Re: Emergency Food … Preparedness
Posted: Wed Apr 20, 2016 8:48 pm
My primary reasons for running my generator would be to keep the refrigerators running (we have two), for cooking (we have an electric stove-top/oven), to power battery chargers, to run cooling fans when the heat gets unbearable.........stuff like that. I agree that running lights all the time makes you a target. Ultimately, if the outage lasts long enough I'll obviously run out of fuel - whether that be gasoline or natural gas/propane - and we'll turn to wood burning and other methods of food preservation, etc. I've never thought of a generator as a zombie-apocalypse survival tool. For me, it is a temporary power source, to bridge a time of temporary municipal power unavailability.....like that bad freeze we had a couple of years ago.WildBill wrote:Not only the noise, but if people see lights on in the house they might guess you have a generator.troglodyte wrote:Something to think about if you decided to run generators in a time of emergency or unrest. The sound will eventually draw people towards you. That will probably not be the best thing.
For short-term outages it shouldn't be a problem. If it is an extended outage or unrest is occurring I think I would prefer to put up blackout curtains, kill the genny, and break out the GPAs. Lay low, stay grey.
My main problem right now is water. If our electricity goes out then we lose the well. I'd love to get a manual pump but at 175' they are hard, and costly, to come by. I am working on rainwater harvesting so that may be the short-term solution.
In my conversation today about generators a friend told me that after Ike his neighbor had his generator stolen during the night while it was running.