Comment by nucleardog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nucleardog | Hacker News Reader

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Liquid fuels are relatively light and easy and quick to transfer.

When we had no power for a week, I drove a couple hours away to a gas station, spent 15 minutes filling jerry cans, and came back with enough energy to power my entire house for a week.

Yeah, in a continental or global disaster, we’re quickly going to be unable to get our hands on gasoline without the drilling and refineries and distribution, etc and electricity would be much more available. In the much more frequent and likely regional disaster… I’d prefer to be stuck with gasoline right now.

I could definitely see a future where instead of a noisy generator I power my house off of my car for a week until the charge is getting low, supplemented by some solar, then drive a couple hours to where the electricity is working and spend a half hour charging it back up.

I just don’t think we’re quite there yet. A typical long range EV right now, after the power to get me there and back, would have about 25kWh of power I could use for other things. That would be three hours of driving to replace 3 hours of generator output.

I've actually lived through evacuations of a major metro area...twice.

Both times gasoline quickly became incredibly hard to come by. Electricity would have been a lot easier.

Also, there was massive amounts of traffic trying to leave. An idling car slowly creeping through a 100mi traffic jam still uses a good bit of gas. An EV uses very little energy slowly rolling in the same situation. Sure at normal speeds I would have easily had 300+mi in the gas cars, but my mileage in traffic was massively worse on the 14+ hour drive from Houston to San Antonio.

I have as well, in hurricane zones, but electricity was out for multiple weeks, but gasoline was still available (if quite expensive due to market forces, but of course that meant that there were still a few gallons available for everyone.)

And here come the headlines about gas shortages in Florida. Many hours of idling to go <100mi, stranding cars along the highway. Meanwhile, EVs still charging just fine.

    > spent 15 minutes filling jerry cans, and came back with enough energy to power my entire house for a week.

Wow, this really feels like a stretch!

How much fuel were you using to power your house for a week? I find it hard to believe you can pump more than 100 gallons of fuel in 15 mins.

    > in a continental or global disaster

Have you lived through any of these? If yes, can you provide a real world example, not a hypothetical scenario.

In theory you can fill cans in parallel

Don't even need to...

First off, apparently gas pumps should have a flow rate around 8-10gpm. So 100 gallons is still only ten minutes of pumping.

But also... If you need 100 gallons to keep your house going for the week maybe, I don't know, try turning a couple (hundred) lights off or something for now?

Using 100 gallons over 7 days is 14.3 gallons per day. Assuming you can kill the generator while you're sleeping, figure 16 hours you have it running. So you're using 0.9 gallons per hour. Looking online, looks like for a gasoline generator ~6kWh/gallon is fairly typical.

So you're planning for, averaged out, a 5.5kWh draw continuously every hour you're awake.

If that's your typical power usage, you're looking at 5.51630.4 = 2,675kWh/mo, which at our electricity rates would cost me about $375 just in usage charges to buy from the grid (never mind the connection fees and stuff).

In reality we're using more like 4-6 gallons per day.

Diesel pumps in a truck stop (on the commercial side, where the big rigs fill up) are incredibly fast.

(Side note: I have noticed that the prices on the big rig side of a truck stop are usually slightly higher for the same diesel fuel!)

> How much fuel were you using to power your house for a week? I find it hard to believe you can pump more than 100 gallons of fuel in 15 mins.

Well, maybe you should have stopped after the question and we could have cleared up the confusion!

If I run the generator from morning to night with typical loads, I'm usually burning through about 5-6 gallons a day. So a week of fuel is 35-45 gallons.

Because I know "I actually did it" isn't a good answer, went and looked and the typical flow rate for a gas pump is supposed to be 8-10gpm. So... actual time holding the handle down on the pump, worst case, is about five and a half minutes.

> in a continental or global disaster, we’re quickly going to be unable to get our hands on gasoline without the drilling and refineries and distribution

Did you... disagree with that? Or are you just saying things to say things? Is there a big culture of backyard oil refining where you are? There isn't where I am. I didn't think I needed lived experience to say "if the refineries are shut down and the roads are impassible, oil products are going to be pretty hard to come by".

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