[quote]Varqanir wrote:
Coat one side of the mylar with a viscoelastic polyurethane foam. It might get a mite sweaty under there, but you would achieve both separation and additional insulation.
[/quote]That’s what I was thinking - some kind of foam. Thanks! I’ll check that out.[quote]
Wondering about fuels: are your vehicles and generators diesel? Are you set up to manufacture your own biodiesel and/or ethanol? The great thing about the diesel engine is that with the right filtration systems, it will run on practically any liquid hydrocarbon. An old Mercedes-Benz turbo diesel engine from the 1990s can be made to run on used motor oil, or transmission fluid, or used french fry oil from fucking Burger King.
[/quote]That evolution will take place in the next year or so. It’s on the list. My ultimate plan for a generator is a little bit unconventional: a portable lighting engine (like one would use for temporary jobsite lighting or side of the road work). It’s a three cylinder diesel, 50 gallon tank that’s designed to run for over 200 hours kicking out 60A at 480v. It’s better and cheaper than any generator you’ll buy commercially. As for my vehicles, I’m making the switch soon, but haven’t yet. I have a few other toys I need to buy first. [quote]
In a true Mad Max-style breakdown of society, when even Burger King would have stopped frying potatoes (the horror), one could hypothetically run one’s vehicle on the oil that one could harvest from high-voltage transformers on the “grid” that everyone would by that time be off of (it would hypothetically involve shooting the hypothetical transformer with a hypothetical .22 rifle, then catching the dripping hypothetical oil. Note that I do not actually advocate this hypothetical course of action, you fucking NSA fucks).
[/quote] One can also grow various plants (sunflower and pumpkin seeds are easiest) and press the oil yourself once the transformers are dry.[quote]
Ahem.
Which brings me to the question I’m sure that you, as a Union Electrician who shits gold and pisses money, are surely qualified to answer: how concerned are you about weaponised electromagnetic pulses, and do you have any countermeasures in place to protect your electronics?
[/quote]
EMP is high on my threat list because it has three potential sources:1 it can be an actual EMP attack, 2 it can occur naturally from a solar event and 3 is a natural side effect of a nuclear detonation. So yeah, I’ve taken some precautions, but it’s impossible to protect all of your electronics. There wont be time. I’ve chosen to go “low tech” with just about everything I intend to rely on. But having said that, an electronic library is far easier to manage than printing gigs and gigs of all the material I have - everything from Mozart, Dickens and other classics of music and literature to various technical manuals and survival related archives…
An EMP will affect inductive loads and capacitive loads, but not resistive loads - pretty much everything with a circuit board, inductive coils or capacitors (electronic ballasts for lighting, solenoids in heat pumps, capacitors for electric start motors and single phase motors depending on capacitors for a phase angle shift, etc…). But SIMPLE resistive loads, such as circuits feeding regular light bulbs, space heaters, ovens, etc… should not be affected to badly. The pulse might blow the light bulbs connected to a circuit because the over current protection probably won’t open up in time, but the circuit itself will remain undamaged - you can just replace the light bulbs/fuses (you have spares, right?). For other simple equipment, the controls might be fried, but those can be easily bypassed and primary function restored. So my advice is to go as low tech as possible if you plan on depending on it. K.I.S.S. is something that has served me well in pretty much every activity that I enjoy, from sailing, to camping to work. I’m pretty much an analog man in a digital world at heart.
Having said that, I do have a Faraday cage that I’ve rigged up in the garage out of an old beer fridge where I keep my digital library. In it, I keep a few extra inverters (my solar panels and deep cycle batteries will survive an EMP just fine, the inverter, not so much) , two old IBM laptops, several digital hard drives each wrapped individually with copper and grounded to the internal frame of the cage (external windings are separate from internal windings with a TTR of 1:6 to reduce/dissipate the current of a pulse more efficiently) and I’ve got the whole thing grounded and bonded to it’s own ground rod connected by copper bus. Yeah, I geeked out on it, but it was fun. I’m going to build another one soon to house some of my HAM equipment. I don’t bother to put any of my GPS equipment in there because I don’t think the satellites will be either A, be functioning, or B be available for citizens to use in the event of something serious.
Magnetism is a very interesting topic to me and I’m a bit of a nerd when it comes to that stuff, so sorry for the long post.
EDIT: oh, and one minor correction: Union electricians eat molten lava, shit gold and piss PERFECTION! LOL
