I was catching up after the great Firefux link flush over at Mike’s BeerComputersandBeer blog and noticed he linked to our By Ourselves, For Ourselves series of posts in these two “What If” posts: This stunted one, and this Part Two in which he links a post by the Kitsap Road Warrior in which Doug Bear, a Kitsap County public Works employee, discusses road plowing priorities during last month’s “Polar Onslaught”.
One of the reasons I decided to make my commuter vehicle a 4WD w/Bonus Height was because of my strong belief that the only place I want to be when the SHTF is home. Washington is nearly as earthquake prone as SoCal and just as prone to incompetent government. I’m not trusting them as far as I can spit to keep the roads clear.
In a related tie-in, I have finally gotten around to unpacking The Darrells from the move(for those not familiar w/The Darrells, please see the bottom of this post). What wasn’t updated in the BOFO series of posts is that I was actually able to grab another pair of them, for a total of four.
However, not too long ago I was helping a friend get his truck started when I accidentally killed Darrell#4. The friend ran into his shop to get some starting fluid whilst I cranked the motor over. It finally caught, but then died when I stepped out to disconnect D#4. So I got back into the cab, and instead of doing the smart thing and waiting for my friend to return, I assumed that he’d heard the truck start and would be out in a second or two, and fired the engine up again.
And let it run with D#4 attached while I waited. And waited. And waited.
Needless to say, 45 seconds of incoming 12V current from the battery back into D#4 dun went and kilt him.
So now I’m down to just three Darrells, which I’m finding is plenty. I parted out D#4 and gave him a proper burial at the battery recycling center.
I was running a test on D#3 before I moved which basically consisted of me not charging him once a month like I did to D#1 & 2. For 14 months D#3 never saw the right side of an extension chord. I then didn’t charge any of them for two months while I moved.
And I am happy to say that all is well in my SHTF shelves.
The Darrells hold a charge of 14.2V when fully charged. In 60 days of sitting in a box in my exterior storage shed in the cold of “Polar Onslaught 2008/9”, D#1 & 2 had only dropped to 13.9V.
After the 14 months of no charging, sitting in an unheated garage through a winter and a summer, plus two more months of no charging during “PO 8/9”, D#3 had only dropped to 13.1V. Still good enough to jump start 95% of vehicles out there and plenty left to run lamps, charge mobile phones/flashlight batteries and even a small heater.
I cannot find these particular jump boxes any longer. Hell, I’m pretty sure that they were being discontinued during my first post on them. But whatever else you do for your home SHTF supplies, include at least one 12V jump boxe with 110V converters. As you probably read in my first post on them, I found them indispensable during nearly a week of no electricity/phone/cable.
Our good man Rivrdog has even written up a DC to AC home made battery storage post, but he is in the midst of diddling around his site and I can’t link to it at this time. I will when he gets back up and running full time. I’m “hoping” to “change” a Radio Flyer little red wagon into a mobile 12V battery platform w/110V outlets.
Never can tell what you might need in the Obamanation in the future.
Wished you hadn’t tossed D4. I have always wanted to experiment with one of those by removing it’s internal, usually only 60 A/H battery, and putting in a heavy DC plug so that a heavier battery could be instantly connected. With the system of plugs and wire I have in mind, high-amperage DC could be connected several ways almost instantly. I would use the connectors that the aircraft starting carts have to plug into large aircraft, and for cable, I would use sets of welding cables, which are very flexible but at the same time, carry all the current one could desire.
The average person doesn’t understand why spring clamps are no good for this duty, but anyone who has ever stick-welded does.
The “dinking around” should be done within 3 days, with the rollout of Rivrdog II, the new, sustainable model which farts rainbows of common sense, to follow.
Here’s a sneak preview for RNS readers: the new motto:
“If you’re going to kick a pit bull in the butt, you’d better have a plan for dealing with it’s bite.”
BTW, FireFux is off on a tangent of it’s own. The volunteer-built browser has apparently taken on a bunch of ex-MicroSquish people, who think that the browser must be gigantic and capable of defending itself against a Cylon attack of large strength.
To erect such defenses, FireFux has installed a rapidly growing file system which stores “dangerous URLs”. Each URL is a separate file, and reportedly there are millions of them, giving FireFux a major issue of taking forever to load, then forever to reload when you click a new link. I’ve heard that you can flush the files out, and the browser then speeds back up, but it immediately starts reloading the huge network of bad URLs.
There’s apparently no hope for FireFux, it will instantly bog any computer less than a god-box, so my 5-year old Fujitsu laptop is not good enough to run FireFux 3.0.5.
I have a good firewall, good anti-virus and good spyware protection, so I don’t need this extra layer that FireFux is foisting off on me.
I’m going to try to go to “Old Version” and get a two-series model of FireFux, but if I can’t make THAT fly, I’m done with that dish.
I finally found my Knoppix 5.1 disk, and I think I will start booting in Ubuntu with it. When I get familiar enough with the Red Hat stuff on the Knoppix tutorial disk, I will take that Big Leap and get rid of MicroSquish forever. My Pentium 4, 2.4 ghz, 768mb RAM Fujitsu will run just fine forever on the lean and mean Unix offerings.
It goes without saying that virii and spyware are seldom written for Unix-based programs, so one can be really lean and operate bareback. The Knoppix disk has about a dozen different browsers to pick from, some 15 to 20 email programs, and everything is FAST!
The only problems I have heard of is that I will probably have to get a new wireless router, as most current ones have no software for anything but Mac or MicroShit, and that will be a problem on the road as well. There are one or two which will do Red Hat though….