An addendum to my storm posts from yesterday:
First, and most importantly; at last count, we had ten people giving a “yea” vote to my reposting of the “By Ourselves, For Ourselves” series. I’m pretty sure that is close to the whole readership, so they will be reposted. Thank you all for your responses. I’ll try and get the first ones up before the new year for y’all, but it may take longer as I’ve got the inlaws arriving tomorrow and staying for the holidays and a couple minor repairs to make on the hizouse.
Next up, I know this will come as a shock to most of you, but Seattle liberals are whiny bitches.
Seattle’s uber-left-wing blogger, Goldy of HorsesAss.Org
I’ve gotten a couple emails and comments from readers telling me to quit my whining… that I should have just been better prepared. But I’m not sure how much better prepared I could have been. I’ve got a wind-up radio and some candles and a couple flashlights and plenty of food. And with the dead pear tree that blew down in my yard, I have plenty of well-seasoned firewood. Unfortunately, what I don’t have is a fireplace in which to burn it.
I suppose I could have bought myself a generator to power the blower on my oil furnace, but for a city dweller, that just seems like overkill. It’s not like I’m living on some island or out in the country where the occasional power outage is the price you pay for the beauty and peace that comes from such isolation. I live in the middle of a major American city, and it is reasonable to expect the basic infrastructure to function.
Buying a generator is overkill because he lives in “a major American City”. What a fooking whiny idiot. Maybe he should live in the area governed by his favorite politician, Ron “Tax to the Max” Sims and see what it is like when a truly incompetent government doesn’t give a rat’s ass about your home’s elecricity status.
On a similar subject, whereas my joke yesterday about Gregiore hating white people was a play on the Kanye West statement during the Katrina aftermath, my accompanying statement about her sending state services was part of the joke. I have no idea if she even sent state folks out to help. Sorry it sounded as if I was whining, I was just trying to bring “teh funny”. Now you know why I don’t write sitcoms.
However, I do know that the areas in King County that have waited the longest for a return of the electricity, the south and east suburban and rural portions, do vote heavily Republican. So, I guess that the more accurate, though less funny, statement would have been “Gregiore hates White Republican People”.
And lastly, I’m looking for another couple of those Jump Boxes that I wrote of yesterday. Sadly, it looks as though Home Depot, the manufacturer of the “Husky” brand name items, no longer makes them, though I’ll be going to the source shortly after the new year to confirm that. I’ll let you know what I find out.
Please keep us posted – I spent some time yesterday searching (in vain) for the Jump Box. Closest I could find is the Jump Start for the car – not a bad tool on it’s own, but not even close to the Jump Box you described.
Speaking of generators, I don’t know what kind you have or if you’re looking to add, but this one:
Honda EU2000i
The Honda EU2000i is one of their Super Quiet models. My fire department has one and the thing is quiet enough that you can carry a conversation standing right next to it. Perfect to keep a low profile.
I read a post up at Kim du Toit’s site today about liberals with a “flush it all away” mentality leftists have regarding “overpopulation” and how they want to see Mother Nature take care of it all via natural disasters. The irony in this is that:
a- if they really want a massive die-off and Mama Gaia doesn’t provide the guilt-free enviromental cataclysm, it’ll take a massive genocidal campaign that makes the genocidal dictaotrs of the 20th century look like amateurs, and
b- after reading your reposting of Goldy’s, I’m convinced many of the “flush it all away” moonbats won’t be prepared when the eco-cataclysm comes. If Goldy thinks an emergency generator is “overkill” for 2-3 days, there’s other preperations he and his ilk is not thinking of. Won’t they be surprised when the Great Flush comes and they realize their crap isn’t sticking to the side of the bowl?
Perhaps something like this
or this.
Possibly combined with this.
Ack, must have done something wrong on that last link.
It was this …
http://www.ccrane.com/more-categories/alternative-power/freeplay-freecharge-weza-portable-energy-source.aspx
It’s not a substitute for any of the more mundane sources of electric power.
The human body can put out 1/4 horsepower for a short period, probably only 1/10 HP for any length of time. That 40-watt output represents 1/8 HP if my memory serves, a HP being just under 700 watts.
When recharging a battery of any size, the objective is to have the charging rate about 10 times the planned drain rate on the battery. With this tiny generator, that means you could only plan on using about 4 watts, which might charge up a cell phone battery.
Also, no one will be able to stand up and pump that set very long, unless one has it affixed to some sort of frame. It’s just not an ergonometrically efficient way to use human power output.
Taking the max output, 40 watts, if you pump for an hour, you have 40 watt-hours, which at a charging voltage of 14.4 volts is 2.77 amp/hours. A Group 27 (large RV) storage battery is 105 amp-hours, so you would have to pump that thing for 19 hours to put a half charge on such a battery, which your Xantrex 400 will discharge in just under two hours, if it’s pulling it’s full 400 watt load.
Ohm’s Law is very instructive, and no offense to C. Crane Co, they’re a fine outfit bringing us fine equipment, but for nearly $300, this machine just doesn’t cut it in ANYONE’S emergency plans. It is half the cost of a Honda EU1000, which will run 14 hours on a gallon of gas, and provide enough juice to power a serious battery charger to hammer those storage batteries full in a couple of hours.
This thing will appeal to the greenies, but it’s not useful for the rest of us.