Preparedness for when

[Deleted User]

HEWO is DOCKY heer!!!!! ANTY GQ ize bettin vat yer Dogi inna tinnie fing woz makde frum Horsiez!!!!!! Har har har!!!! vat iza lurcha jokie!!! Ize batty jus lyke Mumi butt shez beta atit van meeeeeeee coz shez reawy nutz!!! Hewo to ver Printz uv Bewfarst ize hopin hez feewin beta tuday an Hewo to ANTY PINAPL wot sez 'sigh' ina resinde wey an ANTY CRAIGY wot is advatizin me tew ver wurld, iz meeee Famus????? Luv frum yew freend DOCKY xxxxxxx, SLLLLLUURRRRPPPPPPSIZ awl rownd!!!!!

Just taking over the post for a mo, CAKE, the other thing that horses would be worth their keep by doing is using the canal network with the boats towed by horsepower thereby giving us water transport systems for moving goods around the country. The canals are gradually being refurbished by groups of dedicated enthusiasts just as the little steam railways that are being run by enthusiasts will be so amazingly useful as they can run without electricity or oil products. In fact just last month the little railway at Swanage in Dorset was given a grant by the government to upgrade the piece of track that connects it to the mail rail network with a view to it becoming a regular authorised service for the public. It may be a backwards step in terms of technology, but it worked well for hundreds of years, the difference being that now there is a much larger population to cater for, but I'm certain that it will be the way forwards in the future, Cheers Lyn xxx.

GreyQueen

Thanks for those linkies, Rosemary Jane, I shall have to check them out later after work.

I can recall visiting the Centre For Alternative Technology in Wales where they had a bank of static bikes rigged to generate power for small colour TVs. The speed you had to go to keep up the current to power them was quite astonishing. I'm talking full pelt and that would be very hard to sustain for even the duration of a 30 min programme. You'd really have to want to watch your soaps to go to so much effort.

The last time I was at CAT I don't recall seeing them but it's a fascinating place which would have much to interest many people, IMO.

It will be very interesting to see how the future pans out but I suspect our current version of normal will become something looked back upon as a bit of a Land of Milk and Honey in the harsher times to come. The shame is, we often don't appreciate how comfortable life is in a modern western industrial country, even for the poorer sections of society. It's such a shame because these are The Good Old Days and a lot of people will be missing them badly when they're gone...........

I recently wandered across from The Archdruid Report into this blog which I'm finding very interesting;http://22billionenergyslaves.blogspot.co.uk/

Well-written and very thought-provoking. I like it a lot.

ETA the cake, I can ride horses and know bits & bobs about working with them. Mum's fosterdad was one of the very last men in England to plough with horses, even when he was last working (1950s) it was a rare enough sight that he was photographed for the regional newspaper.

As the horseman on the working farm, it was his job to get there at 4.30 am to feed the horses so that they will have digested well enough to go out at 7 am. They were usually back at the yard by 4.30 pm. Dad as a teenager worked at a farm which had a very old school owner (the squire) who kept the cart horses on for light duties within a couple of miles of the farm, but the ploughing was all done by tractor. The horses were just being kept for sentiment and not replaced at the end of their working lives.

They were mellow creatures and like to work and if one wasn't needed when the others were taken out of the yard, it'd kick up a fuss. But woe betide the farm boy who tried to take a horse away from the farm as opposed towards it at the end of the workday........... they knew their rights.

The country is awash at the moment with neglected horses as people who bought them for leisure riding find that they cannot afford to keep them. One figure I heard quoted this week by an equine rescue charity was that it can be £100 a week, all told, when you include vet and farrier.

Reminds me of the old saying If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

thriftwizard

has anyone even thought how to convert planes and boats to electric?

Alibobsy, continuing MrsLurcherwalker's theme of restoring the canals etc. - how about running boats/ships how they used to be run - by direct wind power? I believe there's a lot of work going on (albeit by a few far-sighted individuals) in that direction - see the Sail Transport Network's site.

I live in a town that was once powered by its two rivers. There are dead watermills all around, mostly now posh housing or "industrial" units. There's even one that has been "restored" by the National Trust, but sadly they didn't make it actually workable, only so that it looked correct. Our park was once a giant fabric factory, employing most of the population, hence this place remained relatively prosperous once "The Buttony" came to an end and much of the rest of our county starved. But when we were trying to get a Transition movement up & running here, there was a total lack of interest in the possibility of using the waterpower that's already available & basically free for the taking; people really did want a technological magic bullet rather than use what's staring them in the face! But basically, they were only interested in a solution that would allow them to keep all the lights & heating on, all day & all night, at whatever expense, not something that meant they'd have to use less. Ah well...

GreyQueen

My hometown (not where I live now) is also on two rivers and Thriftwizard and I have had a chuckle about the co-incidence before, as we're not even in the same region, never mind the same town.

My hometown has a water mill, disused for about 90 years, but the millrace is still part of the water management scheme and when the river is high it comes boiling out from under the mill with incredible force.

I also know where there are working windmills, one of which is run as a joint tourist attraction and working mill; I get my breadflour from there via the farmer's market and it's lush.

The hometown was the highest navigable point on its river system although barges can't get up those rivers now due to weirs being put in the way. The last "maltings" (warehouses etc) were falling into disuse in the mid-twentieth century and are long gone. Lorries took over.

Provincial City is navigable from the sea and I sit right beside the highest navigable point on the river system. Colliers used to come around the country by sea and up the river system. Upstream from my neighbourhood, and you're in kayak territory, downstream and it's passable by small ships. Our (now defunct) industries used to export via the river, too.

There's lots which could be done with water, water networks, sailpower and even horse-barge power, and it may well be done again in the future.

:T Hats off to all those stalwart souls, often reviled as eccentrics, who devote countless hours to preserving, maintaining and improving these facilities. I consider them unsung heroes and heroines.

pineapple

GreyQueen wrote: »

The country is awash at the moment with neglected horses as people who bought them for leisure riding find that they cannot afford to keep them. One figure I heard quoted this week by an equine rescue charity was that it can be £100 a week, all told, when you include vet and farrier.

Reminds me of the old saying If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Unfortunately it seems that some horses are burgers... There was a terrible story on the news about a woman who thought her pet horse had gone to a nice home only to discover it had been issued with an altered duplicate horse passport and been sold on for meat. Imagine if that was your dog!
On the news this morning they said they were now testing a range of products including gelatine. It seems there may be horse in certain sweets?
Apparently that may also be the fate of many a retired race horse. Most are supposed to be excluded from the food chain on account of the drugs they may contain but I wouldn't bet on it. I think it's awful enough that so many end up in an abbatoir.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/1000-racehorses-a-year-in-uk-abattoirs-shocking-failures-in-checks-how-do-we-know-thoroughbreds-arent-in-our-food-8496027.html

VJsmum

GreyQueen wrote: »

Rosemary Jane, that was an interesting post. I know a person in Aberdeenshire plugged into a ground source heat pump, so you don't need to be sitting on a busy geothermal area like Iceland to get some benefits. There is also a very real risk that Iceland itself may become uninhabitable due to volcanic activity.

I can't claim technical expertise (hopefully a clever person will pop by a minute) but isn't there a problem with losing electricity the further you transport it? I don't mean that it'll fall off the back of the electricity-waggon like a poorly-secured potato sack, but that some of the current disappears in transmission, and the further that you send it, the greater the loss.

That's where transformers come into it. We transform electricity up to over 100,000 volts to go into and through the grid, and then local substations transform it back down so that the small percentage loss is unnoticeable, it is transformed down to useable values inside your house. I believe the percentage loss is about 2%. ANyone been to the electric mountain in Wales (Dinorwig, in Llanberis), fascinating place but is / was only ever used to top up during surges.

I looked at ground source heat pumps for our house but they are rather expensive to install retrospectively, then I was going to look at and cost wood pellet boilers to replace our ageing gas one. Unfortunately the boiler broke during a spell of snow last year and we had to get it replaced in rather a hurry so have a new condensing boiler.

CAT is one of my most favouritist places - we holiday near there every year and is usually somewhere I visit. It is very "zen" up there - possibly the lack of traffic helps. We take our construction students there occasionally to help them to think "outside of the box". The water powered funicular is a wonder.

I also live in a town at the confluence of two rivers - which is nowhere near the other two! THere's a lot of it about!

[Deleted User]

We stumbled upon CAT in the very early days when it had been going for nearly a year, it was magic then and fired our enthusiasm for green living from the moment we went in. As Thriftwizard says. ships always were powered by the wind (or if you were a viking by manpower as well!) and the world worked well as a trading system for hundreds of years without fossil fuels. Of course they would have to be built before you could set up the trade routes as I doubt that modern ships could be adapted except I do remember seeing a prototype idea for a freighter powered by solar sails a while ago, so maybe that would be an option. Whatever does happen we will all have to reconcile ourselves to a much reduced quailty of life by 2013 standards, which would perhaps give us a healthier and more useful exisatence on the whole, but not as easy!!! Cheers Lyn xxx.

esmf73

Took delivery of Just in case - how to be self sufficient when the unexpected happens by Kathy Harrison this morning. Only on page 38. VERY interesting reading xx

The_Dragon

VJsmum wrote: »

CAT is one of my most favouritist places - we holiday near there every year and is usually somewhere I visit. It is very "zen" up there - possibly the lack of traffic helps. We take our construction students there occasionally to help them to think "outside of the box". The water powered funicular is a wonder.

We also holiday near CAT every Summer! We haven't been there for a while though (it isn't really crutches friendly - or wasn't) and besides which Dr Dragon deals with this type of thing at work and wants some time off from it

GreyQueen

Now I have another book on my reading list, esmf! And I was in the library just now and had a hunch-ette and went to where they keep prepperish books and found that there is a companion volume to the Nat Geo Doomsday Preppers series called the Complete Survival Manual.

Literally just got it, it might be good, it might be middlin' or it might be piddlin' ; only time will tell.

Was counting bottles of cooking oil and I have one a month for the rest of the year, which is happily exactly what I use. But prices are on the up so I plan to buy some more. They have a fairly long date on them in my experience (up to 2 years) and with prices going up about 20p every 2nd month, it seems a worthwhile thing to do. I have them stashes in date order and the new ones go to the back of the line and the ones used come off the front.

I have also been reviewing other stocks and will be taking my wally trolley out tomorrow with a view to buying a few bits and bobs. Trollies are great for OPSEC because no one can see what you've got in them, they just assume you're Norma Normal. I even take mine to the army surplus, where you can find many fine things, not necessarily to be used for the original purposes, mwah ha ha.

Random thought; gloves.

Gloves are good. If you're going to be doing manual labour, hefting stuff about, gardening or foraging for firewood, your hands take a heck of a lot of wear-and-tear. Protecting them from bashes, cuts, blisters, splinters and thorns is a great idea.

Think protection, think plastic gloves in your first aid kit, think of warm gloves for winter and cycling gloves for kayaking in. You can kayak for hours at a time without them but you'll prolly end up wearing thru several layers of skin on web of flesh between your thumb and your fingers.

It hurts lots. Esp with salt water in. Although I must admit when we came around a headland from a flat calm into a heavy swell and strong wind and had to paddle like the very devil to get inshore, I kinda forgot about the pain in my hand. Sheer terror tends to over-ride minor injuries............:p

ETA; VJsMum, I confess to adoring the funicular at CAT and riding up and down on it time after time. Worth the admission cost all on its own.