For Those Unprepared, Will It Be Like This..??

[Emerald]

I can relate to the Los Angeles episode, because after Katrina, it was nuts in this part of Louisiana. Criminals went wild. Nothing was safe.
We had a mandatory evacuation issued for Gustave, but I stayed hidden in my home. I wasn't going to tough out a storm on an interstate or run the risk that criminals would be breaking into my house or my relatives homes on the estate.
I think most of us on the forum keep certain things stored. I can go a long time without going to the store if I have to. Dried beans, milk, flours, meats, potatoes. I like to keep some extra propane handy for cooking outside too.
Katrina thought me to not fill my freezer too much. I have a generator, but what if I can't run it? What if no gas? Better to live out your defrosting freezer for a week or 2 and have less spoiled food. Old ways are safer....can things or dry them or keep them live until you are close to needing them.
Of course all of this will be useless unless you have NRA stickers hanging around the place.

Just a thought here about the freezer problems with no power- my hubby and I both had the same idea on black Friday- one of the stores that we both went to(different times tho but same day--we split up boys and girls went in separate cars lol)the store had a car adapter for home (AC) stuff, you can just plug it into your car/truck and plug two 120 things into it. Like phone chargers(if you don't have one already) my new stove which is gas but you need to have electric if you want to bake anything(who's dumb idea was this anyway?) the top can just be lit by matches/lighter and my freezer-we try to have the car tanks filled at all times and I figure that if I lose power and know that it will be off for awhile I can at least plug the freezer in while I try to can or cook or figure out how to take care of what is in there so that I don't lose it. I ended up buying one and the hub's also bought one! If they work well I will post back. I would like to buy a bigger wattage one if they do work. who knows they might have one that I can get 220 out of for the well.
But the thinking here was if we know that the power was only going to be out for a few days we could run the car to keep the freezer cold for about one hour or two hours each day as that would probably keep the freezer cold enuf for stuff to not thaw. And also plugging in our fridge every so often to help keep stuff cold.

 

[i_am2bz]

I'm not clear, Emerald...are you talking about those rectangular inverter things...?

 

[Emerald]

I'm not clear, Emerald...are you talking about those rectangular inverter things...?

Well these are the smaller versions but they plug into your car's lighter port and then you can plug in two different AC things. I guess it is a DC to AC inverter. We got them for about 75%off the original price.
We do camp every so often and we sometimes forget to charge or we are not in a place where they have electric and we wanted one for our camera's charger too.
it is like a big box with two outlets and one part that just plugs in to the car.
The other one I would like to buy is much more heavy duty and can be plugged in to the lighter or you can use jumper cables and hook it right to the battery. Which might be of better use in a SHTF situation.
I bake our breads and bread stuffs and while i do have an outdoor wood oven, there have been times when our fun, off and on, electricity will pop off right while I am baking and of course the new oven has a computer chip that runs the oven part(while I love my new stove and oven, I don't know what I was thinking getting an oven that is not just a knob control ). Now I can just run the cords out to the car and plug it in to finish baking.
I have had a cold since Christmas and the meds make me ramble a bit... Sorry bout that!

 

[TanksHill]

Emerald,

Do they say what the maximum watts are on the inverter?

g

 

[rebecca100]

We have had several power inverters and they are GREAT! It usually says the wattage on it. One plugs into the power port on the car and the other just clips onto the battery terminals. The only problem is that you have to have plenty of gas in your vehicle to be able to crank it and recharge the battery. They go dead pretty quickly under a load. Talking about WM prices..... I went shopping for groceries there for the first time since we came back and left almost in tears and with a lot less than I had anticipated on my budget.

 

[Denim Deb]

Depending on the size of your inverter, you need a separate, heavy duty battery. My DH got me one Christmas of 2009. He was going to install it in my truck so I could use my (electric) chain saw out in the woods. He never got it in. Then this year, we found a 2000 watt generator for sale for $150.00. He bought that. I can finally cut up all the wood that people tell me I can have! B4 I was limited as to what was small enough to fit in my truck as well as light enough for me to pick up.

 

[rhoda_bruce]

Now there is an idea! I actually have one of those, but I never considered plugging it into an extention, leading to a freezer or fridge. It might need to be more heavy duty or connected directly to the battery, but it would be a cheap alternative to a generator. I have 2 generators. One runs my whole house, but it needs breaks every 8 hours (precaution) and the other runs the bear necessities.......refrigeration, washing machine, AC, a few lights and tv.........some of which I can do without, in a pinch.
I might want to check into this a bit more, because I will not be willing to loan out a generator, even if someone thinks I have an 'extra' one.

 

[Denim Deb]

That's why I got the solar panels for my tack shed. I already have a 2000 watt inverter, as well as a heavy duty battery. I'm hoping that the solar panels will be enough to keep the battery charged up so I have power in my shed. I also found a 200 watt heater, so once my husband finishes the inside, as long as this works, next winter, I'll be able to keep it warm in there. I went to put some medication on one of RU's horses yesterday, and the stuff was pretty much frozen!

 

[Emerald]

Emerald,

Do they say what the maximum watts are on the inverter?

g

The ones we bought were only 100watts.
Rebbecca! Thanks for the info-I figured that if you started the car and let it run while you were using the inverter it would not run the battery down as much. The general idea on cars idling is that it is about 1 gallon per hour(probably a bit more for my big beasty) and it would be worth that $3 bucks to keep hundreds of dollars worth of food frozen.
Plus I love the idea of solar panels and the hubs and I have been discussing them a bit- if I could find a few solar panels I could keep a few marine deep cycle batteries charged and just pop an inverter on it to run the oven..
And for the question of how much power does the oven pull--not as much as the hubby feared-as it is just a small cpu to run the oven and as the oven is gas the power is not too bad. Now I figure that if you have an electric oven you would have to have more than just one dinky car battery to run it!
I would love to have a generator but the investment is out of the budget at the moment. The hubby looked into the natural gas generators that hook right up to the main line and if your power is out for more than 5 minutes it will kick on and switch everything over, we found out that one for our house would only be about $3000! Since we have pipeline nat. gas it would be quite convenient.
It kinda sucks that everything that is good for the environment costs more than we can afford.

 

[Denim Deb]

In the book of Revelation, it talks about widespread famine in the end times. I have to wonder how much of that will be due not only to conditions in the world, but also to government control. I found this article today, and it makes an interesting read.

http://socialistworker.org/2005-2/556/556_04_RealHeroes.shtml