place it's not linked is in the chirp. So I may have to throw this article up there later. I'll send it out via email also. The article itself is great, but the resources hidden in the article are really for those of you out there who are like, you know what, I want to make sure I know how to keep the power on. There's a myriad of reasons, right, that we're concerned about this whole thing. Backup power has been important to me for a long time because one of the biggest reasons, not just sort of the prepper in me that knows it's possible to lose power and lose power forever or for a long period of time, but talking to a buddy of mine. from South Africa, right, he he lives rolling blackouts like there are nations in this world that are really, really. They're really modern, you know what I mean? And. They suffer rolling blackouts. Australia is another one. This is a way of life. Like they build. So in other words, Jeremy from South Africa has an entire solar generator system, backup battery system that runs his podcast operation. So I did it with mine sort of just playing around and proving the concept, right? I wanted to prove the concept of the backup generator by, running PBN on it because we had a great sponsor in point zero energy. So I wanted to prove that concept that way. And I did that, but it wasn't out of necessity. You know what I mean? This guy's operation, he runs a legitimate podcast called germ warfare. It's a great, great show. And he, he needs this system. Like this is how he does business. Cause you don't know when the power is going to go out. You know what I mean? So that's one of the reasons why it's always made sense to me. Cosmo Sauce says, power is always going out in South Africa because of corruption. Welcome into the show, Cosmo. What's up, Hazmat? What's up? If you have a name I can read, Art, how you doing? If you don't have a name I can read, then I can't help you. Cosmo says, hydropower is very stable here in British Columbia. The whole core concept, guys, in terms of like your self-reliance is your journey off grid, I think. Your journey off grid or your journey to own your grid. I think that's very important. You know what I mean? You got to get there. You want to get there. You got to get there. We're all going to wind up there. Even if it's power companies putting small power plants or something along those lines on our homes. We're not going to live with power lines for another hundred years. You know what I mean? They don't make sense. The minute people can figure out a way to keep those guys employed without having them running around in trucks fixing power poles and power lines. Let me put it to you this way. I'll put it to you the way my father always puts it to me. When he was younger than my kids... he would walk outside and look up and see power lines and wooden power poles, right? This is 1950. This is 1957, right? Let's say he was seven years old, 1957. We're running our electricity with, you know, obviously with improvements to some degree, but the base infrastructure that we're running power to and fro is 80 years old, guys. Do you know what I mean? What else in your life are you running that's 80 years old? Do you know what I'm saying? So there's some bullshit going on. Do you know what I mean? There's some power company bullshit going on. You have no doubts. Well, first of all, why not bury everything and then eliminate? Over an 80-year span of fixing power lines, why not bury everything and say, okay, we're done with the falling over of poles. We're done with the icing over of power lines. So we're on this inevitable journey to off-grid or owning your grid or something along those lines, right? Jay Fergens in chat says she likes the dual fuel options for a generator. I think you're 100% right on that. That's a huge perk, right? That's a tremendous perk, being able to power with propane, power with gasoline. I mean, these are easy, accessible fuels, right? Butane, kerosene, whatever you can find that can power a generator like that. Let's get into this article, guys, because I want to show you what's available to you in this article. So this was created for us by our friends at BePreparedSolutions.co. The creators of our BeAware dashboard that you've seen on here, fully customizable to your zip code or even your address. Also, they create really the best fully customized software And I mean that when I say customized in every sense, like to your family's needs, an emergency plan. So if you're not super prepper, if you're not a guy who's like sitting down and written this thing out, they can create a tremendous emergency plan for you and your family. Just go to BePreparedSolutions.co and use the promo code PBN20. You'll get access to all their services for the year for like, I think it's under 200 bucks. And you'll be able to print out, I mean, you can go over there right now and print out your emergency plan for a free trial, seven-day free trial they got going on right now. But yeah, their plan is, I have one of my own. I'm going to print it out and keep it for us, for my family. Built to my family's needs, four people, the pets, the whole nine yards, and they just they cover so much because you can tell they've written a plan system out from their own emergency plan. And these guys are real preppers. You know what I mean? And they're also constantly improving. So they wrote this article for us, critical loads first, how to size backup power before you buy a generator, right? This will give you an idea, um, using guidance from ready.gov on how to do that. Now I'm not going to read through the entire article, right? What I want to show you is some of these amazing, uh, options here. They have their own kits here available, a recommended kit, $ 174 built into the article. You can check it out, right? They do a really good job at building out those kits. If their kit building operation is based off of your emergency plan and your biggest concerns when you fill out your emergency plan information, you know what I mean? So if you're saying, I'm really nervous about 90 days off grid, you're going to get a bunch of kits that are going to address that for you in varying budgets. And then you also can go in and take off whatever you want to take off, add whatever you want to add to that kit. First thing I want to show you is this critical load worksheet. See how that looks. So the critical load worksheet is probably the easiest way to figure out what's going on and what you need. This is probably the quickest and easiest way for you to figure out how much power I need, right? Now, priority tier, that might be up to you. But you can go in and look at the label on your refrigerator or your chest freezer with all your meat in it and see how many running watts you have, how many starting watts you need, or how many running watts it takes, how many starting watts it takes. Then you add in the hours per day you're going to run the thing, right? Because for something like a oxygen concentrator or some pump, maybe, or definitely an internet router, you might not run those things all day. Daily watt hours, voltage necessary, notes, that whole thing, man. And it's got a good list and a good breakdown on what to do in the six-step priority list here. If you have no idea where you're going, all you need is labels from your devices. If you have labels from your devices, you can figure out what the critical loads are that you want to prepare for with your generator. Make sure you have enough voltage in total. But this thing is sweet, man. Fill in your own nameplate numbers, red tier one. Yeah, this tier system is great. Let me see. Let me back out of it here. There we go. There we go. Now you get a look at it. So phenomenal little worksheet. A great way to figure out how much. And you can write this stuff down too. You don't necessarily even need to use their chart if you don't want to. But it's a great little tool, man. Here's your little step-by-step directions. right? Walk the house room by room, add one rope for device you'd want running in a multi-day outage, CPAP, oxygen concentrator, well pump, furnace blower, sump pump. Now, I will tell you, if you include your furnace blowers, you might wind up with a large load list, right? You might wind up with deep needs in terms of voltage and fuel to power that, right? Here's a sort of a less advanced... sheet that you could draw up yourself or build out in an Excel spreadsheet, right? You talk about tiers. Here's another kit. This is really cool. Another great little diagram here. Power sizing worksheet, your three steps to a target capacity. And this is just a way to look at it you know what i mean it's a similar concept another way to look at it this way you can figure out what it is you need a lot of times i mean i did this i just bought the biggest generator i could afford and figured we'll figure it out you know what i mean but this is particularly helpful if you're going to do something like battery power and solar Because that's what will fail you the most. What will fail you the most is you realize that you have not enough solar panels to refill your backup batteries or your solar generator or whatever it is you have. And then you're just out of power in the first... You're out of power four hours into daylight. Meanwhile, that's with the sun's power, right? So then the sun goes down or moves out of position and you're never powering that battery back up. Right. If you're new to all of this, if you've got like some solar power and some solar generators and a gas generator, I'd highly recommend you power as much as you can with the sun and your solar generator and build the capacity of solar panels. Right. And maybe even more batteries, um, And when you run into those days where the sun is low, you run into those days where you're not getting what you need or maybe the power usage high, way high for some reason. Maybe you're running a furnace blower and it's cold, right? What you want to do then is you can take your battery bank and you bring it to your regular gas generator and use the gas to refill your electric generator. I mean, sort of. Sort of the way that people were powering their Teslas when they thought they were running unlimited electric vehicles. I don't know if you ever saw those images of Teslas with generators next to them, gas generators next to them, powering them up. It was always phenomenal. It was a lovely little time to have. But that's kind of where I got the idea, to be honest with you. I started thinking, use the generator, the gas generator, the dual fuel generator as your power plant. And then you use it to power your backup batteries and try to power as much as you can off those backup batteries, right? Obviously, ideally, an ideal situation like today, lots of sun. If you have enough solar panels, you can get that battery charged or most of the way charged and keep living off of that, right? I hope this is shedding some light on sort of your opportunities. You know what I mean? Because as nerve-wracking... As nerve-wracking as it is to think about power and running out of power for such a long period of time, we waste a lot, right? Every American wastes a lot of power. You know that. We have lights on in rooms we're not in. We have TVs left on all night and fans blowing for no goddamn reason. And it's just one of those things. We're good at it. We waste water. We waste power. We pay for it. We bitch about it. We moan about it, and then we move on. So there's a lot of room for you to trim. There's a lot of room for you to sort of trim down kind of what it is you're using, and you'll be able to use a lot less power. One of the things we did, just out of the fact that we don't really refrigerate a whole ton of stuff anyhow, is we got a smaller refrigerator years ago. probably like six, seven years ago, we had a smaller refrigerator. We don't have one of these tanks, these double door tanks with a television and an ice maker on it. You know what I mean? It's a very small, simple refrigerator. And one of the things that happens when you have a refrigerator like that is you don't, most people with a big refrigerator, it's not full of food. It's full of like condiments and leftovers and things no one's ever going to eat anyway, or things you probably shouldn't even be eating anyhow. You know what I mean? So we just downsized and have never had an issue. But what's really good about downsizing the refrigerator, if you can live that way, is now you have an energy draw that's a lot less. It's a lot less compared to one of these larger units. Again, this can make that journey off the grid a lot easier, right? This can make that journey to being somewhat on, somewhat off a lot easier also. So let's explore the article a little more. Let me back out of our awesome power sizing worksheet. Very cool. So like I said, if you're into math, if you want to figure out what the real hard information is on how much energy you currently use and what you're going to try to replace, this is it, man. This has the equations, the calculations, everything. This is a cool little chart here too if you want to go over it in your free time. I'll see if I agree with it. Backup power options compared. These are the key differences for portable generators, inverter generators, battery power stations, solar plus storage. See, I get comparing, but my experience and my taste in particular, guys, is why not all? Do you know what I mean? Why not everything? Like I said... Everybody's got a budget. So if you have nothing, then, um, you gotta start somewhere. Right. And you probably don't have, you know, if you bought a solar plus storage unit, probably $ 1, 200, $ 1, 500 minimum. If you bought a battery power station, that's of use probably about four or $ 500 an inverted generator. We have one of those up there for, uh, um, what you saw, right? 250, 300, a big portable generator, serious output, you know, five, seven, five to eight hundred dollars, something big. So, you know, that adds up. Now you're talking about spending five grand to 10 grand to get all that stuff up and running, because if you buy the solar panels and they're hard panels, then and I'd recommend the hard panels, then you're going to need you're going to need things. You're going to need framing for them so you can sit them outside and This stuff doesn't always work, you know what I mean, on its own. Got to add things, right? You might need wires. I had to buy extended wires for my system to get them where I wanted them to go. But in the long game, why not use all the technology possible? You know, I think that really is the win. If you had to start somewhere and you were worried about a long-term concern, you start with a portable generator, 5,500 watts or more gas generator. and you know store and rotate your gasoline so that you have serious output right the beauty of course of the battery-powered stations in the solar backup batteries is uh you can bring them babies inside they can just sit inside and really i would like to i don't have it yet but i'd like to have a a pretty a pretty effective battery power station for everybody's room i'd like to have a downstairs i'd like to have a kitchen i'd like to have uh all my children and myself and my wife to have each have one in every room. You know what I mean? And just have them there because why not? It's easy. You know what I mean? These things are when they're full power, they're easy and you don't need, you don't need 3000 Watts in every room. You know, you don't need 3000 Watts in your kid's room. Most likely you definitely don't need it in your bedroom. Um, your big power, you keep downstairs, really your living room and your entertainment sort of lighting generator. Probably don't even need that big of one there either. kitchen, maybe you keep the biggest, right? You keep the biggest one. Gas propane for your portable genny. Inverter gen, same thing. Limited by watt hours. Runtime duration. Let's talk about that. So portable generator runs as long as fuel lasts. Same with the inverter generator. Battery power stations are obviously limited by watt hours. And then your solar varies with the weather and seasons. which is something we don't talk about with solar a lot, but it is worth understanding, right? There are sunnier times of the year than others. It's not the same, really, all the time, the power that you generate. It's just great information, man. It's just a great little sheet to look over. Before you jump into spending money, like I said, the immediate fixes that I built out for you, particularly the lighting, they're not a huge investment. You know what I mean? They're not a huge investment, but they'll give you huge capability because you'll be able to see quickly and easily, right? So I want you to check this article out, man. They got a lot of cool stuff in here. Lots to think about. You know what I mean? If you're really trying to make some big changes in terms of what you're going to do with backup power, there is no doubt, right? You... The more you get into this kind of stuff, the more you realize, like, I can build a plan and I can handle this. And I think what a lot of people over time, if you prepare long enough, a lot of people are just going to say, we can work our way out of a power bill. And I think that's where we're going. I think that's personally where we're going. People are lamenting the power companies and the power bills. I mean, I've heard stories from the Northeast that you wouldn't even believe. $ 600, $ 700 bills over the summer. And it's just too much money. And here's why it's too much money. If you pay four or five months at that price... you've got serious solar capability. You know what I mean? The average is, you know, you're still paying basically a dollar a watt for solar power in most cases, right? You're paying a dollar a watt for, you get a hundred dollar, a hundred watt panel. It's around a hundred bucks. You know what I mean? So when you start to calculate your needs, then you can get a really easy dollar figure on, you know, how many solar panels you need. Does it make sense? Of course, you got to have space, right? You got to be able to do that thing. But that's just part of the deal, too. So we're going to follow this up with an email, your home fortress email for backup power in particular. It'll include this podcast. It'll include links to the articles and that kind of thing. So if you're on the mailing list, great. If you're not, then go to go to chirp.me slash PBN. There's another link. You'll see another sign up there for a book called 50 Must Read Books to Survive Doomsday, which is an awesome book I created a couple years ago. When you sign up to get that book, you'll sign up for our email list. The book comes free and then you're part of the email list if you want to dig into this even further. Reach out with your questions. We may even have a follow-up show from the Phoenix in chat to cover these topics as well, maybe on Saturdays. We want to take this opportunity while everybody's fired up. And I know you guys are still fired up because I'm looking at the podcast stats. I'm looking at the sales numbers and all that kind of stuff. I get it. Let's take advantage of this passion, right? And let's turn it into progress. Let's get things done. And if nothing else, just take advantage of those cheap and easy immediate fixes so you have something, right? You have an answer in the face of all of this. Now, If you want my honest opinion, this is your life now, right? And this should always have been your life. Self-reliance and independence, you live in a free country. Sometimes it doesn't feel like it, and I think we're going to have to have a bit of a tax rebellion sooner or later. But outside of those things, you live in a free country, largely. Why be so dependent on these other companies to deliver your water and deliver your power and deliver all these things? I'm immersed in this sort of technology and I see it all the time and I see it improving. And I'm telling you, it's getting easier and easier and easier. And it's going to get easier and better and cheaper. I mean, that's what tech does. So start thinking bigger. Start thinking outside of the box with your own home fortress. Live on the grid if you want, but simply make the journey off grid a lot easier. I think that's what it's all about right now. Being on the grid is great. Hot water is great. Unlimited water is great. Unlimited energy is great, right? But get yourself into a position where your whole world doesn't stop when the power goes out, all right? I'll talk to you guys soon. Don't forget to spread the word. Share this podcast. Let everybody know that in their time of high anxiety, there are some solutions out there, and the Prepper Broadcasting Network is one of them, all right? Talk to you soon. But what also you put in here is your home internet, your home off-grid internet, right? What's your home off-grid internet? Your home off-grid internet is your prep or disc, right? When the Wi-Fi goes out, when the power goes out, your family connects to the prep or disc. What makes the prep or disc so unique is that you can hop on it. Your wife can hop on it. Your son can hop on it. Your daughter can hop on it all through their phone or device online. Just by connecting to the Wi-Fi, right? It comes packed with all kinds of goodies. It's got 60,000 classic books. It's got FEMA. It's got maps. It's got medical. It's got prepping resources like you wouldn't even believe. It's got entertainment. If I had a prepper disc back in 2020, I would put my kid's entire curriculum on the prepper disc here. And he would have used this as an online resource to do his work. So you and your wife can watch a movie in a grid-down type situation or an emergency on your iPad pulled from your prepper disc while your kid does his homework on his iPad from the prepper disc while your daughter is reading the Gutenberg Library of 65,000 classic books, whatever one she wants. You know what I mean? That's the whole idea.