Responding to Collapse, Part 12: coping with longer power outages

Volunteer butternut squash and gourds
that grew from one of our compost bins this year.

Dealing with power outages, Section 2

This is the second of the four sections I promised in my last post where I talked about the most basic preparations you should make for short power outages.

Today we'll talk about some further preparations that you can make that aren't (for the most part) terribly expensive and which will help see you through longer outages. There are some pieces of camping equipment that can be quite useful when the grid temporarily lets you down, and useful for camping, as well. This still comes under the classification of coping with a failing BAU (Business as Usual), rather than adapting to a failed BAU.

Because camping often takes you out of contact with the power grid there is a range of camping equipment that uses energy sources other than electricity or allows you to generate your own electricity. When camping, or during an outage, you want to use as little electricity as possible, so that the equipment you need to generate it is as small, simple and inexpensive as possible. Electrical appliances that turn electricity into heat are the first thing you want to get rid of in favour of using some sort of fuel directly to produce that heat. Things like furnaces, heaters, stoves, toasters, and so forth.

Two different type of small propane cylinders
and a can of Coleman fuel

The fuels you'll most likely use are either propane gas or white gasoline (also known as naphtha or Coleman fuel). You can easily store enough of these fuels to get you through an outage a few day to a couple of weeks in length. There is quite a bit of discussion on the internet as to which is better, liquid fuel or propane. All the camping equipment I have uses liquid fuel, which costs less, is less bulky, is safer to store, handle and move in a vehicle, and works better in the cold. It is a bit more complex to use. I do have a propane barbeque and a propane torch for soldering and such.

I keep two or three cans of Coleman fuel on hand, and I've read that as long as the can hasn't been opened it stores quite well. I've left fuel in partly empty cans (with the cap closed) for years and then used it with no problems, so I'm not sure how much of an issue stale fuel really is.

The choice between liquid fuel and propane gas is largely a matter of personal preference. If you go with liquid fuel, have a funnel on hand for filling and a spare set of guts for the air pump. And the one thing you must not do is to fill Coleman appliances with liquid fuel indoors. That's asking for a fire. Make sure you go outside to a well ventilated area with no nearby sources of ignition.

There is also a lot of discussion on whether it is safe to use this equipment indoors, much of which is pure bunk. For safety's sake crack a couple of windows to get some ventilation and have a carbon monoxide detector in the area where you'll be using the equipment. I have found when using even a small appliance like a mantle lantern indoor in the winter that it generates enough heat to make up for the loss from windows that are slightly open.

At this point I should address the issue of natural gas. Many of you probably have a natural gas supply connected to your house. You'd think that this supply would be unaffected by electrical outages. Sadly this is unlikely to be true. In the majority of cases, that natural gas supply is pressurized by electrical pumps that won't be working during a power outage. Some large trunk lines are pressurized using pumps powered by natural gas, and I am told they will probably continue to work during a power outage. But their controls are probably electrical, and unless they have battery backup and/or a backup generator, they won't work either. So I wouldn't rely on your natural gas supply to be impervious to power outages. In any case, most of your natural gas appliance have electrical control and ignition, so they won't work during an outage. Unless you have a generator (see more below).

Perhaps some of you have propane appliances supplied from a large tank that the propane company installed next to your house, and which they fill regularly. This is a source of energy that may well carry you through a power outage. As with natural gas appliances, most propane appliance have electrical controls and ignition, so you need a generator, or a way of hooking you camping style propane appliances up to that big tank. There are a couple of other concerns. Most propane companies work on just in time delivery and if your tank is almost empty when an outage happens, your propane supply won't last long. Perhaps you can talk you propane supplier into a different delivery arrangement. And during high use periods like cold snaps the local supply of propane may run out and you won't be getting any deliveries, even if the power is on.

At this stage you probably still don't want to make majors changes to your lifestyle—when the power is out, you'd like to be able to have some electricity, for a variety of uses that aren't easy to power with other energy sources, or to provide control power to appliances that burn natural gas, propane or even fuel oil.

If you just want a small amount of power, there are small battery banks which store enough power to recharge your phone, tablet or even your laptop. The simplest ones can only be recharged from 120V AC, but the more sophisticated ones (know as solar generators) can be recharged from a solar panel, 12V car outlet, or 120VAC, and they sell foldable, portable solar panels which will charge these battery banks. They have power outputs at 120V AC, 12 VDC and powered USB ports for phones and such like.

I don't have one of these devices, so I can't speak from personal experience, but while they do appear to offer a certain degree of convenience, they are quite expensive and they really don't store very much power—a few amp hours at the most. Certainly not enough to run typical refrigerators or freezers, for instance. If you want to go with solar power, you might be better to consider the full fledged solar panel, inverter-charger and battery system that I'll be discussing in my next post.

Generators

Our Generator

The obvious thing here is to get a generator. I finally gave in and bought a generator a couple of years ago, and last fall we installed a wood stove. We have electric heat and it just isn't practical to have a large enough generator to run our electric furnace, so the two decisions went together.

Our generator is a gasoline fueled, 5500W model made by Champion Global Power Equipment that we got on sale at Canadian Tire for less than $1000 Canadian. (Canadian tire is a chain of automotive/hardware/houseware/sports/garden stores here in Canada. If you live outside Canada don't know what you are missing.) If I had deeper pockets I would have gotten a Honda generator—in my experience Honda power equipment starts more easily, is more reliable and lasts longer, but also costs a lot more. So far the Champion has started easily and run well, even in the winter. This was the smallest generator I could find with a 240V output, needed to run our furnace fan and some of my woodworking equipment.

Some may wonder why I didn't get an "inverter-generator", which uses a DC generator and solid state invert to produce AC. They offer better fuel economy if you want to run your generator pretty much continuously and under light loads most of the time. And they usually are set up to run quite quietly for use in campgrounds. But they are more expensive and more complicated. I intend to run my generator only when there is really something for it to do, and I needed to get the most bang for my buck.

Draining stale fuel form generator
into spare jerry can.
On the left, two jerry cans full of gasoline.

Generators do require some on-going effort to keep them in good condition. I start ours once a month and run it for a short while, then shut off the fuel valve and let it run dry so as to stop fuel from leaving deposits in the carburetor. Fresh fuel is also very important. I have three 20 l. (5 gallon) jerry cans, two of which I keep full of fuel. Before running the generator each month, I drain its fuel tank into the third jerry can and empty that can into my car's fuel tank. The other two cans are labelled "odd" and "even" and in odd numbered months I empty the "odd" can into the generator and then fill it with fresh fuel at the gas station. Same for the "even" can in even numbered months.

Like most generators, this one will run about 8 hours at 50% load. My jerry cans hold the same amount of fuel as the generator's fuel tank, so I'm good for 24 hours at half load. Of course, most of the time I'll to be running the generator at less than 50% power and I have no need to run the generator round the clock, especially with the wood stove and Coleman equipment. I expect that during an outage I would run the generator for an hour or so morning and evening to cool down our freezers and fridge, and do anything else that I need power for at those times. So I hope to be good for outages up to a couple of weeks long.

I got a gasoline fueled generator because my car uses gasoline and I can rotate stale fuel into the car rather than throwing it away. And during an outage, if I desperately have to go somewhere and gas stations aren't operating, I have some spare transportation fuel on hand. If you have a diesel vehicle or you live on a farm with diesel equipment and have a big tank of diesel fuel in your equipment shed, you should consider a diesel generator. If you have propane appliances already and a large tank of propane that your supplier fills regularly, you might want to consider a propane fueled generator.

I just googled "does diesel fuel get stale" and apparently it does after a few months, so you'll still need to rotate your diesel fuel. This will be much less of an issue with propane.

There are a few other complications with owning and using a generator that we should discuss.

Some maintenance will be required, such as changing the oil regularly (check the owner's manual for how often) and cleaning or changing the spark plug. And eventually you'll want to take that generator to your local small engine place for a complete overhaul.

Because the gas tank is full of fuel, a generator is a fire hazard and you shouldn't keep it in your house. I keep mine in my backyard tool shed.

When it is running, the exhaust is a problem (carbon monoxide and so forth), so it should be run outdoors or the exhaust vented outdoors, and not upwind of any ventilation intakes.

Because this is a piece of electrical equipment it needs to be kept dry, and this includes keeping it dry when it is running outdoors in the rain. A leanto made with a trap and some 2X4's would do in a pinch. Or you might want to build a very well ventilated shed to both store and run the generator.

Hooking your generator up to the electrical system in your house in a way that is safe and meets the requirements of the electrical code is a job for an electrician. Until that job is done, you can hook up individual loads to the generator with extension cords. Using a cord with two male ends to plug your generator into the house system is dangerous and illegal. The main concern is that if you leave your main breaker or switch closed, you'll be livening up the whole grid and the people who are working on it trying to restore power. It is no exaggeration to say that that deaths can result from this.

My generator is quite noisy and I don't plan on running it through the night. You can get generators that run fairly quietly, but they are more expensive and usually come in smaller sizes, so I chose not to get one. During an outage, that noise is going to attract attention. In the little town where I live, I expect my neighbours to drop by and see if I have power. When outages become more common, I expect we'll develop a tradition of generator parties, and I'd be pleased to host one.

I hear American survivalists and preppers talking about noisy generators attracting unwanted and possibly dangerous company. They'll probably shake their heads and laugh at my idea of a generator party, but things really are different here in Canada. As my American daughter-in-law, who grew up in Camden, New Jersey, and lived in Jacksonville, Florida, before coming here, says, "it's like moving to a different planet."

Single Mantle
Coleman Lantern
Spare mantles on the right.

OK, having covered all that information, now let's run through our list of services with all this in mind.

Lighting

You can get battery operated lanterns that are quite effective, but I would advise getting a Coleman mantle lantern. They generate a bright white light that is barely distinguishable from the electric light we are all used to and give off a fair bit of heat as well. The mantles are fairly fragile when in use, so keep a couple of spare mantles on hand. Kits of repair parts for the air pump on Coleman appliances are available and you should have one.

Water

Additional water storage would be a good idea, enough for a week or two, at minimum of a gallon per person per day. For two people for a week that's 14 gallons. The next step after storing more water is to have a water filter that can make surface water safe to drink. If you live near a lake, pond or stream, this will prove usefull.

Google will give you links to many types of water filters, but if you are looking for a tabletop filter that will turn the most unsavory surface water into something drinkable, Berkey or Doulton are the brands you want.

Filter elements
inside the upper bucket

Our homemade water filter

They are a little pricey, though, and it is possible (I have done it myself) to put together a much less expensive DIY filter using a pair of plastic buckets that is functionally equivalent to the factory made filters, and uses the same filter cartridges. Here are a couple of links to instructions: 1, 2.

It is also a good idea to keep some 5 gallon plastic buckets on hand for carrying water. You'll find they actually come in handy for a great many purposes.

There are a variety of water treatment/filtration systems for use when camping or backpacking. I'm not really up to speed on these, so I'll include this link to a review of Best Backpacking Water Filters & Purifiers of 2019 to start you on your own research if you are interested.

Of course there are filters you can make at home using charcoal and sand, but I'm going to leave those for my next post.

If you have a well and a generator, best call your electrician and see what is going to be involved in powering your water pump from the generator. Many water pumps have a 240V motor, so you'll need a generator with a 240V outlet, a suitable extension cord, and some wiring at the pump to make it safe and easy to hook the generator up to it.

"Jenkins" Style Sawdust Toilet
with bale of wood shavings in front

Sewage

What I said in my last post applies here as well. Keep an emergency bucket toilet on hand, or go for a Jenkins style sawdust toilet . I have one of them tucked away in a secluded corner of my basement woodworking shop. If we were going to use it regularly, some ventilation to the outdoors would be needed.

I can recommend a couple of books on the subject of humanure: The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins, and The Scoop on Poop by Dan Chiras.

Food

I'm going to leave the issue of storing large quantities of food for a post in the near future where I'll discuss the ongoing availability of diesel fuel and its effect on supply chains. But it is a good idea to have enough food on hand to last two weeks at a bare minimum, assuming that many stores won't be open and regular deliveries won't be happening during an outage. The idea here is to store what you eat and eat what you store. Don't get taken in by those people who are selling expensive freeze dried emergency food.

Some of that food may end up getting served at a generator party, so plan accordingly.

Two burner liquid fuel Coleman stove, and large kettle

If you are in the habit of always eating out and don't normally keep much food in the house, you need to break that habit and learn how to cook as part of your collapse preparations. It is likely that most restaurants won't be operating during an outage.

The first long outage will catch a lot of people, both consumers and those working in the supply chain, by surprise. A rude awakening, but one that may lead to better preparation for future such problems.

Cooking

You won't want to subsist for very long on food that doesn't need to be cooked. I would recommend a two burner Coleman stove to use when your electric range isn't working. If you have a propane stove that will work without power you're in luck. Propane barbeques can also be useful when the power is out.

Spare parts for Coleman pumps

I recently acquired some spare parts for the pumps of my Colman lantern and stove. The cup on the right is made of leather and will work at much lower temperatures than the usual rubber cup, which stiffens up in the cold.

A big kettle for heating water for washing is also handy.

Refrigeration

At this level of preparation, refrigeration is a tough issue. My own response was to get a generator and plan to run it for short periods a few times a day to keep our fridge and freezer cold. Freezers will stay cold for a day or two without power (especially if they are full), but refrigerators only stay cold for about 4 hours without power and I expect to keep several bags or plastic bottles of ice in my fridge to extend that time (so I can get a full night's sleep if nothing else). I'm also shopping around for a "fridge thermometer" so I can tell how that's working.

There are refrigerators intended for off grid situations that are better insulated and take less power than typical fridges. And there are propane powered refrigerators of the type used in RVs. Both are pretty expensive, so I'm not seriously suggesting you get one at this point.

It is possible to turn a horizontal chest freezer into a refrigerator that takes very little power and stays cool longer. When you open the door, the cold air doesn't fall out, and they have thicker insulation than a regular fridge, so they stay cold longer and use less power. This would be particularly useful if you are setting up an off grid solar power system and need to keep your power usage to an absolute minimum but still want to have refrigeration.

Here are some links to instructions: 1, 2.

The only criticism I would make of these instructions is that it is pretty dumb to run the capillary tube for the sensor bulb under the door seal—hard on the door seal, and leaky. Instead, you can get the temperature sensing bulb in into the fridge through the drain valve and put some duct seal (industrial strength plasticine) around it for a good seal. The "old school" mechanical temperature controller shown in both those articles is definitely the way to go since it uses no power itself. Sometime ago I read another article where the author had gone to a lot of trouble to build an electronic controller that used less power than the fridge. It still used a bit of power, though—better to stick with the simple mechanical controller.

Awnings on the south side of our house

Cooling

As I said in Part 1, if you've chosen your location carefully, you should be able to get by without air conditioning, and just suffer through the few hottest days in summer. Shade and ventilation will help, and believe it or not, if you stay out of air conditioned spaces for a few days , you will get used to the heat. Try to take it easy though, until you've adapted.

Shade can be provided by trees and/or awnings. Trees take a while to grow, so it's best to look for a place that already has shade from tall deciduous tree, definitely on the south side and if possible on the west side. Or plant quick growing trees like mullberries, and wait patiently.

My house has lots of south facing windows from solar gain in the winter, but that's not a good thing in the summer. And it is in a location without trees and where planting trees isn't really practical. So I made up awnings to shade the windows that were picking up the most heat in the summer. They have to be put up in the spring and taken down in the fall, but it's worth the effort.

Guts of attic vent,
based on salvaged furnace blower

Attic Vent Grill

A well designed house can get quite a bit of cooling from natural ventilation, especially from cool breezes in the evening. It helps to have windows that open. This still just wasn't enough for our house, so I put in an attic fan which draws air in through the windows and pushes it out through the attic vents, cooling both the house and the attic in the process. This works best when it cools down after dark, which it usually does in our area.

Our wood stove

Heating

We have an electric forced air furnace, so when the power is out, we have no heat. We do have a catalytic tent heater that uses liquid Coleman fuel. It works pretty nicely in a tent and does OK in the house in a pinch, but it would be best to do the initial lighting outside and you really have to open some windows for ventilation.

There are space heaters that burn propane or kerosene and apparently are safe to use indoors and don't use electricity, or at least work OK on batteries, and aren't terribly expensive. Something to look into if you really don't want to get a woodstove, or simply can't afford one.

But perhaps it would be best to just get a wood stove. Especially if wood heating is common in your area, and there are people making a business of installing wood stoves and supplying firewood.

We did that last fall, and while it was a major expense (especially the chimney—we have a tall house), wood is still cheaper than electricity, so it will pay itself back over a number of years. Of course, there is a bit of work involved in tending a wood stove, but it seems worth it to me. Though I must admit that I am retired and often looking for something to do in the winter.

Our very tall chimney

Ten cords of firewood ready for this winter

Communications

You should make arrangements for communicating with your family (and other house mates) who may be away at the start of an outage. Cell phone will be working for 2 to 4 hours and landlines for quite a bit longer than that.

It appears that CB radio is no longer a big thing, but amateur (ham) radio is. For those who are so inclined I would suggest taking up ham radio and joining a group who use their two way radios for emergency response co-ordination. Not for everybody, clearly, but a fun hobby for techies who like to talk to strangers.

Transportation

I don't have much more to say here than in the first section. Keep you vehicle's tank at least half full, and in a pinch you can use some of your stock of generator fuel in your car.

Bicycles are useful, even when the power is on. I have to admit that living in a hilly town I lust after a bicycle with electric assist, which could be charged by generator or maybe even by a solar panel if you don't plan to use it too much.

And of course, in a small town, walking is quite practical and something we should all get more accustomed to doing.

In Closing

Quite a bit of what I've advised here is not expensive and can be done even by apartment dwellers or if you are renting a house. Much of it would probably be a good idea even if you aren't preparing for collapse. And it will allow you to get through longer and more frequent power outages with relatively little suffering. But best not to kid yourself that this will give you much in the way of long term independence from BAU. We tackle that sort of preparation in my next post.

Links to the rest of this series of posts, Preparing for (Responding to) Collapse:

• Preparing for Collapse, A Few Rants, Wednesday, 25 July 2018
• Responding to collapse, Part 2: Climate Change, Saturday, 15 September 2018
• Responding to collapse, Part 3: Declining Surplus Energy, Friday, 26 October 2018
• Responding to collapse, Part 4: getting out of the city, Wednesday, 21 November 2018
• Responding to collapse, Part 5: finding a small town, Friday, 28 December 2018
• Responding to Collapse, Part 6: finding a small town, continued, Monday, 28 January 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 7: A Team Sport Monday, 18 March 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 8: Pitfalls and Practicalities of that Team Sport Tuesday, 26 March 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 9: Getting Prepared, Part 1, Thursday, June 13, 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 10: the future of the power grid, Wednesday, July 17, 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 11: Coping with power outages, the basics, Sunday, August 25, 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 12: Coping with longer power outages, Thursday, September 19, 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 13: keeping the lights on when the grid goes down forever, Wednesday, 16 October 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 14: adapting to life without the grid, Tuesday, 29 October 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 15: shortages of diesel fuel, Wednesday, 27 November 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 15: Addendum, Saturday, 21 December 2019
  Diesel vs. battery powered semi trucks for shipping
  Biodiesel powered tractors vs. horses for farming
• Responding to Collapse, Part 16: Shortages of Money, Part 1, Tuesday, 3 March 2020
• Responding to Collapse, Part 17: Shortages of Money, Part 2, Friday, 27 March 2020

Responding to Collapse, Part 11: coping with power outages, the basics

Storm moving in off Lake Huron, August 2019

In my last post I talked about some of the problems with using "for profit" companies to provide infrastructure services and went on to look at how one major part of our infrastructure—the power grid—is likely to gradually fail over the coming years. I ended up looking at the effects of power outages, but ran out of space to cover how you can mitigate those effects and what your community can do to cope when it finally finds itself permanently isolated from the grid. I'll start talking about that today, but it looks like it's going to take three or four posts to cover this subject in the detail it deserves.

If you're following or considering following the suggestions I've been making in this series of posts, you're probably receptive to the idea of making preparations for collapse—possibly quite eager to get at it. The endgame here is the end of industrial civilization, with the grid shut down completely and the wells, mines, farms and factories it supports no longer running. So, you might think it would be a good idea to just dive in right now and go off grid.

In general, though, when preparing for any of the effects of collapse, it is important to remember kollapsniks like me have a pretty bad track record when it comes to attaching dates to our predictions. So the shape of your preparations should be such as to not squander your resources and leave you broke or in debt when the apocalypse doesn't happen a week from Tuesday. Ideally your preparations should enhance your life as BAU (business as usual) continues to gradually wind down, as well as making it possible to get by when BAU is finally gone. Which may be quite a way down the road as yet.

When most people talk about going off grid, they are talking not about doing without electricity but about generating some of their own, in order to maintain a certain level of modernity in their lifestyle. To do this requires access to two things: an energy source or sources and technology that can convert that energy into electricity. It is also helpful to be able to store the electricity you generate if your energy source is intermittent.

Today's consumer society makes energy sources, generating equipment and batteries readily available. This, unfortunately, will involve a significant upfront investment, the electricity you produce is likely to be more expensive than the electricity you can buy from the grid, and you won't have really gained any long term degree of independence from BAU. If you can afford it, this may be one way of setting up to weather power outages with a good degree of comfort and convenience. I suspect, though, that many of my readers are not wealthy enough to spend many thousands of dollars on an off grid power system.

It is probably true that at some point, as grid power increases in cost and decreases in reliability, home generated power becomes a winner. But at that point you'd also like to become much more independent of BAU, so a different approach will be required, and whether you can arrange to have electricity at all without relying on BAU for fuel, equipment or spare parts is a serious question. Which I'll get into in a post just a little way down the road.

But first, let's get back to the issue of coping with power outages. The effects of such outages, especially longer ones, are so far reaching that it is overwhelming to think of coping with them all. So I'll just concentrate on the most immediately impactful: lighting, cooking, refrigeration, food, water, sewage, heating, cooling, communications and transportation. Not necessarily in that order.

I'm going to divide the rest of this into four sections, each of which deals with a different sort of response to the challenge of power outages, roughly speaking in increasing order of expense and personal commitment. The first of those sections will be covered in the rest of this post and the final three in my next few posts.

I am assuming that many of my readers are convinced enough of the inevitability of collapse that they already have or are seriously considering moving to a remote small town and are eager to do some preparation, but they may be limited in their financial resources and practical skills. Sections 1 and 2 will cater to those limits.

1) Short Outages, minimal response

In the case of short outages, you can simply do without for a few hours, and experience little more than minor inconvenience. Indeed, the most important technique I can recommend for coping with any of the effects of collapse is to be ready to cheerfully accept some loss of comfort and convenience.

Around here, minor outages used to last from 2 to 4 hours. Now it's more like 4 to 8 hours, which is almost entirely due to power companies trying to save money on staffing. Most of us have lived through a few of these, especially in rural areas where power is distributed via overhead lines strung on wooden poles. This is, realistically, part of living in an industrial civilization—the cost of eliminating all outages would be too high.

So kick back, read a book and wait for the power to come on. Of course, if the power is still off after sunset that book is going to be hard to read, and it sure would be nice to have a flashlight and/or some candles. A little more thought and you'll soon realize that there are a few things that aren't terribly expensive and which would make short power outages much less of a nuisance.

Even people who don't accept the "collapse narrative" will benefit from some basic preparation of this sort. At this point (August 2019) all the resources of BAU are still available to consumers, so everything you'll need can be had very easily.

Lighting

Flashlights and batteries

In the short run, the lost of electric lighting is one of the main things to prepare for and also one of the easiest. You don't want to be stumbling around in the dark as you do the things you'll want to do to cope with an outage. And once that's out of the way, you're going to find it pretty boring without all the electronic entertainment you're used to. It takes light even to enjoy books and board games. At this basic level, you'll use flashlights and/or candles to provide light.

Flashlights have improved a lot in the last few years. LEDs have replaced incandescent bulbs, increasing battery life and making flashlights much sturdier. These days the best batteries have a shelf life of around 10 years, so that you can leave your flashlight sitting on a shelf for a long time and not end up with dead batteries or a corroded mess. And I guess if you plan on using a flashlight a lot, one with rechargeable batteries would be a good idea. One useful variation on that idea is a flashlight with rechargeable batteries and a built in hand cranked generator.

In emergency situations, a flashlight is especially handy when you need to move around in the dark. They also don't present a fire hazard the way candles do.

In the photo on the right are the flashlights found around our house and car, all of which were purchased at Canadian Tire. (Canadian tire is a chain of automotive/hardware/houseware/sports and garden stores here in Canada. If you live outside Canada don't know what you are missing.) At the back is a worklight that takes 4 AA cells and produces a startling amount of light for along time. Comes with a hook to hang it by and magnets in the base to stick to any iron or steel surface. In the middle is a Garrity handcranked flashlight. Thirty seconds of vugorous cranking gives you 3 to 5 minutes of light, depending on how dim you're willing to let it get before cranking it up again. At the front on the left is the Maglite single AAA flashlight that I carry on my keychain. Put out 47 lumens. Second from the left at the front is the Maglite 2 AA flashlight that we keep in the glove box of our car. Puts out 97 lumens. On the front right is a cheap 3 AAA flashlight that only puts out 60 lumens.

Candles and holders, matches and lighter

Candles are good too, especially as a stationary source of illumination. Unfortunately most candles don't come with built in holders and being tall and skinny, don't stand up very well on their own. So it is a good idea to have a few candle holders around the house, sized to fit whatever kind of candle you keep in stock. In the front right of the photo to the right is a tea light, which comes with a built in holder and doesn't take up much space. Useful in emergency bags.

Since candles don't light themselves, you'll need matches or a lighter of some sort. Nobody smokes in our family, so the lighter we have is made for lighting barbeques, but works fine for lighting candles and our woodstove as well. The long nose keeps you hand back a bit from whatever you're trying to light.

Water

Water storage in the cold room at our house

Water is your next most urgent need. And while the municipal water supply or your own pressure system may continue to supply enough water for drinking and washing for a short period, it is wise to have a few gallons of potable water stored away. It is usually recommended that you have one gallon per person per day just for drink and washing.

Water from a chlorinated municipal water supply does not need further treatment when stored in clean, food-grade containers. Non-chlorinated water should be treated with bleach. Add 8 drops of liquid household chlorine bleach (5 to 6% sodium hypochlorite) for every 4 litres (one gallon) of water. More details can be found here and here.

I'm not, by the way suggesting you go out and get a few cases of bottled water in single use 500 ml plastic bottles. First off, if you can't drink your tap water, you're living in the wrong place. Second, bottled water is an expense you should avoid. Third, those bottles are a serious waste problem. If you're strapped for cash, save food grade plastic containers that you would otherwise throw out, wash them and use them to store water. Things like 2 litre beverage bottles, juice bottles, and so forth. And if you can afford a relatively small investment, you can easily get sturdy purpose built water bottles that hold 20 litres (5 gallons) and have a built in spigot. In the photo above there is also a blue 2.5 gallon water container from Canadian Tire that we use when travelling.

Our 60 gallon
electric water heater

Another source of water is your water heater which probably holds 40 or 60 gallons of potable water. If it's never been flushed then the water at the bottom, which will come out first, will probably be rusty. The drain valve is also probably very close to the floor, and you likely need a screwdriver or wrench to operate that valve. Best to check this out in advance and make sure you have the required tools and a pan that will fit under the valve to catch the water. In any case it's also a good idea to flush your water tank annually.

Sewage

Safe handling of human waste is an important public health issue. And when you gotta go, you gotta go—it really is an emergency. Even during a short power outage, the odds are that someone in your home will need to use the facilities.

You probably have a flush toilet hooked up to a septic tank and weeping bed or to municipal sewers. The septic tank and weeping bed is likely gravity fed, so it is OK to use the toilet even when the power is off. Municipal sewers may be gravity fed, but it is likely that some parts of town are downhill from the sewage processing plant and rely on electrically powered pumps to make things flow in the right direction. I live in such a location and the town used to show up with a vacuum truck during outages and use it to make sure that our sewers didn't back up. Recently they installed some upgrades, including backup generators for critical sewage pumps. It wouldn't hurt to check into the situation in your town.

Your toilet is good for one flush using the water in its tank. If you've made no other preparations, you need to make the most of that flush, and not waste it when there is nothing more than urine in the bowl. Then you need to be looking for a source of flushing water, which you can just pour into the bowl to make the toilet flush. Many sources of water that you wouldn't want to drink are fine for flushing a toilet. The rusty water from the bottom of your water heater is certainly OK, as is rain water and surface water from streams and ponds. A five gallon (20 litre) bucket is useful to have if you are reduced to scrounging flush water from such sources.

Emergency bucket toilet
with waste bags

People like me, who grew up on farms and have spent some time in the bush, are not above finding a secluded spot outdoors to urinate, and in a pinch even to defecate. Though it is important to realize that feces are a health hazard to other people using the area. This brings us to the idea of emergency toilets which you can put together quickly. Here are several good articles on the subject:
How to create an emergency toilet
Make and use an emergency toilet

Amazon will be glad to sell you a bucket, seat, lid and waste bags, all ready to go. Or you can buy just the seat, lid and waste bags, and supply your own bucket.
Portable Toilet Bucket with Seat and Lid Attachment

I would recommend having one of those emergency bucket toilets on hand. I don't have one because I have a Jenkins style sawdust toilet made up and ready to go for emergency use. These are often called composting toilets, but only because when the bucket gets full you can dump it in your compost pile. The legality of doing that with human waste varies from place to place, so it is best to be discreet.

Food and Cooking

During short outages you can either go hungry for a few hours (it won't kill you) or have some food on hand that can be eaten without cooking.

Refrigeration

Your concern here will be that food in your refrigerator don't spoil and frozen food in your freezer doesn't thaw.

Food in your refrigerator should be OK for up to about 4 hours provided you don't open the door too often and let the cold air out. If you freezer is full, food should be safe in it for about 48 hours, 24 hours if it is half full. If your freezer isn't full, it is a good idea keep some ice in it for increased thermal mass. I use several jugs of water, which freeze after they are put in the freezer. It might also be a good idea to open the door of your refrigerator just once and put in a jug or two of ice from your freezer.

Some good advice on keeping food safe during an emergency can be found here.

Frozen food that still has ice crystals and feels cold is usually safe to refreeze. Frozen food that has thawed out, and food that normally requires refrigeration, and has been above 40 degrees F. for more than 2 hours, should be discarded.

Heating and Cooling

If you've chosen your location carefully, you should be able to get by without air conditioning, and just suffer through the few hottest days in summer. Shade and ventilation will help, as will moving heat generating activities like cooking outdoors. And believe it or not, if you stay out of air conditioned spaces for a few days, you will get used to the heat. Try to take it easy though, until you've adapted.

Here's some good advice on how to stay comfortable and safe during hot weather.

The same careful choice of location will, unfortunately, put you in some pretty cold weather in the winter. If your home is well insulated and well sealed it shouldn't cool things off more than a few degrees during a short outage.

But just in case things get worse than that, here's some good advice on keeping warm in a winter weather emergency. The basic idea is to limit the spaces you're trying to heat, and whenever possible to heat humans, not spaces.

Communications

Handcranked and battery operated radios

You may want to call the power company to let them know about the outage and to contact family and friends to see if they need help. Your cell phone, if it is charged up, will probably work through a short outage as will your land line phone. But if your landline phone is a cordless one, it won't work unless there is power to the base station, so get at least one old fashioned directly wired phone and make sure it works if it is not connected to a power source.

A battery operated radio is also a good idea, for both information and entertainment. The handcranked radio on the left (a Grundig FR-200) in the photo to the right inlcudes a flashlight and receives AM, FM and 2 shortwave bandsworks. It work off 3 AA cells as well as the buildin rechargable battery. Sadly, the quality of the souond is poor, and it doesn;t discriminate between closely adjacent stations very well. The small Sony boom box onthe right takes 6 D cells and works just fine off them or 120VAC. The sound quality is great and it plays cassette tapes and CDs as well as AM and FM radio.

Transportation

Personally, I would advise staying off the roads during a short outage. Traffic lights aren't likely to be working and those who are on the roads may be panicky and not thinking straight. But just in case you do have to go somewhere, it's a good idea to keep your fuel tank at least half full. That's a good idea in any case, really.

Miscellaneous

If you work at home using a computer losing unsaved work in the event of a power outage can be expensive. Of course a laptop with a good battery will allow you to save your work before shutting down. If, like me, you are still using a desktop computer, a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) is a really good idea.

When the power comes back on the voltage is likely to be quite low due to heavy loading. This can cause problems for voltage sensitive equipment like motors and electronics. You can do your part to help with this problem by turning off heavy loads such as your electric furnace or baseboard heaters in cold weather or air conditioners in hot weather, and also your water heater, stove and clothes dryer. And to be safe, disconnect sensitive equipment like refrigerators, freezers, computers and televisions.

In Closing

You can make these few, simple preparations even if you're living in an apartment where you can't make big changes to the infrastructure. And it won't cost you very much, either. Everyone should have these basics under control.

But I would guess that along with a few short outages the immediate future holds the possibility of one or more substantially longer outages, which will do much to change our complacent attitudes and render us eager to be more prepared.

In my next post I'll cover a higher level of preparation, still achievable on a tight budget and still relying on BAU for supplies and equipment, but suited to coping with longer and more frequent outages.

Links to the rest of this series of posts, Preparing for (Responding to) Collapse:

• Preparing for Collapse, A Few Rants, Wednesday, 25 July 2018
• Responding to collapse, Part 2: Climate Change, Saturday, 15 September 2018
• Responding to collapse, Part 3: Declining Surplus Energy, Friday, 26 October 2018
• Responding to collapse, Part 4: getting out of the city, Wednesday, 21 November 2018
• Responding to collapse, Part 5: finding a small town, Friday, 28 December 2018
• Responding to Collapse, Part 6: finding a small town, continued, Monday, 28 January 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 7: A Team Sport Monday, 18 March 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 8: Pitfalls and Practicalities of that Team Sport Tuesday, 26 March 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 9: Getting Prepared, Part 1, Thursday, June 13, 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 10: the future of the power grid, Wednesday, July 17, 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 11: Coping with power outages, the basics, Sunday, August 25, 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 12: Coping with longer power outages, Thursday, September 19, 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 13: keeping the lights on when the grid goes down forever, Wednesday, 16 October 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 14: adapting to life without the grid, Tuesday, 29 October 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 15: shortages of diesel fuel, Wednesday, 27 November 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 15: Addendum, Saturday, 21 December 2019
  Diesel vs. battery powered semi trucks for shipping
  Biodiesel powered tractors vs. horses for farming
• Responding to Collapse, Part 16: Shortages of Money, Part 1, Tuesday, 3 March 2020
• Responding to Collapse, Part 17: Shortages of Money, Part 2, Friday, 27 March 2020

Responding to Collapse, Part 10: the future of the power grid

Sunset over Lake Huron

In this series of posts I've been advising my readers that moving to a small town remote from large population centres, in an area that can supply the basic necessities of water, food and firewood, is a prudent way of coping with the ongoing collapse of BAU (Business as Usual). With the caveat that some advance preparation will be needed to ensure successful use of those resources.

In the next few posts in this series, we'll look at some of the details of how BAU will collapse and how you can prepare to weather that collapse. In the immediate future infrastructure breakdowns will get more frequent and longer until finally it's no longer practical to rely on BAU for the necessities of life. It seems to me that supplies of electrical power, diesel fuel and money will be at the heart of many of the troubles that lie ahead, so I'll concentrate on those areas.

And while I'll mainly be talking about infrastructure breakdowns we should remember that interruptions of service can occur for a couple of other reasons.

The first has to do with the way our economy is organized and how we choose to provide vital services such as power, water, sewers, housing, food, communications, transportation, education, health care and so forth.

Today most of the world's nations are capitalistic, with a distinct neo-liberal flavour. Under such conditions, companies are operated to make a profit and other goals, such as the public good, are strictly secondary. So when a "for profit" company finds its business becoming less profitable they must find ways to increase their charges or to supply less for the same fees or to quit supplying customers in less profitable areas altogether. And if they don't do those things they will either be bought out by companies that will, or they'll suffer bankruptcy. If there doesn't appear to be much chance that another company could make a good profit in the same business then it will never be reestablished. And if the public was relying on that company to provide vital services, then we are just out of luck.

Of course there are other ways of organizing an economy, and in particular other ways of setting up companies to provide infrastructure services. But the argument is often made that for profit companies operating in a free market are more efficient. I would question if there has ever been any such thing as a free market, and whether it would function as predicted in any case. Efficiency in this case is defined as the amount of return on share holders' investments, and has nothing to do with providing a high quality and reliable service to your customers.

But perhaps we should set all that aside in order to focus on the really critical thing, which is the difference between the way such companies work in growing economies versus contracting economies. In a growing economy it is relatively easy to make a profit and do so while supplying a service for the public good. But when the economy begins to contract that becomes more and more difficult for "for profit" companies.

Governments can set up non-profit organizations whose primary goal is to provide services for the public good and they are likely to last longer in a contracting economy. In my experience, contrary to typical capitalist propaganda, they can also be quite efficient. But as the economy contracts so will tax revenues and eventually governments will have to cut back on the services they provide. With good planning though, they can do this in a controlled manner with lots of advanced warning, and give people time to adapt to the situation.

As the economy gets even weaker, co-operatives organized by the people who need the services hold considerable promise. I'll have more to say about this over the next few posts.

The second thing is that if you rely on BAU to make a living, you will find that your own economic circumstances are declining. When you can no longer afford the services you have come to rely on, you'll have find ways to provide them for yourself, and in the process learn how to get by with less, like it or not.

I can consume along with the best of them, and there are certainly all kinds of things that it would be useful to have as we try to become more self reliant. But don't worry too much if you can't afford some of the shiny toys I'll be mentioning in future posts. As well trained consumers we may feel that buying things must be the solution to the problems that face us, but it isn't. Actually, there is no solution to the fix the world is in at the moment, and the best we can do is adapt to the changing conditions. Part of that is learning to get by while consuming less. This is hard for me and I'll bet it's hard for you too. That's why I talked first about preparing by become part of your new community (in posts 7 and 8 of this series), rather that the less important preparations that involve accumulating "stuff".

Back 2012, when I started this blog, the authorities recommended that you be prepared to weather emergencies lasting for as long as three days (72 hours). They were basically saying, "don't rely on us to be there immediately—it may take as long as 72 hours before help arrives." In the meantime, this has been changed to two weeks in some areas. Is emergency response capability declining, or are they expecting more lengthy and severe emergencies? I suspect both. Of course serious "preppers" are laughing at this—they'd recommend that you have supplies on hand for a year or two. I don't disagree, but you have to start somewhere. And as collapse deepens those longer intervals to prepare for will come to seem more reasonable.

Power Outages

Power outages will probably be the most frequent infrastructure failure you'll have to cope with. Short outages have relatively minor impacts, but because electricity is at the heart of so much that goes on in modern civilization, as outages stretch out they start to effect more and more things.

Eventually, it seems very likely that the power grid in many, if not most, areas will cease to function. I encounter two different responses to this idea. Many people cannot conceive that their 24 hour a day, essentially infinite supply of power could every come to an end. Others are fixated on the idea of a sudden and hard crash which will bring the whole of industrial civilization to an end, including the power grid.

I'm somewhere in between, holding what I think is a more detailed and nuanced opinion. Most of the rest of this post is going to be spent talking about how the slow decline of the power grid will go, leaving the responses I would recommend for the next post.

Power outages can be as simple as a utility pole getting knocked over during a traffic accident, to as complex as the grid failures that happened in northeastern North America in 1965 and 2003. And to take it even further, EMPs (electromagnetic pulses) from nuclear weapons or coronal mass ejections (solar flares) can do huge damage to electrical girds which may be very hard to recover from. But I think some of the most common and serious problems with the grid will come from three specific areas:

• The first is equipment failure due to age and/or lack of maintenance, aggravated by overloads such as air conditioning load during summer heat waves. As the economy continues to contract power companies are going to find themselves short of capital and less able to invest in their own systems, leaving those systems more susceptible to failure. /li>
• The second will be damage due to storms that are growing more frequent and more intense due to climate change—things like high winds, tornados and ice storms in particular. Lengthy outages will happen when there are widespread weather related problems combined with shortages of spare parts and limited manpower to install them. Those latter two problems will come mainly from cash strapped utilities trying to save money.
• The third is sabotage. The grid is very exposed to a saboteur who knows what he is doing, and because of its geographically diffuse nature, very hard to secure. As collapse intensifies, there will be increased civil unrest—more angry people looking for easy targets that symbolize the establishment. The grid is certainly one such target.

Of course, these concerns apply to the grid as it exists today, using conventional generation. It seems there is going to be a serious attempt to switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy, primarily solar and wind. Those who are pushing for a "Green New Deal" are telling people that we can use wind and solar to replace fossil fuels, and that in the process more jobs will be created and we'll actually end up more prosperous. This is a very unrealistic dream and just off the top of my head I can think of four serious problems with it:

1. What solar and wind produce is electricity. But electricity supplies only 18 to 20% of our current energy use. Most of the rest comes directly from coal, oil and natural gas, and those fuels are used in ways that will be difficult, if not outright impossible, to replace with electricity.

   The main issue is that a battery is not nearly as effective a way to store energy as a tank of diesel fuel. And there are definite physical limitations on how much better batteries can get— we can probably improve them by a factor of two, but that's about it. Despite what we keep hearing in the news, it simply isn't practical to use batteries to power airplanes or long distance heavy transport by road, rail or sea. The quantity of batteries needed, and the size and weight of those batteries, is the problem.

   There are many industrial processes that use coal or natural gas for heat. Replacing those fuels with electricity may be theoretically possible but we haven't, for the most part, even started to develop ways to do so, much less begun to implement them.

2. Phasing out fossil fuels would require using renewables to supply much larger quantities of electricity than we are currently using. But there are fundamental problems with using renewables to produce even part of the comparatively small amount of electricity we use now.

   One aspect of running a power grid that the general public is largely unaware of is that generation must be matched exactly to the load. Since load is something the grid operator cannot control to any great extent, generation that is "dispatchable"—that can be turned on and off on demand and ramped up and down as required—is very important. Conventional generation is dispatchable to varying degrees but renewable energy sources such as solar and wind are intermittent and for the most part not under the control of the grid operator—the very opposite of dispatchable. As such, renewables only exacerbate the problems of running a grid, especially given the lack of feasible large scale storage technologies. Yes, I know there are a number of storage technologies available but none of them are economical to use on the scale that would be required for use in a power grid with intermittent renewable energy sources like solar and wind.

   The concept of a "smart grid" which gives greater control of both generation and load offers hope of addressing these problems to some minor degree, but only at the price of adding complexity to the system. And adding complexity never increases reliability.

3. The immediate reason for switching away from fossil fuels is to reduce the amount of CO2 being released into the atmosphere in order to combat climate change. But no one seems to be thinking of the carbon footprint of switching away from carbon. The switchover to renewables would be a massive undertaking powered mainly by fossil fuels, and the amount of CO2 being released would greatly increase during that effort.

   Much of this construction effort would also require large quantities of steel and concrete. Making steel and concrete involves the release of CO2, regardless of where the energy comes from—it's inherent to the chemistry of the processes involved.

   So it is by no means obvious that we can get off fossil fuels and onto renewables without creating an even worse climate crisis that the one we are currently facing.

4. Renewables have a very low EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). A high EROEI is essential to the functioning of a modern industrial economy--money is just accounting, energy is really what makes the economy go. Any country which adds a large quantity of renewables to its energy mix will lower its overall average EROEI, making it more difficult to support a growing economy and a high tech industrial society. So even if we could somehow manage to switch over entirely to renewables, we'd have trouble sustaining a high enough level of technology to maintain and repair solar and wind generation facilities. And replacing them when they wear out would be a real stretch. Switching to renewables is something we might be able to do once, but then we'd be in big trouble.

All this is of course based on not having to change our lifestyles, not having to accept a lower level of prosperity and consumption. Indeed one frequently hears people talking about increasing economic growth in order to bring the poor parts of the world up to our level of consumption. It is clear to me that this is not going to happen and that what we really need to do is reduce our levels of consumption down to what can be supported without fossil fuels, using local, sustainable, low tech renewables. It is also clear to me that we will not do this voluntarily, that the majority of our efforts will go into maintaining business as usual regardless of the consequences.

Give all these factors time to work and it will become difficult to continue running the power grid as a whole. Some parts of the gird will simply quit working. Others that have proved unreliable, which place the grid as a whole at risk, will eventually have to be excluded from the grid. These islands will grow until the grid as we know it falls apart.

There will be a few areas where generating equipment will continue to function for a long time and will be able to supply local load. Again, the matching generation and load will be a problem since most such generation comes in large chunks and is a long way from large amounts of load. The most hopeful situations are small hydro (water) powered generators, which can be run at less than full capacity and adjust quickly to match varying loads.

Anyway, it seems clear that we can indeed expect more frequent and longer power outages. But what are the effects of these outages, and what can we do to mitigate them?

The effects of power outages

When the power goes out, you lose the lights, heat, cooling, cooking equipment, refrigeration and so forth in your own home. Even most oil, gas and wood heating systems rely on electricity for control, ignition and circulating fans. Then there are all the services that comes to you from outside your home, that you rely on to just work, but which need electricity to do that.

In general, the most critical services run off batteries which are kept fully charged as long as the power is on. When the power goes out, these services keep right on running as if nothing had happened, at least until the batteries are discharged. The batteries for the controls in power stations are rated for eight hours. The batteries in cell phone towers are rated for two to four hours.

Everything I'm finding on the internet says that the central switching stations for land line telephone service should keep working even during long power outages, which implies both batteries and backup generators. I have some doubts about this, and I'll be keeping an eye out for more detailed information.

Many slightly less critical services have generators that start automatically with only a brief interruption when the power goes out and run as long as there is fuel (usually diesel fuel) in the tank. If arrangements have been made to refill that tank, then this can go on for quite a long time.

Even less critical services than these can have a portable generator hooked up to them if need be. This would include facilities operating on battery power, if the power is off so long that the batteries need to be recharged.

Most service stations don't have backup power so you likely won't be able to get fuel (gasoline, diesel, propane) while the power is off. During long outages the many supply chains that are powered by gasoline and/or diesel fuel will be in trouble.

Natural gas pipelines have to be pressurized to keep to gas flowing through them. Some of the pumps used to do this are powered by natural gas, some by electricity. And I suspect that at least some of the controls for the gas powered pumps are electrical. So your natural gas supply, at least in some areas, will be compromised during electrical outages.

The pumps in municipal water and sewage systems need electrical power too. Some may have backup generators, but not all. If you live on a farm or in a very small town, your toilet is likely gravity feed into a septic system and weeping bed, and will work as long as you have water to flush them. Or perhaps you have already set up a composting toilet which requires no power at all. Your water supply is probably from you own well, with a pump driven by an electric motor that uses 240V AC (if you are in North America). Even if you have a generator, you may need an electrician to help you hook it up to that motor.

Refrigeration of food in grocery stores and pharmaceuticals in pharmacies and hospitals will be jeopardized. Fortunately our local hospital does have a backup generator.

Radio and TV can be important sources of information during emergencies. But you will likely find that only a very few of your local stations are set up to keep broadcasting during power outages.

It would also be great if internet service could continue during power outages. I understand it some areas it does, but we get our internet through the local cable TV company, and even short outages to their facilities knock out our internet connection and our cable TV service, even if the power is still on at our place. Your situation may be different—I hope so.

Oddly, or so it seems to me, most traffic lights aren't backed up in any way and stop working when the power is off.

ATMs won't be working, nor the systems that allows us to pay for things by credit and debit cards. Even if you do have cash in hand, you may find many retail outlets are unable to sell you anything when their cash registers and product code scanners aren't working. Many of them may just lock their doors for the duration of the outage.

Not all of them, though—I was quite impressed during a recent outage when I saw the guy behind the counter at a nearby convenience store beavering away with a cash box, battery operated calculator and a notebook to record sales in. It can be done, but one hopes the prices are marked clearly on items rather than encoded in UPCs. This is an example of an individual (or maybe his manager) taking the situation in hand and keeping things working rather than sitting back and letting them fall apart.

No doubt I am missing many of the potential effects of long power outages, but I think this gives you the flavour of what you'll be facing. Next time I'll talk about how you can mitigate the effects of power outages, both short and long, and what your community can do to cope when it finally finds itself permanently isolated from the grid.

Links to the rest of this series of posts, Preparing for (Responding to) Collapse:

• Preparing for Collapse, A Few Rants, Wednesday, 25 July 2018
• Responding to collapse, Part 2: Climate Change, Saturday, 15 September 2018
• Responding to collapse, Part 3: Declining Surplus Energy, Friday, 26 October 2018
• Responding to collapse, Part 4: getting out of the city, Wednesday, 21 November 2018
• Responding to collapse, Part 5: finding a small town, Friday, 28 December 2018
• Responding to Collapse, Part 6: finding a small town, continued, Monday, 28 January 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 7: A Team Sport Monday, 18 March 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 8: Pitfalls and Practicalities of that Team Sport Tuesday, 26 March 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 9: Getting Prepared, Part 1, Thursday, June 13, 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 10: the future of the power grid, Wednesday, July 17, 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 11: Coping with power outages, the basics, Sunday, August 25, 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 12: Coping with longer power outages, Thursday, September 19, 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 13: keeping the lights on when the grid goes down forever, Wednesday, 16 October 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 14: adapting to life without the grid, Tuesday, 29 October 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 15: shortages of diesel fuel, Wednesday, 27 November 2019
• Responding to Collapse, Part 15: Addendum, Saturday, 21 December 2019
  Diesel vs. battery powered semi trucks for shipping
  Biodiesel powered tractors vs. horses for farming
• Responding to Collapse, Part 16: Shortages of Money, Part 1, Tuesday, 3 March 2020
• Responding to Collapse, Part 17: Shortages of Money, Part 2, Friday, 27 March 2020