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Wind turbines, solar panels or generators?


brickgunner

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I don't think the average man that PZ seeks to represent has a bachelor's in electrical engineering =\

 

You may think this stuff is common knowledge, but it very much isn't. Even most repair and handyman types have no actual idea how generating electricity works, they just know how to fix things that are broken. It's not a matter of being physically difficult (although I do think you're underestimating the amount of soldering and such would be needed to make this actually work), but of knowing how.

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I don't have a bachelor's in electrical engineering. All my knowledge in electrical work has come adjacent to my apprenticeship in heating and air conditioning. I'll be studying more about it this next semester, but it's by no means a focal point of my education. Most of the rest of my knowledge just comes from asking questions and reading up about it in books. This stuff is actually pretty easy to pick up on.

 

Granted, actually building an electric generator from scratch would be a very difficult feat for an average person (it's not exactly impossible, but most people won't know that all you need is a long length of enameled copper wire and a magnet plus some other stuff. Building a good one is labor intensive as well) but if you've got an electric motor scavenged from someone's house(and every house has at minimum one, so it's a pretty common part) you've bypassed the most difficult step. After that all you need is the source of movement and enough skill to wire it into the power grid, which anyone who studies up on electrical work in a skill book is gonna be capable of doing.

 

This stuff is a lot easier than most people think. I guess that's probably just a matter of opinion, though.

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Electrical work is something that you probably won't find many books for. Things that are both highly technical and offer very little in the way of hobby/enjoyment value have migrated pretty much to the internet now. Unless you happen upon the house of someone in college to become an electrical engineer, finding this kind of stuff would be prettttttty uncommon. Just ask yourself if you've ever been in anyone's home who had an electrical engineering tome sitting around their house. I know I haven't- I always check out people's books, too.

 

Again, I'm not entirely worried about the physical labor aspect of it, this is just extremely not common knowledge or easily accessible. Between the very low realism value of doing it and the very low amount of power/value gained from actually doing it, do you actually think this would be worth programming in PZ?

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I disagree with it not being easily accessible. It's not common knowledge, yes, but the books are out there and anyone can learn from them. That's a point of contention but it's just an opinion so it can be overlooked.

 

What I do know is that, meager amounts of power or not, in the event of an apocalypse every loot run I went on I'd make sure to bring back at least one motor and one car battery unless I was in truly dire need of some other supply and needed the extra space. I'd then proceed to hook the electrical motors into every source of movement I could find or contrive. Like I said, the parts are obscenely common so there's no danger of running out of them. Add together a bunch of meager power sources and feed them into a battery farm and you'd have at least enough energy to run a fridge. It'd be a lot of work but everyone needs a hobby to focus on in their spare time and you can't underestimate a person's need to return to normalcy, even if that normalcy is the frankensteined shadow of an actual power grid they've managed to cobble together from spare parts

 

The only real problem I, personally, see against it is that the system behind it might be too much coding work and the devs might prefer to keep it simple in order to work on other stuff. It would definitely be a pretty major undertaking from what I understand of game design. That, more than anything else, would be most likely to sink the idea from my point of view.

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I think you're highly overestimating the intelligence of the common man and the amount of books with this information in them. I reckon the vast majority of human beings remember nothing from their schooling in regards to science.

I could try a poll at work and see how many people could actually do this? How many people would you say could? 1 in 10? 1 in 100?

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Dunno. I doubt most of them would because they'd have never been inclined to seek out this information. But if a kid in Africa with parents too poor to afford 80 dollars a year in tuition can learn how to piece together a bunch of electric generators from random junkyard scrap using nothing more than his own wits and the meager pool of knowledge gleaned from books in a run down public library, then I'm pretty sure that an American living in a thriving nation packed to the brims with every piece of technology we could ever dream of could eventually bang together something reasonably resembling electric power.

 

Even without access to the internet, I think you're highly underestimating how intelligent and inventive people can be and the wealth of knowledge we have available to us. You could probably go to any bookstore or library in America and find at least a few books on electrical work and how this stuff operates. And even without that, you think people are ever gonna give up? If you turned off the power and burned every single book ever, you think people are just gonna shrug their shoulders and say "whelp, that is that. Time to forget all that nonsense and become cave men"? The parts are still there. The components still exist. People will salvage them and try to figure out how they work. Even if you destroyed every scrap of knowledge people will still try and figure it out. And what's more, they'll succeed. They'd have access to everything they need to figure it out even if it was through little more than trial and error.

 

Normally I'm the first to call bullshit when someone displays even a single iota of wisdom or intelligence, but believe you me I think you're giving people way too little credit when it comes to figuring this stuff out.

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Eh, you here lots of stories about how resourceful and smart people are because it makes for good stories. The reality is, most "civilized" humans would die an ugly, pathetic death in these kind of circumstances. People lived without power and water and the internet, but they did so because of knowledge passed down through generations, not because human beings are amazingly resourceful.

You're right about one thing- people wouldn't give up. But I'm afraid I don't think post-apocalyptic Kentuckians are going to spend their days striving for the (literally) least effective method for generating power that's possible for their location with some kind of single minded fury. Water power uses similar methods and would be infinitely more reliable and productive, for example.

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Eh, you here lots of stories about how resourceful and smart people are because it makes for good stories. The reality is, most "civilized" humans would die an ugly, pathetic death in these kind of circumstances. People lived without power and water and the internet, but they did so because of knowledge passed down through generations, not because human beings are amazingly resourceful.

You're right about one thing- people wouldn't give up. But I'm afraid I don't think post-apocalyptic Kentuckians are going to spend their days striving for the (literally) least effective method for generating power that's possible for their location with some kind of single minded fury. Water power uses similar methods and would be infinitely more reliable and productive, for example.

Ah, I see. There's a little misunderstanding going on here. I dropped the wind turbine angle almost entirely a little while ago and just started talking about electrical generation period. Which is why I've been talking about physical movement the last couple of posts as opposed to wind. Water power would work well for what I've been arguing for because it also fulfills the necessary "Physical Movement" criteria I mentioned.

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I live in Kentucky, not too far away from Frankfort. That's not too much farther away from the Fort Knox area (It's southwest of me) and I can tell you people in my area know a lot about solar power and it's been a pretty big topic lately.

 

Lots of places out here, old farmhouses and the like, eat up tons of electricity every year trying to stay warm or cool - it's often cheaper to invest in them than to keep dealing with the Electric companies (it's even a way some people make money back by putting power back into the grid).

 

So they're pretty well known around here.

 

Next, panels are getting cheaper to produce. There's a new panel being developed using the stuff that they use to set Tofu, rather than the toxic mercury based stuff that makes them so expensive - this means they're also getting more easily invested in by locals. They'd be possible to be scavenged in some spots (like, say, the Muldraugh rural farm might have a chance, or even the Lumberyard) and even some government buildings are starting to use them.

 

I think the implementation of solar energy sources in PZ would have to be the really advanced endgame, however. There would be several components: The wiring (which I think the PZ team is working on a wiring concept similar to Minecraft Redstone), The Panels (which would have to be arrayed with aforementioned wiring), the Converter, and a Battery (if there's no power). If Electrical or Tech become crafting skills, they'd be especially high.

 

Wind generators are much more common around here, especially with how hilly it is. They'd be more mid tier I think and require Carpentry to actually build the frame and mill. Otherwise, similar converter, wiring, and battery. (this can thus be simplified) that would use Electrical or Tech skill. Some farms out here have one or two wind generators, where they have the space. They're nice to have if you've got a good spot.

 

I think the most common thing would be for early players to loot a hardware store for a gasoline generator (or make one out of a car, making an easy alternative method for players with Automotive Skill?), set that up with an Electrical or Tech skill as a constructed item, and wire it up. The downside is it isn't continuous - it would require gasoline - but the positive side is that if they add Automotive Skill you could probably scavenge engine parts and gas from cars. Thus, it'd be low tier and easier to get when you've progressed to a point where electricity is going out and you've got a stable spot picked out.

 

The generator would be heavy as heck, though... I couldn't see the player dragging around anything like that safely until vehicles are added. Solar Panels could be made lighter than a body (About the weight of logs, I'd say - consider these as the thin cheap ones not those big heavy efficient ones with the mounting racks) and easier to transport if the player's lucky enough to find and save them. The other stuff would be considerably easier to carry back to a safehouse.

 

As for survival, I can honestly say that most of the people I know around my town would be strapping all kinds of crap together to try to get their electric back on - especially when it gets cold up here (cutting wood in winter sucks, I know from experience). Trial and error, with a dash of motivation, can yield some pretty cunning things - especially if you have even the faintest inkling of where to start. Tech school/vocational education is pretty common around here, especially in local high schools - I had a neighbor make an array of well ventilated old car batteries that powered some of his electric heaters in the winter.

 

Also, more people have things like electrical pumps for some of their cisterns or such, so having a power source is pretty important to keeping safe water available. More people would be concerned with electric than water, though I don't see water turbines as an option even next to the ohio river. I could be wrong about that though.

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Apart from the fact that I have the impression, you are playing minecraft, I think you're over-science this a little bit. Maybe think about what you want this energy for and resize the scale* of your plans.

 

Wolar-power** is easy:

If you're planning to set up solar panels on your roof, you don't need to have a degree in electronics. You even don't  have to understand what they are doing. It's just a story of RTFM. Red plug red socket, black plug black socket. To set them up you only have to place the devices, not start purifying the silicon. To make a little advertising, here is a packpack with a solar panel on its back which provides enough energy to charge your iPod. Still a panel, but simple enough for your dog to recycle and replace. Same story for wind energy.

 

Homemade doesn't need perfection:

If you are building small size engines, there isn't much you can do wrong, if you're using standard products(30W input, 40W light bulb). At the bigger installations its getting slightly more complicated sometimes, which would be a reason to call an electrician or summon the soul of Benjamin Franklin.

You wouldn't care about maximal efficiency because without the statistics or comparison with other locations you will never know if you are better or badder than average, so i don't think its necessary to think about hills, tress, thermic, terrorism or ethic conservation.

 

 

 

*rescale the size or resize the scale?

**Wind-and-Solar power

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  • 2 weeks later...

I have just considered, why not put a rain collection barrel on a crate and a second on the ground, connect the two by a wooden gutter and add a generator (from a car) in the middle. The generator has  paddles so it is turned by the water from the upper barrel, AND YOU HAVE ELECTRICITY!!! SIMPLE (sort of)!

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Alternators need to spin at a couple hundred - couple thousand RPM in order to produce adequate charge. You probably wouldn't get enough force from rain, but from a river? Maybe.

If you wanted to get those several thousand RPMs, no "unmodified" source of running water would do the trick, as you would have to have the water rushing at a very high speed as well. This is typically realised by choosing a location where a significant "drop (or difference in the altitudes at which water flows) is attainable. With such a place at hand, water is drawn from the upper reservoir into a pipe with a progressively smaller diameter, so as to build up pressure and, therefore, velocity at which it leaves the pipe through a proper nozzle (selecting the one best suited to your turbine can be tricky). For turbines operating at high RPMs (such as an alternator would be), several nozzles are typically used.

 

Sure, this gives you great efficiency (mind the diameter of the turbine though), but a floating waterwheel is much simpler to set up, such as this kiddie project:

Sure, they're not very efficient and won't give you LOADS of power, but give a steady trickle, require virtually no maintenance and can use any old river, without the need of building a special infrastructure.

 

This actually sounds viable for PZ - would keep your lights on, but not much more. Several could charge a battery bank in ...reasonable time (several days at the least), enabling the periodical use of power tools - not sure why, but my mind keeps whispering *welder* to me.

 

Well, one could possibly build a dam and get to flood the whole of WP beneath their own lake, which would be awesome, but that seems "kind of" beyond the scope of zombie survival.

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  • 2 weeks later...
That being said, I don't think wind turbines are within the grasp of the vast majority of normal people. Kentucky has very few prebuilt ones around due to proximity to mountains making wind energy quite unreliable. It would never be able to add much power if sticking to roughly realistic numbers for the area, and the amount of technical skill that would need to go into this would be farrrrr higher.

 

A wind turbine can be as simple as the alternator out of car, with some blades attached, hooked to a bank car batteries. It most definitely IS within the grasp of pretty much anyone with non-zombified braincells. It is one of the single simplest things to construct. My dad (a concreter by trade) and myself made one when I was a kid, with nothing more then car parts, that hung over our shed to power the lights. It worked with next to no maintenance for over 15 years.

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I don't know how much people really would know how to build any of these...The only one I could possibly figure out personally would likely be the windmill or waterwheel and Rathlord said you'd be unlikely to find skill books for these sorts of things, but I bet you could find some electrical engineering skill books in a college or university.  That being said, most of these seem to take several items to assemble that I've never even heard of so realism would have to be balanced with game simplicity to make sure that it's still a challenge to assemble without making it worthless to even attempt.

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I looked into the solar panels at work today, and they require a converter and one other piece which I've now spaced and forgotten; it definitely isn't just the panel being wired into the batteries. Presumably the same is true for wind.

 

I'm sure it wouldn't be toooo terribly difficult to keep lights on and the like, but anything more advanced I'm unsure about. I've done some electrical work but I'm definitely not an electrician by trade; if anyone knows more I'm interested to hear it. Something like a refrigerator or an oven or a microwave; those require certain voltages to run, right? I guess my point is, I don't think you can just wire those things to a battery and have them work. You'd need an AC/DC conversion kit, wouldn't you? You'd also need appropriate wattage (or is it voltage?). Too much and you fry it, too little and it doesn't work. You can't just wire a battery to a home outlet, that much I know.

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