The EnergyNovice was born.. I guess out of necessity.  Hurricane Ike ripped through Texas with all its fury but nobody expected its effects to reach Dayton, Ohio… way up here in the midwest! With wind gusts up to 70 mph - pretty uncommon for these parts - trees were broken, rooftops and sidings broken off and flying off into the air.. even unsecured trampolines rolling and jumping over fences.  Nobody really expected it to be that bad, not the weathermen, not the emergency services, not the electric company, and certainly not us.

Of course, with the destruction came the eventual loss of electricity and power. Huge swaths of neighborhoods were in darkness that first night.. 2.5 million households were without power and to make it worse, most of the power line technicians and engineers were not in town - they were in Texas helping out the affected homes there! In our case, we were out of power for 3 days.. but a lot of homes were out of power for 7 and, I believe, the worst was about 13 days!  Some homes were without heat, some without food (food doesn’t last long in a fridge without any power) and fast food stores were filled with people (the first time I’ve seen them that full). Generators, Inverters, propane stoves, kerosene lamps, and other emergency items - normally in stock in stores - were completely gone by the time we got around to thinking that this blackout would take much longer than we thought!

Basically, this got me thinking…  this shouldn’t really happen to those who are prepared and ready for any disaster that should strike.  We have a lot of resources all around us in “normal” times but when disasters happen… things that we take for granted are usually gone pretty fast - electricity, heat, food, water… pretty much gone in the first few days.  It could be worse.. what if it lasted more than that without any relief?  What if gasoline trucks couldn’t deliver gas to the stations?  What would happen to those generators which needed this? 7 days without relief is going to be a nightmare for most people.  What if it happened in the middle of winter?!

Although I have always been interested in alternative energies, it never really hit home until this happened.  It got me thinking of ways we could have done better in the crisis… we should have a back up plan if electricity went out… fridge & furnace seems to be the best items to power for our home.  What could we do in the future to have this running?  Solar panels & batteries could have helped… a large inverter on hand would have been pretty useful to power lights and other essentials.  A generator would have been a blessing too. :)

Thus, this blog was born… I’m a pretty good researcher on the Internet and I have a basic grasp of power and energy from college days. What I plan to do is share my findings and ideas on this blog… to see what people think and see what we all could do to increase our self-reliance and lower our dependence on others.

There are a LOT of energy resources out there… which are feasible and which are not though are a different thing… I do hope though to have fun finding out new ideas - as well as looking into tried & true ways to be energy independent.  I hope you will too… !