Author	Thread: HANDYMAN
WalkNTalk View Profile History	HANDYMAN Posted : 10 Aug, 2025 07:52 AM I like that Handyman has gone for offgrid living and has his own set-up. Good to reduce those electric bills. The less we owe utilities, the better! May you save a million dollars. I have a brother who had his house arrayed in solar panels and had his own solar hot water heater. Now his wife has a Tesla. Not a good time to have a Tesla with people targeting the car. He has also owned Toyota Prius and Honda. Nice to reduce our energy costs. I used to bike to work and rollerblade to work. One of my brothers lived a block from work. He got me hooked on drinking purified water. Anyway, good there are people for energy independence and smart living! Hope God favors you in your current battle. Post Reply
Handyman62 View Profile History	HANDYMAN Posted : 10 Aug, 2025 10:45 AM Even if I saved a million dollars I couldn't take it with me. I do love the fact when the grid goes down in my area I usually don't know it until after the fact. I am still connected to the grid which feeds the panel that runs all my high energy appliances like my stove, dishwasher, electric dryer and one of my central air units. (I have 4 but only use 1.) Everything else including my electric water heater runs off my solar. I average about $40 a month in electric bills and the only reason it's that high is because they charge me more per kilowatt because I use less. Where I live the cost of electricity is only about 0.12 cents a kilowatt hour if you use at least 1000 hours a month. Many states charge 0,25 cents and up. Because of the low price here it was not really cost effective for me to put in my system so saving money wasn't my primary reason. The main reasons were to keep the lights on during those temporary blackouts and in the unlikely event of a terrorist attack that takes out the grid. If that happens I and a couple of my neighbors may be some of the few that survive the event at least until my cancer takes me. I'm set up to survive without the grid. I would put in a well which would make that a little easier, but I do happen to have a spring adjacent to my property. It's not developed so the water would have to be filtered. My property provides everything needed to do that also. I have some plastic barrels and where I live its called the sand hills so sand is abundant along with various size rock and plenty of trees to make charcoal so large scale filtering is possible. But I would still boil water for drinking. I'm also already set up with a 500 gallon water tank in side my house with it's own pressure water system. I installed that because my water meter is 1500 feet from my house through the woods and crosses 3 different properties and has managed to spring a leak which I can't find. It's not practical to get everyone's permission to retrench their property's and the water company won't move my meter closer. So I keep my water turned off and only turn it on to refill my tank every 2 weeks. My water set up has come in handy because our water company tells people after the fact when they turn the water off to work on the system. Then they don't tell people to boil the water until after the fact. I found that out one day when I flushed my toilet and the water was as yellow as the urine I was flushing down. I called the water company and they said we worked on the system yesterday so you should boil your water. This was all before I installed my tank. Now I just hope that my water tank has enough water in it when they decide to contaminate the water. Which already happened at least once since installation. I also have everything I need to set up a rain water catchment system with that tank. 500 gallons really isn't enough to take advantage of the rain we have here. It does rain often but most are small rain showers so when the big ones hit it would be nice to have at least 5000 gallons but 10,000 would be better. I have a room I can dedicate just for that. At this point I won't bother purchasing the tanks. Because of covid they sky-rocketed in price and with my illness I don't see the point in preparing anymore. That's what happens when a man no longer has a family to provide for. No point in preparing for long term survival when there's no family involved. Well like usual my response was long winded Post Reply