From a Pineapple Express a few years back (80+ mph gusts and lots of landslides):

- When putting in rural/exurb solar, make sure you have a secondary charge source for your house batteries. This can be a car or a propane generator, but check compatibility before buying anything. Solar won’t cut it (storms are cloudy), and propane won’t cut it (no roads, and also, there’s probably a shortage of supply and trucks).

- Whatever cell networks people fall back on will effectively be down (as you saw with verizon)

- all emergency services websites should fall back to web 1.0 forms and static images if they take more than 5-10 sec to load. Loading a pile of JS and CSS to load a fake modal that obscures the content affer 5 min of loading at 2G speeds doesn’t count (looking at you PG&E)

▲ defrost 3 days ago | parent [-]

> and propane won’t cut it

Depends entirely on tank size really.

Standard (in Australia) is 2x45kg household cylinders (chest high to an adult) for household cooking.

(Finish one, switch to the other while waiting for swap).

It's not hard to have eight or more cyclinders on standby and to keep them topped up for when needed.

For rural / quasi industrial, furnaces, generators, etc it's not uncommon to have fixed installation 210kg LPG bulk cylinders filled by supply truck .. and larger.

When disaster strikes a bulk tank lasts a long time if the primary drains on it (eg: a tile or glass furnace) are wound back or turned off.

Eg: https://www.supagas.com.au/for-home/lpg-gas-bottles/tanks

▲ toast0 3 days ago | parent [-]

> For rural / quasi industrial, furnaces, generators, etc it's not uncommon to have fixed installation 210kg LPG bulk cylinders filled by supply truck .. and larger.

Seems kind of small if you're rural/have regular delivery limitations? I've got a 500 gallon propane tank for domestic use (stove, waterheater, fireplace) and another 500 gallon tank for my generator. The internet says a 500 gallon tank at 80% full (max safe fill) is about 750 kg of propane. We've had a few two day outages, but no three day outages since we moved here, but neighbors report some outages in the 7-10 day timeframe. 500 gallon tanks seem pretty popular around these parts, commercial/government goes bigger, small properties go smaller; plenty of neighbors have no generator and may not have propane either; government runs warming centers if you can get there.

▲ defrost 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Seems kind of small

   it's not uncommon to have .. 210kg LPG bulk cylinders .. and larger.

Nearly five standard 45kg household tanks is the smallest capacity fixed installation bulk tank supplied by one local gas company. The option to rent larger tanks on a long term contract exists.

> if you're rural/have regular delivery limitations?

Many rural locations here have regular deliveries .. the milk gets picked up every day for example (multiple double tanker trucks worth from, say, the Cowaramup* district alone).

There's no need for a larger tank simply because you're rural unless you explicitly want constant gas at a particular delivery rate sufficient to last out a supply issue of {X} {time units}.

( For example if you run a continuously fired glass furnace + annealers, have a ceramics business as a side hustle, specifically have emergancy services generators for blackouts etc. )

> government runs warming centers if you can get there.

Your local government I assume - this isn't something ours has ever considered TBH.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowaramup,_Western_Australia#A...

▲

hedora 2 days ago | parent [-]

750kg (500 gal) is the smallest you can get around here.

A house backup generator uses something like 3kg of propane per hour idle, so that tank will keep your fridge on for ~ 10 days. Our area (outskirts of Silicon Valley) saw 20-30 day power outages with essentially no sun that year. The weather is rapidly worsening due to climate change, but they are also hardening the infrastructure.

Now, with a battery + backup generator + wood stove, you only need to run the generator to charge the house batteries. Assume a duty cycle of a few hours of optimal efficiency generator per day, wood heating, and you can easily exceed the 30 day target. At that point the sun should be out, at least here in California, or at least the roads will be open enough to let the propane supply chain adapt to the demand.

For the EV route, buy a truck or SUV with vehicle to home support, and a house battery that can charge off the vehicle. The truck has 2-4x a house battery in it. This plan assumes there’s a fast charger in town (ideally near the grocery store), and it’s under ~ 100 miles round trip.

Edit: I’ll add local pricing: A used >= 100 kwh ev is about $30K. The generator + permits + tank is > $20k.

With the ev route, you also get a nice car.

I didn’t price out generator + 2000 gallons of propane storage. It’d guess it’s about $30k.

	▲	olyjohn 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe you don't need such a huge generator. Run your fridge and a small heater, and only heat a small section of your house. Were talking about emergencies here, not keeping your hot tub running. I can heat a bedroom easily with a 1500 watt space heater. And my fridge pulls an average of about 150 watts. Quite honestly, a whole house generator is for convenience when there's a tree that falls on a power line. It sounds like a real waste for an actual emergency.