this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
399 points (96.3% liked)

Dank Memes

6143 readers
122 users here now

This is the place to be on the interweb when Reddit irreversibly becomes a meme itself and implodes

If you are existing mods from r/dankmemes, you should be mod here too, kindly DM me on either platform

The many rules inherited from

  1. Be nice, don't be not nice
  2. No Bigotry or Bullying
  3. Don't be a dick!
  4. Censor any and all personal information from posts and comments
  5. No spam, outside links, or videos.
  6. No Metabaiting
  7. No brigading
  8. Keep it dank!
  9. Mark NSFW and spoilers appropriately
  10. NO REEEEEEE-POSTS!
  11. No shitposting
  12. Format your meme correctly. No posts where the title is the meme caption!
  13. No agenda posting!
  14. Don't be a critic
  15. Karma threshold? What's that?

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (7 children)

So like… what actually should one be doing to prepare for this kind of stuff? Is the average emergency prep kit good enough or are there other things that can/should be done? (short of fully relocating because in this economy that’s not possible either)

[–] azertyfun 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Depends on local hazards. Here in Western Europe the main worries are rising sea levels, floods, water scarcity, and hot weather.

... So basically don't live too close to sea level (or hope the government will get real good at building dykes), become a homeowner and insulate as much as you can. At that point heat pumps and a solar setup should be enough to take the load off extreme weather events even if the economy goes to shit.

If you can't own your own home... well there's little you can do besides hope that rent remains affordable and that maybe sometime down the road enough people die that landlords are legally forced to insulate their properties (here in the EU some countries already freeze rent for badly insulated properties, but that was basically a reaction to the fear of freezing to death due to gas shortages...).

For other weather hazards like wildfires, tornadoes, and hurricanes... IDFK. There's some ways to protect your property, like fire breaks, tornado shelters, etc. but of course little incentive for slumlords to make an effort there either.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just solar panels on your roof might not be enough. In my country it's a standard practice to wire things in such a way that when grid power goes out PV panels won't work either. Apparently ability to keep power during grid blackouts is significantly more expensive. So you might have solar setup and still be fucked during extreme weather.

[–] azertyfun 1 points 1 year ago

Yep, it's the law everywhere AFAIK. It's an extremely important safety feature because if it's missing, linemen working to fix the issue would not be able to power down the line, or worse, would disconnect it from the grid and start working on it without realizing YOUR house is still energizing it.
The inverter does that job, and it will also shut off your solar if the mains voltage is too high for instance (this prevents "solar neighborhoods" from driving the line voltage unreasonably high, and even then I've heard of people seeing 250V+ in their homes on really sunny days). A "funny" side-effect of that is that the most sensitive inverter in the neighborhood will always be the first one to trip, so that guy always gets shafted when solar production is at its peak.

However (while I haven't looked into detail into this yet), I believe it should be perfectly legal to have a closed system with solar panels and a heat pump, as long as they never touch the mains.

Besides, even if your power goes down when disconnected from the grid:

  1. That's not exactly unavoidable. Inverters have web interfaces nowadays, so I'm pretty sure you could easily tell it "this is an off-grid installation now". Yeah, it's illegal, but in the extremely unlikely case for my area that I'm without power for several days (that'd be WWII levels of "oh shit" for me), I'm flipping that breaker to cut myself from the grid and jailbreaking that bitch.
  2. Assuming no societal collapse (which is the argument I'm really considering here, the rest is mostly fun hypotheticals), having a regular solar setup is still a huge asset because it can easily offset your A/C bill in the summer, and (part of) your heating bill in the winter. You might not live completely off-grid, but it greatly smooths out the financial aspect, and means not every hike in electricity/gas prices will be a "oh shit can I heat myself this winter?" moment.
load more comments (4 replies)