Google News: You will see the northern lights tonight! HN: CME imminent, We're all gonna die!
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Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs
171–180 of 418 posts
Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ignoring unrealistic preparations for most of us (such as bunkers and whatever else), an adequate supply of food and water to handle disruptions to logistics for a realistic amount of time must surely be the lowest hanging fruit (e.g. a month?). This is fairly trivial if you aim for things like rice and pasta, and if the grid goes down for longer than a month a lot of us are dying regardless of how we prepare.
Also trash bags to shit in. Put it in your toilet, close the lid on it, boom you can shit in the comfort of your bathroom in a relatively sanitary way.
I guess that's one upside of living off of city water / sanitation. In my circumstance I wouldn't have a change of living due to well water pump being easily run from solar collected electricity. It would only have to run the pump a few times a day to keep the well bladder tank primed. Same thing for the mound system as the pump only needs to run a few times a day during normal operations. This could just be run once at the end of the day to bring the final holding tank down to a normal level.
Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs
#173Can you really call yourself a prepper if you don’t have a faraday cage with a spare laptop inside? (The intersection of doomerism and tech is amusingly cyberpunk sometimes.) Actually, what’s the most useful way you’d prepare for a worldwide grid outage? This isn’t that, but sometimes I wonder if a future CME might be as catastrophic as some say.
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Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen the flickering as well, but surely it's not CME-related? After all, it's already evening.
It takes a while for a solar storm to reach earth. It travels slower than light. But I don't know what caused the flickering in Stockholm.
Ah, yes, I know this of course, and I somehow temporarily imagined some kind of madness where the earth's sunny side is permanently pointing towards the sun.
Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand what 50 kW could possibly be needed for. Part of the electricity bill here in Flanders is based on monthly power peak. I charge an EV at home, and by setting up the charging station to take into account consumption data from the meter, I have no problem staying below 7 kW. Okay, that's averaged over 15 minute time slots, but even the connection for my house is only rated 13.8 kW!
> Okay, that's averaged over 15 minute time slots, but even the connection for my house is only rated 13.8 kW! In the US we have single-phase (split-phase) 120/240v 200A service drops for houses, 48kW. Houses over 3,000 square feet with electric heating, electric ovens, electric water heaters, and electric air conditioning can push 150A peak demand, and a 200A service drop is not much more expensive for the utility t…
Not needing a sub-panel is almost certainly the reason.
The North American residential electrical code limits how many circuits you can put onto a generator based on the circuit capacity, not the expected use. You aren't allowed to pinky swear that you won't run your electric oven and dry laundry at the same time. It doesn't matter that your generator will just trip its breaker or die.
So if you want to have most of your house on a permanently wired standby generator you need to wildly oversize that generator such that it can entirely replace utility power.
Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs
#176The K-index for this is an 8 which is one less than an extreme G5 geomagnetic storm ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-index ). I haven't been able to find it, so I'm curious what the Carrington event K-index was?
This paper estimates Kp = (8.4±0.8). Because the scale is logarithmic, the difference between 8 and 9.2 is obviously quite extreme.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/asna.2022007...
Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs
#177I wonder how much it would cost to harden the US power grid against another Carrington Event, such that "only" thousands of people would die, instead of millions.
Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a 50kw generac tied into my house with a 1000 gallon propane tank.
I don't understand what 50 kW could possibly be needed for. Part of the electricity bill here in Flanders is based on monthly power peak. I charge an EV at home, and by setting up the charging station to take into account consumption data from the meter, I have no problem staying below 7 kW. Okay, that's averaged over 15 minute time slots, but even the connection for my house is only rated 13.8 kW!
I have 2 wells, irrigation, a big shop and a smallish house. I live on the eastern crest of the North Cascades mountains in Washington State US and it can be -30c in the winter and 40c in the summer. Heat pump system with wood backup for the house and woodstove in the shop. When looking at the costs to put in the genset the difference to go big was de minimus.
Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
The genius move I heard of was to throw a few 5-gal jugs of water up in your attic (!!!). It's relatively shelf-stable, standardized size, and "in case of emergency" you can even use it as a gravity-flowed spout to fill smaller containers below. I've taken to trying to have a minimal set of 4 one liter steel water bottles hung in the closet (grab + go) all the time. So convenient to be able to "just grab some water"…
If one is going to do that, I'd strongly recommend putting them in some kind of basin that can hold the water if it escapes from the jugs, or sturdier containers, or both. At least in the US, water jugs are generally very flimsy. An attic is likely to have wide temperature variations throughout the year, and leaky water jugs up there could cause some expensive damage.
Yeah we had plastic jugs in our cool basement leak all over the concrete floor — I can’t imagine the disaster that would be to have plastic jugs in my 140F attic with resultant leaking down from the ceiling
Re: Coronal mass ejection impact imminent, two more earth-directed CMEs
#180Relevant YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGlGCIiyZE This guy has done solar weather reports every morning for years at this point.
My preference is for Dr Skov: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXia20jA4tI