Comment by DoubleGlazing | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoubleGlazing | Hacker News Reader

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My wife hails from a little rural village a few miles outside of Syracuse, NY. A place that when the weather gets bad, it REALLY gets bad. There have been snow storms where they have been without power and blocked in for a few days. As a result of this my in-laws have become preppers without realising it. They keep a supply of petrol, dried food, water, fire wood, batteries, gas bottles and have various types of radio at their disposal. They also have a backup generator for the house. They are in the process of fitting solar to try and avoid using the generator when things are bad because in a snow storm a generator sound really creepy. They could live for a week without any lifestyle changes if the power went off and the roads were impassible.

When we were getting married and all the extended family arrived at the house for the big do, some relatives turned out to be preppers and were fascinated with the setup. One phrase I kept hearing was "We read in this book that if you do this, then..." and my father-in-law would respond with "Well, when we were actually without power during the 93 blizzard we learned that..." Basically experience trumped mass produced prepper books.

To a certain extent weather makes preppers of us all. I daresay people in Syracuse can rely on harsher weather coming more regularly than down here on the Texas coast. We get hurricanes and tropical storms but they have the entire Gulf Coast and Eastern Seaboard to choose from.

Every time a storm comes we get the usual advisories to stock up on a few days of food, check flashlight batteries, fill a clean tub with tap water for drinking, etc. Those things are drilled into your head from grade school and are repeated on news broadcasts before every major storm.

What's interesting is the unexpected byproduct of outages. Particularly here in the South home construction techniques have changed over the last 100 years. Older homes have lots of large, screened windows, whole house fans and vented attics to help move large amounts of air and help with heat. Even without power you can open all your windows and get a cross breeze. New construction is heavily insulated, has fewer windows and makes no concessions for mass airflow outside the air conditioning system.

Hurricane Katrina was an epiphany for many home owners down here as power was out for weeks afterwards; previously comfortable homes became sweltering hotboxes. The effect on local generator supply was immediate and obvious: sold out everywhere. I heard through the grapevine of entrepreneurs driving down truckloads of them to make a quick buck.

Even so gasoline-fueled generators can be difficult to keep fueled after a hurricane - people leaving the city have a tendency to deplete supplies and gas stations may not have power to pump. But natural gas tends to stay on even when power fails since gas distribution systems can have their own generation and some use the fuel they're moving to maintain pressure.

All the anecdotal evidence I have points to a heavy uptick in natural-gas-fired whole house generator sales after Katrina. In fact there was a trend for a while of new construction actively advertising whole house generator inclusion. I think it happened to a lesser extent again after Ike. Life really stinks down here without air conditioning. I guess my point is most preppers seem to concentrate on food and water, but at least down here electricity is high on the list. :-)

It's pretty fascinating to me that people don't default to having a couple days of food in the house. I guess if you have an electric stovetop dry goods aren't so useful when the power is out, but for people with gas, $10 of pasta will go a long way (and is easy to rotate through). I might not have a lot of choices left after 3 days, but there'd be food whether I went to the store or not.

I'm sure the reliability of the fuel supply in the aftermath of a disaster is a factor for the nat gas generators, but if you are going to install one permanently, not having to deal with deliveries and stale fuel are also pretty big advantages.

Oh yeah! Far superior to the hassle of dealing with gasoline and unless you buy a monster generator you're not going to power your entire house off of it anyway. Agreed wrt some simple dry goods. A box of crackers and some cans of tuna will go a long way, assuming you can find the can opener. :-)

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