Posts Tagged ‘grid-down’

When I came home from church on Sunday I was very hungry. I ate some left over chicken and started thinking about grid down survival. I decided to give the Esbit stove a try. I had some left over soup in the fridge and decided to give that a go. For this experiment I cooked outside on the ground of my patio. I used two petroleum cotton balls for fuel and my mess-kit to cook in. I did not time the experiment, but I would say that the soup was nicely simmering after about 7 minutes. That’s an assumption. But let me tell you there is something special about open fire cooking. I felt like I had earned that soup. Read the rest of this entry »

If you are like me, you enjoy the luxury of streaming media from Netflix, Hulu and Youtube. They are each great services. What happens when the net goes down? Building your offline library of media (movies and music) can be a life saver in a grid down situation.

First consider the situation you’ll be faced with. Will the use of a DVD player be feasible? Most often when the power is out of service, DVDs are not good use of emergency power. But mobile devices can be charged via solar power and can play ripped media. Consider ripping your current video media with Handbrake and storing it on a SD card. Your media can then be viewed on the small screen. Potable DVD players are fairly cheap as well and use battery power. Read the rest of this entry »