Northern Michigan Solar Powered CabinAlternative Energy Living at the 45th parallel
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First of all, welcome to our site! We've been around for several years and conduct all kinds of half baked DIY projects on our show, This Old Shack. Be sure to check out all of our half witted articles and pages. If you have questions, just Email us and we will do our best to confuse you beyond all belief.NAVIGATION Email or Contact us here
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We're going to build our own solar panels!Read the diary entry here. |
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Disaster planning should be part of every single household across America, strike that, the world. When disaster strikes, people die or lives are c80%hanged. In times of plenty, forego the Playstations and buy extra food. You can explain a lack of toys better than a lack of food to your children.
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In
1980 our military switched its entire food ration program over to the full
moisture MRE pouch system. These are the meals we tested on "This Old
Shack". |
Quite possibly the best preparedness site in the world.
There were several reasons for the switch:
Sprinkle of rain = power failure.
Giving a little back by not using so much.
Independent living.
07/20/2010Read about inverter based appliances here.Low voltage appliances have come a long way since we started this deal in 2005. Many of the new appliances are designed for 12 volt power sources from the ground up.Many low voltage appliances are the exact same model as their 110 AC brothers - most appliances have a step down transformer to take your 110 AC and convert it into the lower DC voltage that it actually uses.The newer versions, however, are designed strictly for 12, 24 or 36 volt power. Over the next few months, we'll take a look at some of them and report back about what we find.The best place we've found to start researching low voltages appliances is at roadtrucker.com. Check out their 12 volt coffee makers!
Inverter powered appliances makes that pesky energy star rating system suddenly real important.When you're shopping for appliances that are normally grid based for your off grid home, some of your choices become more important than ever.Here's why: You have a limited supply of energy. With the grid, you just plug and go and pay the bill at the end of the month. Off grid, plug and go means sitting in the dark if you over extend your battery bank. Worse yet it means unnecessary hours on your secondary charging system (usually a generator).One of the most important bits of reading that you're going to want to learn about are product labels. These are the labels on appliances that tell you how much energy they will use. As an example, we have a little cube fridge that is going to the shack. Upon looking at the label, we see it uses 1 amp of juice (110 AC). That's pretty good. Our current inverter is capable of 400 watts. Great! we can power the fridge. But now we have to consider the startup power. That's when a motor starts up and requires an extra amount of amperage to get going. Having an inverter with enough capacity is a priority.
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Plugs and ads |
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How I testThere are several people on various newsgroups and discussion areas that waylay in uninformed or those just starting out in the off grid world of self power generation. This involves an almost religious belief in a phantom 6v golf cart true deep cycle battery that is superior in every way to any other battery in existence.
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