I know I’m just one of many here looking to prepare for a possible SHTF scenario.
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If you haven’t been keeping up, Reuters has been reporting a possible attack on US infrastructure soon.
“Americans should prepare for cyber sabotage from Chinese hackers, US official warns”
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I can pretty much power my whole house with the AC500 and 4 B300s batteries, with 2.3Kw (actual, not the theoretical wattage ) of solar panels into the two PV inputs, plus three 300 watt panels directly into 3 of the batteries, (and soon to add one to the 4th battery.
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I only have one 220v appliance, and that’s my central heating/cooling, so there’s no need for that setup (and expense.) Electric heaters and air conditioners can fill in for that.
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So it can be done as a DIY system and build over time. And it’s still portable for say, an RV.
In the meantime, I expect Nevada Energy to change out my meter, thinking it’s malfunctioning because my bill is so low.
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@St8kout Thank you for your feedback on the use of AC500.
As a large capacity off-grid energy storage system, its benefits are very obvious. If you add another AC500 host, you can build a 240V split-phase system even more :)
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I would wager that a lot of us here come from a perspective of personal preparedness though we don’t fit the description of the typical tin foil hat conspiracy theorist that the MSM would have you believe. We have plenty of reason and good examples to not trust the supposed “people in charge” and the “system” to continue to function without disruption.
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Over the years I’ve kept up with the possibility of an EMP attack. As most know, Iran has been working on a nuke for years, but more specifically an EMP nuke, one that would detonate in the atmosphere instead of trying to hit a city.
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Every time someone in Congress introduces a bill to strengthen our grid, it gets put on hold. It’s understandably complicated as to where to start and what will work. I know that power stations are not portable. If destroyed they would have to be rebuilt from the ground up, so there’s no easy solution there.
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We have a couple of solar panel farms in Vegas, and some muslim recently drove his car into one of them thinking he could shut down the whole city. All he did was smash a few of the thousand panels there, which were easy enough to bypass for the few days it took to reinstall them, lol. But the point is, attacks on the grid are always pending.
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I have read a lot on EMP and I personally don’t think its the biggest issue we face. I do however think that a long term, wide spread grid failure would be the worse case scenario that we could face. Society would break down within 2 weeks IMO. Its hard to say exactly what could happen and when. If some sort of SHTF event does happen I imagine things some will play out entirely differently than anticipated and others will happen just like we thought. If the grid fails it will probably be from some sort of system hack. that’s a scary thought because everything is internet driven and without power its all down.
A computer hack of the grid would likely only be a short term software problem, as opposed to an EMP causing actual damage to equipment. No doubt techs can get the Grid back up in a relatively short time. From previous major blackouts it’s inconvenient but not really catastrophic.
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If your computer gets hacked you can simply wipe the drive and reinstall the OS and backups. It really only affects those without backups and don’t want to lose famoly pictures or whatever. Hackers can’t actually damage computer components.
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I once had a rootkit virus, and while some tech sites told me how to remove it, it was easier and faster to just wipe the drive and reinstall Windows. I like having a fresh install anyway; I used to do it annually.
I have worked in operations at power plants and oil refinery’s my entire career. I don’t think the effects of an EMP burst are completely understood only speculated. Though its true that damage to multiple main power transformers would be fatal. But they have relays that disconnect them from the grid in milliseconds. Its also true that you can correct a hack and virus, but if the outage were widespread it would take days upon days to get the grid restarted. I’m very familiar with starting up large units and the first thing they need is power and most of them just use grid power to start up. a small percentage have back up generators to start their plants. it also true that you could use hydro, wind and solar to get the grid bump started but the coordination effort would be monumental. The scenario I’m talking about is a coast to coast outage, all 3 grids. That would be a true SHTF event. When a hurricane wipes out power to a region its not as critical because the power is still on a hundred miles away. Even the big east coast/new york outages were straightened out in a few days. but that was just a portion of one grid. If all three grids were to fail, they couldn’t be just restarted in a day or two.
