Preparedness for when

mardatha

How did the Victorians have rubber tyres before cheap oil- would that not make a come-back?
Also listening to the debate about post-oil - there is no question at all in my mind that if this country is sitting on hundreds of years of coal then we will go back to it and TPTB will find a way of getting it out. Imagine no heating, no industry no nothing - and a few Greens stand up and bleat about coal being dirty... they wouldn't last long!

jk0

mardatha wrote: »

How did the Victorians have rubber tyres before cheap oil- would that not make a come-back?
Also listening to the debate about post-oil - there is no question at all in my mind that if this country is sitting on hundreds of years of coal then we will go back to it and TPTB will find a way of getting it out. Imagine no heating, no industry no nothing - and a few Greens stand up and bleat about coal being dirty... they wouldn't last long!

Karl Denninger posted this a couple of days ago that made sense to me:

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=229061

2tonsils

Thunderstorm potential - update
Good evening,
During tomorrow evening/night there is a risk of some thunderstorms developing across Southern coastal counties of England as we see some energy move North from the near continent, associated with some very warm, unstable upper air. Our high resolution models have picked up on the precipitation and high energy levels. During the early hours of Saturday there is also a risk for South Western parts of England, extending North in to Wales, West Midlands and parts of North West England.
During Saturday afternoon, increased surface heating will trigger off some home grown thunderstorms, we expect the initiation to be somewhere around central southern England/Midlands areas.
These storms will extend Northwards throughout the afternoon, slow moving all the while, producing some very high rainfall rates and localised flooding. We expect these thunderstorms to be severe in nature producing large hail, frequent cloud to ground lightning and an added risk of funnel development.
In addition to the pre-frontal storms there is a risk of further heavy thundery rain across Western parts of England later extending in to Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Northern England and Scotland during the early evening and into Saturday night.
Torrential downpours/heavy rain will bring a risk of localised flash flooding.
As is the case in such setups, some areas may avoid the thunderstorms.
The attached image shows the areas we expect to be impacted by the weather.

[Deleted User]

Old fashioned delivery bikes which were used extensively by butchers/bakers/grocers shops years ago had a carrier in front of the handlebars over the front wheel and could carry considerable quantities. It was normal to have things delivered locally when I was a child and I can remember the milk and veg being delivered or sold from a horse drawn cart. Bicycles, when they were first in use actually had wooden spoke wheels and iron tyres, not I suspect the most comfortable ride, but they worked. Working the land is possible without a fuelled vehicle although this would be hard and arduous work. We currently have what is called a 'Wheel Hoe' which is a human powered plough, rotovator, harrow with different attachemnts for each job. It's fairly hard work to use but we use it for the allotment, the garden, and in the polytunnel and back in time there was a 'Chest Hoe' which you pushed by leaning against it with your chest and pushing it along in the earth. A smallholding would be possible but it would take a long time and lots of energy. I've been to ploughing competitions and actually seen small ploughs being pulled by teams of Mules and also teams of the larger breeds of Donkey. At the living history museum in Sussex they've successfully trained two couples of sussex oxen to the yoke and to pull the plough and oxen were traditionally used way back in our history. There are many recorded ways of working without fuel or engines, all of them very hard physically but still doable and hard work won't kill us will it?

GreyQueen

mardatha wrote: »

How did the Victorians have rubber tyres before cheap oil- would that not make a come-back?
Also listening to the debate about post-oil - there is no question at all in my mind that if this country is sitting on hundreds of years of coal then we will go back to it and TPTB will find a way of getting it out. Imagine no heating, no industry no nothing - and a few Greens stand up and bleat about coal being dirty... they wouldn't last long!

Charles Goodyear patented the process for vulcanisation of rubber on 24/06/1844. Vulcanisation is the removal of sulphur from the natural rubber to make it elastic and bendy and to give it the qualities which make it 'rubbery'. Originally native to South America, in 1876 Henry Wickham smuggled 70,000 Para rubber tree seeds out to Kew Gardens against a Brazilian embargo on their export, where they germinated a small fraction of them and sent them to India, Malaysia, Africa etc to be grown in plantations.

You have to get rubber in industrial-sized quantities from other parts of the planet and spend energy transporting it and processing it. Yup, you could ship in rubber from Asia by steam ship or sail boat, but I don't think you'd be able to move enough of it around for rubber tyres and tubes to be in widespread use comparable to today. It's the difference between something being available to the elite and something being affordable to Everyman.

Just under half the rubber produced nowadays in natural rubber, the rest is synthetic and that is a petroleum byproduct, so price/ availability of oil determines the price/ availbility of synthetic rubber. Most of the natural rubber (94%) is coming from places like Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. Rubber isn't widely-grown on its native South American continent due to a leaf blight and other natural predators.

I once sat on a wall on one of the city's arterial streets waiting for a business to open its doors. Morning rush hour. Endless stream of driver-only-occupied cars. I tried to compute the cash value of those cars, the amount of resources in steel, glass, plastic, paint, electronics, rare earth minerals and yes, rubber, that each one represented. Absolutely bliddy mind-blowing as literally millions of quids' worth of materiel was driven past me in that 30 mins. And often so that able-bodied people didn't have to walk or cycle a couple of miles, in my experience.

And this was one of a dozen roads feeding traffic in two directions in one smallish city in a corner of one small westernised country. Think about the incredible amount of resources being used and, in many cases, used up every single day. Our descendants will think we're the stupidest, greediest and most wasteful people to ever walk the earth.

nuatha

GreyQueen wrote: »

Re horses as working animals, the biggest breeds would have always been expensive to run, such as your Shires etc, but a lot of farm horses were smaller and lighter breeds such as cobs. Post oil, even a sturdy native pony would be an asset to a household who could keep one, as a pack animal or to pull a small cart. A cart which was too small to carry passengers but could carry cargo with the pony being led, would be a lot better than carrying stuff on your back.

The traditional work animal in this country was oxen, though there's even less expertise about working them than there is on horses these days.

Hand barrows and hand carts, panniers for horses and packs for people would all make a comeback if they had to. As would waterborne transport. The river in my (pretty far inland) small city was navigable by relatively small seagoing ships, although it's not economically viable now, as lorries can bring things up from the ports. My hometown is much further inland and used to be the highest navigable point (for barges) on its separate river system, but alterations to the river below the town in the past 60 years, such as weirs, have meant that's no longer possible. But that could be undone, if the will was there, I should think.

There's a lot of infrastructure that could be brought back to its original purpose. (Except where short sighted planners have opted to block tunnels) It seems to me that future needs should be one of the key criteria in deciding on any work to older infrastructure.

mardatha wrote: »

How did the Victorians have rubber tyres before cheap oil- would that not make a come-back?

We don't grow rubber in the UK, so we'd need a source and a method of getting it here. (And methods for paying for it, since we no longer own the world)
Vulcanization, the process whereby natural rubber is transformed into a recognisably usable system was invented during the Victorian age - a time when we had almost unlimited power to play with (and a lack of health and safety regulations).

Also listening to the debate about post-oil - there is no question at all in my mind that if this country is sitting on hundreds of years of coal then we will go back to it and TPTB will find a way of getting it out. Imagine no heating, no industry no nothing - and a few Greens stand up and bleat about coal being dirty... they wouldn't last long!

That assumes there will be TPTB, and that they will care what's happening. Given the trend has been to turn this country into some fancy garden for the wealthy to play in, devoid of industry that might remind someone of Jerusalem's "Dark satanic mills."

[Deleted User]

GQ, they'll be right!!!

mardatha

There's a lady up the back road here who has a wee donkey and cart, its lovely .. that would be handy.

mac2008

nuatha wrote: »

You get approx 700kWh per sq metre per year. with summer providing 5 times as much as winter. Assume 3kWh per winter week.
However if you are on a feed-in tarrif you get no output from the cells without a mains connection. If you're not not involved in feed tarrifs (where the electricity company pays you for the power you generate) then you are looking at battery arrays for storage as well as inverters (as Kitty mentions)

It would be possible to power a limited circuit which only had vital electrics attached (fridge freezer, medical equipment) however that would require advanced planning and dedicated wiring.

Hello all

I usually post on the 'green & ethical money saving' board, which is mostly about solar, but I like keeping up with this too. I just wanted to add some info re. solar panels.

Yes, it does seem stupid that most systems will not generate power without a mains connection, but this for safety reasons and called islanding protection - if the grid power is down and someone is trying to fix it, they really don't want a couple of kW's coming down that cable from a solar PV 'island' on someone's roof when they think the cable should be dead!

As has been mentioned, you can get dedicated 'off grid' systems which usually have (very expensive) battery storage. Interestingly, you can claim the government fed-in-tariff for off grid systems, but obviously not the export part.

I suppose in a real SHTF situation resulting in a long-term power outage, someone with the right knowledge could modify a 'grid tie' system. At a very basic level, one could just take the DC output from the panels and attach it to a charge controller and batteries instead of the grid-tie intverter.

If BB is interested in powering small appliances during an outage, then one of these would be an ideal 'plug & play' solution, if not cheap:

http://www.power-on-demand.co.uk/solarpod-and-60w-foldable-panel---bundle-deal-135-p.asp

Mac

GreyQueen

mardatha wrote: »

There's a lady up the back road here who has a wee donkey and cart, its lovely .. that would be handy.

Sounds gorgeous. She'll be sitting pretty in an oil crisis.

I'd think mules (offspring of a mare and a donkey stallion) would be great for a low tech world. Strong, sure-footed and allegedly even longer-lived than horses. I saw a magnificent mule in the mountains of Andalucia a few years ago, owned by some English ex-pat hippies trying to make a go of almond farming.* The mare who'd produced it had clearly been a heavy breed and it was a very large, very thick-necked chestnut beastie, very suspeceptible to having its long mule ears tugged. You can get on the good side of mules with a few soft words and a bit of judicious ear-pulling, I find.:rotfl:If I was choosing a mount or a pack or draught equine for a post-SHTF world, that'd be my ideal critter.

* Not the right term, they had almond orchards up in the hills and lived in caravans. Locals thought they were as nutty as the stuff growing on the trees, but I kinda liked them.

Righty, just been out on an errand and will make my flask and drink the leftover tea before going to the allotmentino out there. Dunno what tomorrow will bring but the weather pixies are asleep on the job here and a gorgeous early-summer day has been allowed to occur.