by Conan Stevens, Survival Blog:
(Continued from Part 1. This concludes the article.)
To give a vivid image of what it is still like here, the next smaller village over where my girl grew up still has a single electrical wire held up by bamboo poles with a 3W LED bulb dangling off every 100m (330 ft) or so for street lights, and house wiring running off that same single wire. But the sand roads were concreted over a few years ago, so there is improvement happening.
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As you can imagine in the tropics solar power works great, in dry season we have full batteries by 9:30am and produce over 5KW of excess electricity throughout a sunny day, in wet season it’s generally pretty good but the last typhoon sat offshore for 4 days straight we still managed to get an average of 11% efficiency from the panels which got us 90% charge back each day.
I have ordered and will be adding another 4KWh battery shortly to give us more reserves. “Shortly” because it had to be ordered to Manila then awaiting a family member to bring it down on the bus, which is a 30 hour trip, not due to the distance but due to the state of the roads and it has been delayed due to the ferry not being able to cross from Luzon, the main island to our island, due to rough seas. “Soon” and “shortly” have different meanings here than in the West, and that can frustratingly carry over to all aspects of life.
Most of the farm machinery we are now starting to see as useful runs a 2KW to 4KW generator, so that is a no-go fro cahrging the 2KW Bluetti power station. (That allows up to 5-second 4KW spikes, but there is a precise 2KW cut off, as I tested it with an inverter welder. I can run that at 1900W which is 1/3rd power on the welder dial which can do the jobs we need. So an upgraded solar setup for a workshed for farm machinery will be needed in future. That will include a rice mill, a feed pellet maker, etc.
Getting so much sun does have its downsides: heat and humidity. In the tropics, if you’re not drenched from sweat you’re drenched from rain. Still, for me, being Australian, it beats the cold which I never really experienced while growing up. Having said that, it is currently cool season which lasts 2 to 6 weeks and the temperature gets quite cold, for here, down to 22C (71F) at night – it got so cold the other morning I had to put a long sleeve shirt over my t-shirt for a few hours.
We do have and regularly use Baofeng UV5R 2-way radios. A friend was making fun of me for going full prepper when I originally told him I had bought these. Turns out the cell towers are down once a week on average. These outages vary from a few hours to a few days. One of the two regional 4G providers has been down for 10 days straight this time. So the radios already get regular usage to the point where the radios are the primary point of contact with the sister in the village.
A SHTF scenario plays out daily. It is just normal life here.
With our PV power set-up, we easily run warm spectrum 5W LED lights, a 300W rice cooker, a low-power 15W fan and a small 115W 5 cu ft two-door refrigerator. A 64W 4 cu ft chest freezer was purchased recently and will be added “soon” when the additional LiFePo4 battery arrives. This should let us run 3.5 to 4 days with absolutely no sun if we do not use the rice cooker for rice, boiling water, or stews. Rice cookers are extremely versatile and a great addition to off-grid solar setups that no one in the West seems to consider. They are basically a cheap slow cooker for pretty much anything you want to throw into it.
We’ve had precisely five days so far out of nine months where we produced no useful amount of solar power throughout the entire day. The Bluetti can dual charge with solar and mains (grid) power. This allows us to intake 700W of solar plus 400W from a secondary solar array connected via a separately purchased D0505S converter brick plugged into the AC charging port. Only 45 minutes of direct sun will recharge our usual overnight usage. Maximise your panels and then overpanel. It really does help.
I have worked out that an 12% efficiency of the total 1600W of panels will recharge the Bluetti to 100% each day so we’re generally okay in rainy season even with with clouds and light rain.
The Bluetti was chosen mainly as a single point of contact if there is a failure, add in warranty is done via their head office in Hong Kong, meaning I do not have to argue and push and shove local distributors to uphold their end. Having a single point of failure saves me arguing with multiple vendors who will all point fingers at anyone else.
