this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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Yeah, but won't you need enough electricity to power a monitor, keyboard, and mouse for this to work?
That doesn't take much power, a solar panel or two should be more than sufficient, or you can rig something up w/ a defunct ebike (just run the motor backwards to generate electricity).
If the monitor draws even 20W, you're gonna be tired of that eBike generator solution really quick.
The average laptop is 65W. So the 40 amp solar battery station I built with a 100w panel could run a laptop 7 hours a day without any issues at all. Plenty of time to get actionable information out of it.
Sure, solar works. And batteries work - for about 3000 charge-discharge cycles.
That's... a lot of cycles. That's almost a decade. Plenty of time to build an electric generator from scratch by traveling on foot to a copper mine and smelting the wire yourself. Unless you manage to pull an alternator from a car that can't find gasoline and save yourself the trip. From that you could make a gravity battery or any number of other options.
Point being, after 3000 cycles, it's toast and there's no fresh bread available.
Yes, you could construct something, but I think you'd be pretty amazed at how maintenance intensive a 1kWh gravity battery is.
Point is that 3000 cycles is more than enough time to find or make a replacement even if society doesn't rebuild.
If you're living somewhere with enough easy food, water and shelter that you're not spending all your time just handling that. Making groceries takes a lot of time and effort.
The average hunter gatherer only worked for about 3-6 hours a day. They had more free time than we do.
The average hunter gatherer had food forests planted by their ancestors, wild herds of meat for the taking and a lifetime of knowledge transfer and physical training in living that lifestyle.
You may be adaptable and intelligent and have wikipedia by your side to tell you what to do, but Wikipedia is written by people living in today's society, not that reality. 90% of today's people will suffer horribly getting in the physical and mental condition required to do a hunter-gatherer daily routine in 6 hours or less.
But not you, you're awesome and you get it done in 3, so that leaves you time to go mine copper ore, smelt it into wire and other such things - in reality, no, for the duration of your remaining life scavenging the wreckage will be more productive than DIY from the earth, but scavenging requires a lot of travel and even e-cars won't be getting around very well.
90% of people would die within the first three months because they don't know how to cook and we have a three day supply rule in stores relying on just-in-time delivery.
If you make it past the first 90 you probably have seeds in the ground to get you to the next 90. We don't just inherit the environment, we shape it. We can start growing our own food within weeks, not reliant on ancestors
But let's get back to the topic. 3000 charge cycles, your number, is a lot. All that time can be used to make hard copies of essential information. You can learn how to salvage wire and build new energy sources. An average 2100²ft empty house has almost 200 pounds of copper wire in the walls. 3000 cycles to learn.
But thanks for telling me who I am and what skills I already have.
Having watched a neighbor "farming commune" with 12-15 adults on 80 acres who had nothing better to do than play Gilligan's Island building their huts and trying to grow their own food, for two years with full internet access, enough money for tools and fertilizers, electric pumps for irrigation, they seemed to shy away from using the tractor in the field to work the crops but they had a working tractor... after two years they were only growing about half of their calories.
In other words, In my opinion a "real prepper" already has a "Victory Garden" going and producing enough food that they can easily scale it up to meet 200% of their calorie needs, some to store for hard times, some to barter. If you haven't actually done that, you're probably in for a surprise when the raccoons eat your crops in the middle of the night.
If you have a working printer, toner, paper... and don't forget: a laser printer uses more than10x as much power as an efficient computer. A couple of years would be required just to figure out what you think might be essential information, and after the printer dies you'll find new essential things based on changes in your situation.
Having said all that, yeah, I've got the big offline copy of Wikipedia setup with a reader on a laptop...
This will the the real resource people use for probably 50+ years after TSHTF - scavenging from what's left over. As you say: 90%+ dead by next Spring, that leaves a LOT of empty houses to scavenge. Food won't be there, but wire in the walls, lumber to burn for heat, glass, water pipes, there will be used mattresses available for decades.
Speaking in general about the 10% who do survive the first three months, the skills required to make it through that chaos are very different from the sustained scavenger/farmer phase.
I'm only going to focus on one part because it shows the disconnect between you and I.
Who said anything about a printer? I said hard copy. Not printout. Write it down. Carve it into rock or shape it in clay. 3000 cycles and you keep limiting yourself. That 200 pounds of copper wire could be pounded flat and marked with a sharp tool to create a long lasting hard copy. So many options for a hard copy and you defaulted to the one option we can't even get to work when everything is working.
I hear you, but especially in scavenger mode, even pounded flat copper sheets aren't going to have the capacity to store the wiring diagram for an EV you find that you want to fix up and rig for solar charging. Particularly when you don't know which year or model of thing it is you're going to be wanting to scavenge.
While I agree that laser printers are finicky, once I get one working if I have enough paper I can generally print until I run out of toner. And printed paper isn't forever, but I do have laser printouts from 40 years ago that are as legible as they ever were.
Where I disconnect with you is: why even bother with Terabytes of knowledge when you're just going to collect the "most important" 100kB or so on your copper sheets at a rate of one sheet per hour, or less? There's a reason Moses only had ten commandments instead of the full Talmud.
You'd be charging a battery, not running directly off the bike. Still, solar panels are extremely cheap these days. I picked up a 120 watt panel for 50 bucks recently, it could keep something like this running for hours each day.
So, I believe a tolerable generator load for most people to pedal is around 10W... battery charge / discharge is maybe 80% efficient, so you're netting 8W into your storage. Pedal relatively hard for an hour and you might get 20 minutes use of your IPS LCD screen.
Solar panels are indeed the way to go.
I mention ebikes because if we're in an apocalypse situation, your solar panels may not be very efficient. There are a ton of electric motors out there, so generating power is totally feasible in a prepper situation even if the sky is torched Matrix style, just attach any electric motor to a bicycle and you're good to go (or water or wind turbine, etc).
This unit can connect to a cell phone, that'd be a much less energy-expensive way to interface with it.
It sounds like you can connect with your phone, which reduces the energy footprint quite a bit.
A single rooftop solar panel can do that, and charge a battery for a little after dark use while you're at it.
A true prepper will get an eInk monitor and resist the urge to scroll until they read all the way to the bottom of the page, but even a normal monitor uses a small fraction of a solar panel. Keyboard? Near zero. Mouse? Near zero x10 but still near zero when compared with 200W. RasPi? less than a normal monitor.