South Carolina law permits shooting and or kïlling of someone stealing at night. Read this carefully. YMMV. Now would be a good time to research similar laws in your state. If you find a law that has to do with personal or property protection print it out and keep in your wallet.

SECTION 17-13-20. Additional circumstances when citizens may arrest; means to be used.

A citizen may arrest a person in the nighttime by efficient means as the darkness and the probability of escape render necessary, even if the life of the person should be taken, when the person:

(a) has committed a felony;

(b) has entered a dwelling house without express or implied permission;

(c) has broken or is breaking into an outhouse with a view to plunder;

(d) has in his possession stolen property; or

(e) being under circumstances which raise just suspicion of his design to steal or to commit some felony, flees when he is hailed.

Just a friendly reminder. You should have one of these in your glove box. About 1500 people a year die of hypothermia in the United States. I had a dear friend who froze to death in his broken down car just a few years ago. One of these could have saved his life. They're less than $3 at Walmart in the camping section and about the size of a deck of cards.

It’s been brought up a few times here but… ladies how’s your stock of girl supplies? Have you considered silicone menstrual cups?

Well pump pressure switch. You can buy a pressure switch with a low pressure cut off. Who knew? It cycles like a regular pressure switch, but if you loose water pressure completely it will simply stop running the pump. Prevents pump from running forever with a broken pipe or other issue.

Also a buddy just bought a grundfoss soft start pump. He reports that when you turn it on, it takes about 1-1/2 seconds to start coming on and then slowly ramps up to full speed. No torquing up in the well case… no coming on with a bang…. No surge on a solar inverter system. It also has an integrated float switch so if your well level drops it will shut off before running dry.

Pressure tanks and pump sizes.

Get as large a pressure tank as you are willing to afford. Each time your pump starts, it’s hard on it. If you get a large pressure tank, you make the pump start and stop less frequently.

Have you noticed water pressure changing a few times when you are showering? Get a bigger pressure tank. Or check the one you have for a broken bladder. When we first bought the house, hte contractor gave us a 5 gallon pressure tank. The pump would cycle each time someone flushed a toilet. Ideally, a large pressure tank will allow you to run water in the sink or flush toilets all day without the pump coming on.

Wellmate makes fiberglass pressure tanks with a replaceable bladder. Good stuff. Sure you can use a steel pressure tank, but it will inevitably get a nick in the paint and rust. Tanks are always covered in condensation.

Another tip here is to look into potentially decreasing the size of your pump. Just as a small tank can cause rapid cycling, a large pump can too. But but but… bigger is better you say! Nope. The right size for your water usage is best. Most homes in my area have a 2hp pump when a 3/4 will do. Your pressure switch will arc less, and if your goal is off grid, you won’t need as large of an inverter to start the pump. What you are looking for is a pump that can just maintain pressure in the tank on your largest demand. It might be watering the garden. So if you water the garden, the pump should come on and run the whole time and not power cycle. Once the demand is gone, the pump can then top off the pressure tank and shut off.

Ants seem to love ionized air. They will get into your pressure switch like crazy and gum up the contacts. I have had success by poking a hole in a plastic butter tub for the 1/4” water line coming in to the pressure switch and filling the bottom of the plastic tub with sevin dust. This technique also works if you have an automatic dog feeder that the ants get into. We finally gave up and put the pressure tank in the basement along with the switch.

As mentioned in a previous post, you can get a soft start pump such as a grundfoss. Something interesting about this pump is that because of the electronics inside, it doesn’t care if you run it from AC or DC. So it would be possible to run it four solar panels directly with no inverter.

Thanks to Madwolf for mentioning a gavanlized water pressure tank, I've located an article that tells how the air management works in them. Since they dont have a bladder and the air in the tank can be dissolved in water over time, you have to manually add air or there are systems to automatically add air and bleed off the excess.

This actually is a pretty darn good video for getting a battery made and inverters. Much of his stuff is specific to Victron inverters and REC BMS…. Folks here on this group have used QUCC BMS, JK BMS, Chargery. Never the less if you want a pretty good overview of what you might do to get off grid, this is worth watching.
https://youtu.be/vnjMQLhp6LE

You can live three minutes without air three days without water, three weeks without food.
So if you want to know what to prep…

do you a source of water? If you say we have a wellpump, then do you have a way to power it? Or maybe you should get a handpump for emergencies. Maybe you have a source of running water like a creek, but is it Seasonal? Maybe you have a source of standing water, but do you have a ceramic water filter? If you cannot answer yes to any of these questions, you may as well get on the fema train.

What do you do for food? Most canned food only last two years. At some point you will need to grow your own food. Think about all the steps that takes… Seeds… Water… Equipment… Ability to preserve food. Course having electricity means having refrigeration… And that means having meat several days in a row. If you can’t answer yes to the ability to grow food then eventually you will get on the fema train.

Having electricity makes the two things above much easier. Having water on tap, refrigeration. If you think you can run your house on the gasoline or LP gas generator, where will you get fuel in the future? This is why I push Solar so much. Sunshine can: put water into your garden, make meat last longer, make your life more comfortable. You can stop your wife from saying I told you so. It can stop you from having to get on the FEMA train

Not exactly off grid related but… I know far too many young men whom I call man cubs. They need to be mentored by real men. Part of the downfall of our society is boys not becoming men and being prepared to make tough decisions. We allowed the feminists to pull the rug out from under men by calling it toxic masculinity. God made us for different roles. Women are for love and nurture and men are tough love and tough decisions. Man up y’all!

https://youtu.be/sxePuWBABKk

Several months ago we just might have bought some suture kits from Amazon and some small syringes and some lidocaine from mountain side medical equipment online.

Don't fret. We have admins with full privileges here. Nothing will change with this channel.

Off grid in Finland. https://medium.com/@upnorthandoffgrid

Hi all, hope its OK to put this here. I recently did a video about how to build an off grid power station using affordable parts from the motor industry. My wife and I started a channel about our journey into homesteading and getting off the grid. We're not monetised in any way and created the channel to document our journey and inspire others to do the same.
https://youtu.be/kXY8_6OLbKc

A sobering message for ya'll. I visited a paper mill today and one of the guys I know let loose a story. On the 23th December his kids 12 and 3 went to grandmas house and opened some presents. He got called to the mill on their way home, so he dropped off the wife and kids and took off to the mill. He hadn't even arrived yet and got a call from his mother in law. She told him that his house was on fire and his wife was was badly burned.

His wife started a fire in their burn barrel to get rid of the boxes the kids' gifts were in. Her mistake was using gasoline instead of the jug of diesel fuel. The flame flashed back into the gas jug and blew up all over here. The jug went flying onto the roof and caught the roof on fire.

She is presently in a medically induced coma with burns over every part of her body except her back. She'll be in the hospital for another year yet.

This story made me think about my own daughter. I worried she knew just enough to be dangerous. All the times she's seen me start a bon fire with diesel and she may not have realized that jug was diesel. Make sure this doesn't happy to anyone you know.

Primer for EV's.
Not all EVs are Teslas... most EVs are reworked gas cars. Not all EVs are expensive. If you need a car that's cheap to get back and forth to your 9 to 5 job, there are several "undesirable" EVs such as Nissan Leaf, Chevy Bolt, Fiat 500e. You can pick up a used one for cheap. They require no maintenance at all... no oil changes, no tranny flushes, nothing except tires.

If you have solar at your house they can run on sunshine. You plug them in when you get home from work and they are full the next day. This is the part that people don't understand. The normal car requires you to fuel up on the way home a time or two a week. EVs are full every day. So you do not have to live near a public charging station. They can charge off anything from 120v outlet to a dryer plug to an RV plug in your garage.

If you need to travel you will need to use public fast chargers. All other cars use a different plug than Tesla. This is where it sucks to not have a tesla. The CCS (non tesla) stations are often unreliable and you have to call the vendor to get them to reset the charger. Tesla just works... every time.

Now a little tech info. Where a gas car is rated in MPG (or liters/100km), an EV is rated in wh/mile or wh/km. Watthours. A kilo watt hour of electricity is 12c in my area. So my car gets 250wh/mile or 4 miles per 1000wh. That comes to about $0.12 / 4 miles = 3cents a mile. Just yesterday I drove 150 mile round trip on 40kwh of electric. That's $4.80 in electric. In a 25mpg car I would have burned 6 gallons x $4.50 = $27. THIS IS WHY ELECTRIC CARS.

Fire drill: Your well pump just failed. Do you have the parts to pull it? Pipe unions? Waterproof splice kit? Spare pressure switch? Spare pump? Teflon tape? Do you have a hand pump? Or a bailing bucket?

In an effort to stop the spammers, we have installed a bot to check you at the door. She will also check for certain keywords. Alas she is a cruel mistress and if you use one of these keywords or phrases you'll be booted but can rejoin. Sorry for the inconvenience. This is why we can't have nice things.

If the lights went out right now.... Could you cook dinner? Open cans of spaghetto's for the kiddos? Did you know that you can reuse the water hot dogs were cooked in to make ramen noodles? Adds a nice flavor. And yes I'm kidding. ewwwww....

For some, making dinner when the power is out is the difference between not eating and having enough battery in your cellphone to order door dash.

Folks, what's in your go bag? Jerky? scooby snacks? I had some MREs stored in a shed in the back yard for 10 years and there were NOT NOT NOT good when I opened one. Is your emergency food in good shape?