generating idiocy

GENERATING IDIOCY


Some things that I do are pure brilliance in their return on investment. After our first winter in the high desert ( for you easterners, all desert in Nevada is not the same. The southern tip is Mohave-think the Sahara- and the rest of the state is part of the Great Basin, five thousand feet elevation- think Mongolia ) which in retrospect was very mild, I was so traumatized by the cold that I spent three hundred bucks and added insulation to every interior wall ( mostly foam padding, some foil backed bubble wrap ). This doubled the amount of heat retained by solar exposure ( for instance, even if the day before was 30 degrees, if the sun is out it gets twenty five degrees warmer inside and usually keeps it about twenty degrees warmer inside overnight- 29 degrees waking up in the morning is bad, but great compared to the 10 degrees outside ). A year and a half ago I added insulated skirting to the trailer, and for a mere $80 or so that was a great investment. It helps keep your feet much warmer in winter. Although, again, it is all relative. Mildly cold feet rather than your feet feeling like they are frostbite. But then there are really crappy investments, like my gasoline generator.

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I’ve always hated generators, and I dislike writers who suggest them for survivalists. It is one thing to want them for off-grid living. That makes for electricity being a very expensive luxury. But for a survivalist to own one, you have to wonder what the crap they are thinking, if indeed that is actually what they are doing. A survivalist that thinks a generator will be a viable tool after the collapse must rate his calamities at the scale of one being an ice storm taking out the power line and ten, end of the world, being a rate increase from the power company and the frac gasoline from North Dakota selling for an unheard of five bucks a gallon. Oh, the travesty! Friggin idiots. I’m sorry, but planning on fossil fuels after the end of civilization is delusional and retarded, and I can’t think of a nicer way of saying it. Because of that attitude, I lived off only my solar panels for two and a half years ( granted, panels with battery storage is also short term, the batteries being good for only a few years. But that is why I have AA battery lights using rechargeables, to keep going years after the 12v battery dies. But even the not perfect 12v is far better than a generator. Years rather than days of power ). But because I love all my minions and feel bad for them and try to help them out by thoughtfully pointing out all their faults, I gave in to the incessant demands and went from a five day a week publishing schedule to a seven day a week one at the beginning of 2011. Well, I thought I needed a generator to recharge the batteries on the weekend after writing on a cloudy day ( using the computer for just an hour adds about 60% to the amount of juice I use each day- normally the lights use about 30 watts in the winter and we watch about two hours of TV a night for another twenty watts ). But looking back over the last year of records, the generator was only critical less than half a dozen times. I was a damn fool for buying it.

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Okay, I understand that everyone’s weather differs. Some folks get a lot more cloudy days ( although I bet that the clouds mean more rain which means actual trees grow there which means you can heat with wood ). My situation is contingent on that. But every area being different just means your means of generation are different. The Pacific northwest might be mostly cloudy, but that just means you can hook up a year round, round the clock, micro-hydro power generator. In my case, it is normal to get sun, so passive solar heat and solar panels work best for me. And using a generator for back-up was overestimating the amount of cloudy days I was going to get. Our first winter here, we had two weeks of solid clouds. My 15 watts of solar panels didn’t even cut it for keeping one light on that whole time ( this was before LED bulbs, using the old fashion incandescent 18 watt auto bulb- nowadays my 3 watt LED delivers more light than that old bastard ). The battery drained down and never recovered for a month, at which time we used candles and flashlights ( big time suck ). Well, I added another 15 watt panel and shortly thereafter Big Bear turned me on to LED’s, bless his pea-picking heart. Since then we’ve had only six days of cloudy days, max. So I can usually count on the last day of the week to charge the batteries all the way back up. If I have 70 watts of panels, and use 50 watts a night plus 60 watts on the weekend writing two days, I use about 600 watts a week. In eight hours, the panels deliver 560 watts give or take. I shouldn’t even have needed a generator in the first place, but that initial two weeks when I moved here kept scaring me.
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Looking back over the last year, I had one month, January, with a lot of clouds. I used the generator every weekend and three times during the week. Yet for all that I still only ran the generator three hours. And that was A QUARTER of the years generator use. January through May I used the thing ten hours. This December one hour, and the other six months I used it only two hours total, not for power but just to keep it maintained. Thirteen hours for the year, and only eleven were critical. I wrote for a hundred hours or slightly over in that year. You could say that I only needed the generator less than ten percent of the time. Now, that might still make a case for the generator. 10% use means 10% of the time you still got a weekend article. Articles equate to Amazon income. But once you compare that to the alternative of added solar panels, the generator loses.

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The generator cost me $150. Add a gas can, filling the can, the two stroke oil and a plastic tub to keep the rain off, and it cost $200. Then add the $40 I spent on the AC battery charger I had to buy after the generators DC plug stopped working ( cheaper than getting it repaired ). For that same amount of money I could have bought 45 watts worth of solar panels. After two weeks of clouds, on the first sunny day the added panels would have given 360 watts. Those two weeks would have seen me use 180 watts for the computer, at most. And as an added bonus, year round that same added panels would have given me 60% more generated power every single day. And this all assumes the generator never breaks and gas is never factored into the equation. Simply, I was an idiot and wasted the money. The investment will never pay itself off like the panels would have. Of course, in my defense, the PVC pipe and earth pipe project wasted the same amount of money, so you could say I’m always an idiot.

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