How's about that Road Warrior?

I thought we could go a little Mad Max this time. If any of you younger readers haven't seen it, you should Netflix The Road Warrior. At least this way you'll get the references.

If you're a bit more on the "screw society, I'm getting a cabin in some remote area" side of things, then here are a few tips should the poop hit the proverbial fan:

• When selecting armaments, you should favor anything that fires a 9mm round, shotgun shells, 7.62x39, or .22 calliber ammunition. These are the most common ammunition types and will be the easiest to scrounge.
• Bows and crossbows are also good to have. Should you need to, you could probably fashion new arrows yourself.
• Consider who your neighbors are. Unless you want to be a total hermit and live wearing animal skins you will need to interact with people. Make sure to build a rapport with your neighbors. You'll at the minimum need to trade with them at some point.
• Don't have any tools that run on fossil fuels. Chainsaws, lawn mowers, tractors, etc. If you must have fossil fuel try to choose diesel whenever possible. That way you might be able to rig up some sort of biodiesel "refinery" after the petrol distribution systems fail.
• Get as much of your survival gear and tools as possible in advance. Things like knives, shovels, tents, rope and other gear will be at a premium in a Mad Max scenario.
• Unless you plan to survive on trade, you will need to be able to farm for yourself. Get your farming equipment in advance (i.e. before the doo-doo hits the fan). Like the tools mentioned above, they will be at a premium when the super markets close down. These tools should be manual whenever possible.
• Be prepared to defend you and yours. How many magazines do you have for your rifle? One clip for your rifle may be fine when you're goofing around on the range, but you may want more onhand for emergencies.
• For purposes of trade and providing for the common defense, it may be advantageous to form "coops" or "cooperatives" with your neighbors. More than likely you won't be able to grow all the foods you need, mill grain, bake bread, plant and harvest cotton (or wool), make clothing, build and/or repair a home, etc all by yourself. Coops will help you and your neighbors coordinate your efforts so the community can provide for everyone's needs.
• If you live in a city and the sh!t hits the fan, you will need to get out, more than likely. Have a plan for this. How to get out and where you will go at a minimum.
• Don't panic, whatever you do. Having a plan for various emergency situations will help you beat panic.
• If you live in a city and need to get out, wouldn't it be nice if you had, say, a 3 day cushion of supplies you could pickup and take with you as you dash out the door? You can get them here.

Step 1: Efficiency

The easiest thing you can do to reduce your impact on the environment is to reduce the amount of energy you use in your home. To be able to do this, you need to know a few terms and some simple equations. These equations will allow you to figure out where the culprits are in your home.

The Terms

1. The Water Pipe Analogy - Think of a wire carrying electricity like it was a pipe carrying water.
2. Voltage - measured in Volts (V). Every appliance you plug into the wall uses either 120V or 240V. 120 in America and 240 in most places in Europe. Voltage is like the pressure in the pipe.
3. Current - measured in Amps (I or A). Think of this as the rate that water flows through the pipe.
4. Resistance - measured in Ohms (R). This is like the width of the pipe. It measures how much resistance to the flow of electricity there is in a component or system.
5. Power - Measured in Watts (W). This a measure of the "juice" required by an appliance. Think of this as the amount of water that flows through a pipe.

Each appliance will usually list the power it consumes in watts. If not, you can determine the wattage used by reading the voltage (V) and current (Amps - A) off the label on the back. Simply multiply volts by amps to get watts.

Okay, so what does this all mean? Well, let's talk about it in the same terms that your electrical company does. They bill you by the kiloWatt-hour. A kiloWatt-hour is a thousand Watts of power provided over an hour. Essentially it is power (W) times time (H).

How about an example? You have a 65 Watt incandescent light bulb that you keep on 24 hours a day, all month long. Here's how we figure out how many kiloWatt-hours (kWh) this uses over the month:

(65W/1000) x 24 Hours/day x 30 days/month = kWh/month

Note: the 65W/1000 portion of the equation above gives us kiloWatts. A kiloWatt is a thousand Watts.

Okay, so in our case we get 46.8 kWh/month. On your electric bill it should tell you how much the electric company charges you per kWh. In many cases this is seasonal. In September my utility charges 7.09 cents a kWh. So how much did this light bulb cost to run all month long? That's easy:

46.8 kWh X 7.09 cents/kWh = 331.81 cents or about $3.32 a month.

Now go around your house and count up the number of light bulbs you have. A lot, right? Admittedly, not all of them are on 24 hours a day, but I bet some are. You can calculate the cost of your lights very accurately by making a list of every light in the house, along with an estimation of how many hours of the day they are in use. Then run them all through the equations above.

Does that sound like too much work? Yeah, I kinda figured it might be. Fortunately for you, I have taken the time to create a spreadsheet that will calculate your entire home's energy usage. All you have to do is load up this spreadsheet on a laptop and walk around the house collecting information. Plug in the numbers and voila! You have a pretty darned accurate estimate of how much power your home consumes in a month!

Email me for a copy of the spreadsheet @ apocolypseblog@gmail.com. And yes, I know apocolypse is misspelled. I didn't want to have to go through all of the trouble of fixing it. It will even tell you how much money you save by making changes.

Changes

Simply put - change out all electrical appliances and other items with energy efficient substitutes. That sounds expensive, but consider this:

According to the US Department of Energy, every dollar spent on energy efficiency will save three to five dollars in generating equipment. ¹

This applies to any sort of off-grid system you may be thinking of (solar, wind) or the coal powered plant the utility might be building. This doesn't even begin to account for savings you will reap in reduced electrical costs over the life of the appliance.

An easy way to start on the path to energy efficiency is to replace your incandescent bulbs with compact flourescent (CF) bulbs. The average bulb lasts 10 times as long as an incandescent bulb. This means that the "expensive" CF bulb at $2.50 a piece is actually less expensive than the incandescent bulb sold at 40 cents since you'll have to buy 10 of them for every one CF bulb.

Okay, so just in the cost of bulbs we have saved $1.50 by buying the CF bulb. Now imagine we replace the 65W bulb in the equation above with a CF bulb. Here's how the equation looks with a CF bulb that will supply equivalent light:

(15W/1000) x 24 hrs/day x 30 days/month = 10.8 kWh/month

Wow! The incandescent bulb used 46.8 kWh/month versus 10.8 kWh for the CF bulb. How much money did this save us?

10.8 kWh X 7.09 cents/kWh = 77 cents

Since the incandescent bulb costed us $3.32 a month and the CF costed 77 cents, we have already saved $2.55 in electricity a month by changing one high-use bulb! Now how many light bulbs did you have in your house? The money adds up quickly.

Another simple and cheap upgrade is to upgrade to a low-flow showerhead. If you live in the city, this will save you money on your water bill and electric bill (less water used equals less water to heat). I recently bought this one.

If you live on a well, then the low-flow showerhead still helps you out with the lowered amount of water you are heating to take showers. If you are in an area prone to droughts, this showerhead might be the difference between the well running dry or not.

We will talk about efficiency more in the future. If you really want to learn about how to make your home more efficient, I highly suggest The Renewable Energy Handbook by William H. Kemp.

1 The Renewable Energy Handbook by William H. Kemp

Who peed in his Wheaties?

For the first post here on Survive the Apocalypse I guess I should lay down the basic premise for this blog and maybe tell you a bit about myself and my lovely wife, with whom I will be writing this blog.

I am currently a city-dwelling young professional. Some may even call me a yuppie. They'd be wrong, but I can see where they'd get the impression. I am fairly young, I do live in a city (urban), and I work in IT (professional).

I used to blog many, many moons ago back when it was called "keeping an online journal." I would write in my journal every day back in 1999, 2000, and 2001. I was separated from my first wife and I had all of the time and angst in the world to fuel my rantings.

My lovely wife, apocalypsegal, was also an early "blogger" back before it was called blogging. We actually met through our journals.

Shortly after meeting my current (and last!) wife things were just too groovy. The list of things I was pissed off about got smaller and smaller. My need to vent and to vent every damned day diminished and then went away. I stopped posting and eventually my domain name registration lapsed.

I don't think I even have backups of my old entries anymore.

Then came the explosion of blogs and I thought, "Well, I'll never do that again. I mean - how passe can you be?"

But here I am. Here we are, my wife and I.

"Why?", you ask.

Well, I'm putting on this little dog and pony show for you for a few reasons:

1. It's free now! Thanks to blogspot I even get a decent URL for nothing!
2. I need to vent again. More on that later...
3. It's a great way to store my thoughts.
4. I can't lose this data because I misplaced a CD or a hard drive burned out.
5. This allows me to share with you, the general public, information and concerns I feel very strongly about.

So now you know why I started this blog. Now what's it about?

Simply put: Everything is going to Hell. You know it and I do, too.

The dollar isn't worth the paper it's printed on. Just this week the Canadian dollar surpassed the dollar in value. No offense to Canada, but if their currency is worth more than America's, then America has been managed very poorly.

The dollar's lack of value is indicative of many other problems. As a nation we are in debt. Mainly so we could fight a war that has nothing to do with anything but oil. Here's a little factoid that literally turns my stomach:

"Based on the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard public finance lecturer Linda J. Bilmes, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) recently determined that the Iraq war costs $720 million per day, $500,000 per minute – enough to provide homes for nearly 6,500 families, or health care for 423,529 children in just one day."

I got the above quote from one of the RSS feeds to which I subscribe. I'll credit it if I can remember where I got it.

So instead of investing in our nation we invest in bullets and bombs that can only be used once. Meanwhile bridges collapse, children go without health care, our nation's streets serve as the only home many Americans know.

Instead of enriching the entire nation we enrich a few defense contractor CEOs. We enrich Exxon and Chevron while our education system is in decline and our health care system is a nightmare.

We have money to kill, but not to grow. We have money for bombs but not for books or housing. We have money for destruction but not for dignity.

Our priorities are all wrong.

Global warming, impending oil shortages, and possible global shortages in water supplies are just some of the environmental issues that confront humanity as a whole.

As Americans the rise of China's industrial might is something that should have us much more concerned than we are. The rapid rise of America's industrial capacity precipitated our rise as a major global power. Of course it will do the same for China.

With an entire Damocles Armory hanging over the head of society, it isn't too far-fetched a notion that our way of life may change very soon. Whose life will change? I fear every one's life will take a turn for the worse. Nowhere will this be more true than in America.

By any objective measure, Americans live a gluttonous lifestyle. We are five percent of the world's population and we consume 20-25% of the world's energy. We get everything prepackaged and ready to eat from a store.

We in America are, per capita, the most polluting nation on Earth as well. How many sparkling clean SUVs with a single occupant do you see driving down any stretch of the road at any given time? I bet the answer is "a lot."

How many of us live right next door to people we don't know? I don't know most of my neighbors. Our increasing isolation is very, very bad for us as a social species. It is much easier to stand idly by as a complete stranger is mistreated. It's much easier to not be outraged when someone you don't know is laid off or has medical bills that ruin them. It's much easier to stand idly by as the authorities abuse their power when you aren't the one being abused ("First they came for them, but I was not one of them, so I said nothing...")

So I am writing this blog in order to prepare. I am preparing for a change. The good news is that what we will learn together on this journey will be beneficial for not only you, but your environment, your local economy, and yes, young patriots - probably even your nation (whichever nation that is).

There doesn't have to be an Apocalypse in order for you to reap these benefits. The purpose of this blog is to document my family's transition from gluttonous American waster-consumers into a family that lives in more harmony with their environment and their neighbors.

If none of the worst case scenarios come to pass (global climate change, world economic depression brought about by a collapse of the oil-economy, etc) it will be because people took actions like the ones we will discuss. Actions that fall into these two basic categories:

1. Reducing environmental impact
2. Increasing local involvement

Topics for future posts will range from Mad Max to Einstein (not really) to Julia Child. We will discuss preparation for emergencies, cooking healthy, renewable energy and energy efficiency (two topics that cannot be discussed separately).

As I read more books I will include them in the Required Reading section on the right hand side of the page. At this stage I have read Wilderness Survival by Tom Brown and I am just starting The Renewable Energy Handbook by William H. Kemp.