| | | This post is about Disaster Preparedness, since we live in Eastern Canada with very cold winters and an electric grid which is at some risk to damage from ice storms and (in summer) remnant hurricanes. Very occasional semi-catastrophic spring (snowmelt) floods are an issue, with the village cut off for a week or two (the nearest town is about 20 miles). No perceived general need in this particular sub-set of our society to be "survivalists" at the individual level and no wish or need to go off grid unless we are forced to. In our younger years we heated with our own wood, and were pretty self sufficient. In our 80s, that's no longer practical, so what to do? Our thoughts might be interesting to other rural dwellers in like situations.
We have a small, older house with a productive vegetable garden, and neighbours who farm, so there will always be lots of local meat and vegetables. Our own rather old fashioned big garden is pretty productive, too - no machines, but raised beds grow more than we can eat, in late summer. We think that the likely worst situation would be a grid failure for two to four weeks. We get power cuts of from one to three days maybe six times a year (worst case). In summer that's uncomfortable, but we won't die. Just moving aboard our boat might even be all that's needed (solar panels which we have work well at that scale).
What we did was to spend serious money on re-building the house. All new windows and doors, super-insulation everywhere (e.g. 18" in the roof, up to eight inches in the walls), electric heat with separate controllers in each room, and two propane heaters as back-up in the basement and in the largest living area (natural gas is not available). We investigated heat pumps and calculated that they were not cost effective with our low consumption. We have a small generator, enough to run the deep freezer only. Being boaters, lights and cooking and water supply (flexible bags pre-filled) are already solved.
The final result is that we can meet our "survival off grid" targets (1 to four weeks) and can afford to live within our income!
Last year (2016) we consumed 16,716 Kwh of grid electricity, of which heat was 6,618 Kwh.
Thoughts, comparisons?
Tony.
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