Electronic prepping

[ppTRN]

Prepping, refered to survial, is the art of being prepared for any natural or antropological catastrophe by always having a small bag that allow you to survive in arsh enviroments for 72 hours. Inside a prepper's bag you'll find stuff like matches, water filters, rope, med kit and so on.

The world as we know it ended, and you (a prepper, but also an EE) managed to survive not only the first few days, but even the first few years. Now you live in a small comunity that grew with time, you have small houses, running water, even hot water, coltivated land and a small farm perfectly able to sustain you. People around you is safe, procreating, but all of you have lost every piece of electronic tecnology you have ever knew of.

Now that you are definately settled, you go back to your house after a long day of work, and find that old forgotten suitcase that you prepped before the apocalipse. Inside of it there is everithing you prepped in terms of electronics. Thanks to those things you are now able to provide to your small comunity with electrical power, small electronic security sistems, you name it. You even have students, to teach them the long forgotten phisics of electricity. Thanks to your efforts, not only your settlement is the most prolificent (you can pastorize milk, exactly at the temperature you set your system to work!) but is also the happiest and will be the one that will rise the man and woman that will became the first new EE.

You are the prepper. What's in YOUR bag?

[.RC.]

Problem with these situations is they tend to have a bit of an optimistic outlook.

If you have reverted back to a medieval style of living the most important thing will be knowledge on how to build stuff.  Electronics will not last long before time decays them.  So developing the technology to have things like paper, printing and so on, so you can keep the knowledge that has already been discovered in a form that can be easily accessed.

So the most important thing would be knowledge in a long term storage that can be easily accessed.  At the moment that would be simple paper books.

[magic]

IMO modern industry is so dependent on electronics that you won't be able to have things like houses and running water without electricity. It will be repeating most of the path from stone age to the industrial revolution by hand, and may take longer than a few years.

You'd be better off smuggling a bag of nails and a hammer than your DMM.

[m k]

Technology steps can't be hopped over.

Making a coil from a wire is easy but making a wire from an ore is not.

[PlainName]

At the start you shouldn't need to make wire from ore - there is plenty of it about and it just takes knowledge and resourcefulness to acquire and use. So some technology steps can be skipped, but you need to press on and use what remains to rebuild the supply chain to take advantage. Hang around too long and that possibility will be lost.

[PA0PBZ]

 

[nctnico]

You'd be better off smuggling a bag of nails and a hammer than your DMM.

Agreed. I'd leave my DMM behind but bring my hand-operated (wood working) tools.

IMHO the best way to prep is to collect a library on paper that tells you which plants are edible, how to build shelters, etc, etc. Canned food and whatever you store will run out. Remember: give a man a fish and he can eat for a day. Teach a man how to fish and he can eat until he dies.

[Towger]

We used to have set of encyclopedia style books going into good detail on how everything was made/produced.  They were from the 40-50's (or earlier) I think, before everything got too complex to be reproduced.  I read through all of them as a child, but unfortunately other family members chucked them out.   If civilization reset they would give a good kick start on rebuilding it.  Apart from those books I would like solar panels, lighting and radio equipment.

[Bud]

There will be a lot of electronic junk around, I'd still stick a multimeter into the prep kit.

[coppercone2]

probobly dump the electronics and put more food in there

From a funny video game perspective, a DMM might help you decide which car batteries are worth dragging around. That is actually useful because you can run a water pump, run lights, start fires, weld, etc with car batteries. Should be plenty left to borrow when you are the omega man?

Might be the one fun thing of such a event, you can hook up every car battery in manhattan in series to see what happens

[Infraviolet]

m k, reply #3, the advantage is you don't need to. Pretty much any plausible apocalypse leaves the debrisof a collapsed society all over the place for the survivors to pick through. Copper wire will be available to be found in the wastelands that were once cities, you don't need to be smelting it from ore until your restarted society is large enough that you are starting to run out of pre-apocalypse cities to "mine" processed materials from. Copper lasts quite a while exposed to the elements before any serious corrosion sets in.

Even for "producing" the rust-prone steel alloys, you can still gather up rusted objects from the past civilisations, strip away the rusted outer surfaces and use the centre as fresh material for forging or milling in to necessary forms.

[Smokey]

https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Rebuild-Civilization-Aftermath-Cataclysm/dp/0143127047/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?adgrpid=57654351964&hvadid=580884538073&hvdev=m&hvlocphy=9031000&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=636542088698397705&hvtargid=kwd-308206373494&hydadcr=15145_13523074&keywords=the+knowledge+lewis+dartnell&qid=1683491759&sr=8-1


He talks about how he thinks electric motors are easier to make than internal combustion engines, but he's not thinking about the drive electronics needed to power the motors. 
It's all going to be steam engines, I think.

[NiHaoMike]

I know who I would want on my team: Lin Guo Er.
https://www.youtube.com/@LinGuoErOfficial/videos
There's the saying that if a solar storm destroys all the transformers, she'll be able to rebuild them.

He talks about how he thinks electric motors are easier to make than internal combustion engines, but he's not thinking about the drive electronics needed to power the motors. 

Time to go back to the brushes and commutator.

[CatalinaWOW]

It is hard to think of any modern electronics that would be useful enough to skip working on staying alive for another day or week. 

Maybe GMRS radios if you had a way to keep batteries working.  Or a good welding system, though supplies would have to be scavenged.  How to make lightning rods.  And possibly LED lights for as long as they can be salvaged.  The latter assumes that you aren't too tired to stay awake after the sun goes down.  Subsistence farming is hard work and will be particularly hard the first few decades when enough mules and work horses have been raised and trained to meet every ones needs.

Older skills, gunsmithing, powder milling, blacksmithing, soap making, rope making, farriers, harness making, stonework, carpentry, animal husbandry, and a host of other skills will be of far more use than circuit analysis, C coding, or any of the other tools of the modern electronics trade.

[m k]

If leftovers are available then my kit would have several geiger meters and hand dynamos.

Or was it clean apocalypse?
Maybe it was a bug.

[Rick Law]

...
The world as we know it ended, and you (a prepper, but also an EE) managed to survive not only the first few days, but even the first few years. Now you live in a small comunity that grew with time, you have small houses, running water, even hot water, coltivated land and a small farm perfectly able to sustain you. People around you is safe, procreating, but all of you have lost every piece of electronic tecnology you have ever knew of.

Now that you are definately settled, you go back to your house after a long day of work, and find that old forgotten suitcase that you prepped before the apocalipse. Inside of it there is everithing you prepped in terms of electronics. Thanks to those things you are now able to provide to your small comunity with electrical power, small electronic security sistems, you name it. You even have students, to teach them the long forgotten phisics of electricity. Thanks to your efforts, not only your settlement is the most prolificent (you can pastorize milk, exactly at the temperature you set your system to work!) but is also the happiest and will be the one that will rise the man and woman that will became the first new EE.

You are the prepper. What's in YOUR bag?

Since the original scenario is that you "managed to survive not only the first few days, but even the first few years" and "you have small houses, running water, even hot water, coltivated land and a small farm perfectly able to sustain you. People around you is safe, procreating, but all of you have lost every piece of electronic tecnology you have ever knew of."[SIC]   Short term survival is by your scenario already attained.  A DMM is certainly helpful, but procreating is...  Well a mixed bag.

You wont need future EE yet.  You need first to get to the future so as to have a chance for future EE.  With short-term survival (by your scenario) already attained, long-term multi-generational survival should be the goal.  Otherwise, procreation is just sex.

Assuming your community is a little village of tens to a hundred, your little village is a definition of a genetic bottleneck.  I saw a documentary about the India Subcontinent that at one time, the Subcontinent went through a genetic bottleneck.  They were, according to the experts on that documentary, near the minimum number for specie survival at about 3000.  So, taking their word for it, for you to have future generations, you need to interact/inter-marriages with other similar communities.

Forget electronics -- except CB radios and HAM radios to contact other groups.  Meeting up with other groups will help with genetic diversity, knowledge, and perhaps engage in trade. 

Hopefully the other groups will all be good folks, but world being this world, there will be some that want to eat your lunch or perhaps even to eat you.  You need security (weapons of any sort) to defend against natural danger as well as other unfriendly humans, education to maintain pre-apocalypse stuff to keep them running as long as you can, and education to another group to build new low tech (maintainable) stuff to replace the failed pre-apocalypse equipments.

I'd forget about what else you may have at home, but instead try to get mobile.  Savage existing cars that may run, and go look for stores not fully looted yet.  Guns, ammo, mountain bikes (eventually you wont find gas to run cars), archery stores, stationery stores (pencil, paper... so as kids learn, they can put it on paper), and raid your local library for all books technology and medicine, particularly herbal medicine.  Raiding a school for lab equipment would also be helpful.

While you are raiding the school lab, don't forget to pick up an optical microscope (without electronics).  It will help your little village staying alive -- in being able to see what is in your water.

So, leave your x-box in your old house and go to the kitchen to grab all your kitchen knives.  If you run into a pack of wolves on the way back, an x-box isn't going to help much.

[wilfred]

Should be plenty left to borrow when you are the omega man?

That's the movie I think of when contemplating the apocalypse.

I read once that when societies collapse people will revert to doing what they've always done. Fight over women and pigs. The author was quoting a New Guinea highlander. I also remember reading about a man who when asked how he lost his fortune. He replied I lost it two ways, first slowly then quickly. I think when the end comes there will have been plenty of forewarning for the observant and then the end will come quickly to the shock of the masses. Pretty much like the collapse of the Soviet Union or the Berlin Wall. Every past empire that ever existed collapsed far more quickly than it took to rise to supremacy.

Unlike the movies I am thinking the next disaster to prepare for is the consequences of the large amount of debt that exists. And when it falls due you don't want the poor bunny that is "asked" to dig deep. Which will be most taxpayers and those with retirement savings whether it is through bailouts or higher interest rates and inflation. If something can't go on forever, it won't. I forget who first said that but it is a basic truth in my opinion too.

Sooner or later everyone gets a seat at the banquet of consequences. Prepped or not.

For conventional disasters you want to survive the first week without power (refrigeration), water, food, and sanitation. Look at what people did in the early stages of the COVID pandemic. Then you need to survive the disease that follows from masses of dead carcasses.

[BradC]

Look at what people did in the early stages of the COVID pandemic.

How is hoarding toilet paper going to help?

[Smokey]

Look at what people did in the early stages of the COVID pandemic.

How is hoarding toilet paper going to help?

It will get you out of some shitty situations!