Comment Battery backup / living in the woods. (Score 1) 198
I lived with poor power for decades and when I was in high school I used to take the old batteries from gas cars and use them for battery backup. I started by running on 12v car lights, since the break lights have 2 filaments they could also be recycled. I once collected so many of them I was able to get 60 volts to light a neon light that usually worked on 110VAC, but discovered that the DC input was just fine for it. I used to design relay and transistor circuits to turn on lights automatically when the power was off and it was dark and the light had been on before the power failed. So I guess I have been using old car batteries for many years already, this makes perfect sense for a house that can get solar panels, you can be up after the hurricane, maybe with less power, and only if your panels survived the winds intact, which is a big if. We did loose power for 3 weeks after David in '79. It was interesting to see how the electric company had to repair lines across town to be able to start the big power plants, the ones that could only be started with lots of power to warm them up. I still keep an old APC UPS for the day that I can setup a solar panel to do this again. Technology has become much cheaper and better, we can go off the grid with solar and wind, if I can get bandwidth, I want to go live further away from the city where the land is cheap and I can grow my own food. But who knows, leaving the big city is probably not that easy. However with rents and housing prices in Silicon Valley being what they are there is a big incentive to telecommute. Gas or diesel generators are very noisy, used to hate them, they also pollute the air, solar and wind make the idea of living out in the woods more appealing to me, I still need the internet.
