Firefight Y2K

by Dean Ing

  About that alien base on the lunar farside: if it’s there, we should find evidence of it before this edition goes to press. Before the Lunar Prospector finally impacts the moon it will be making passes for six months only 25km above the moon. Our SR-71 recon aircraft fly that high above earth, and on a good day they can read a license plate. That’s not what the LP is for, but anything like an outpost for spacecraft will tip its hand to the LP’s sensors unless it is buried very deep and gives no anomalous readings that we can interpret.

  HIGH TECH AND

  SELF-RELIANCE

  When considering self-reliance, often as not we bump into the “high-tech” dilemma. One extreme opinion is that high tech is a trap to be avoided. The other extreme opinion holds that only high tech will provide self-reliance in style. Thirty years of study have convinced me that the best option lies midway between those extremes.

  IMPORTANT FOOTNOTE: When it comes to keeping our country intact, high tech is absolutely essential, exclamation point. We may not keep it intact even with high tech; we will surely go down the tubes fast without it. The moment we begin to dull our nation’s cutting-edge technology, the Soviets start leaning on us harder because they know they can afford to. We must never forget that “Star Wars” hardware means, literally, Civil Defense-defending our citizens. The Sovs are developing it anyhow, but we have an edge today. That edge cuts deeply into Soviet plans for dominion. Soviet high tech rarely gets to Russian consumers. Ours comes to the home; and that can be good if we know how to use it on a personal level.

  Many people disagree on what “high tech” means. If it simply means some new technology, there’s no real dilemma. If it means something very complicated to maintain, then maybe we do have a problem. Perhaps a few examples are in order.

  The all-terrain bicycles are a new wrinkle, no more complicated than older types and a whole lot sturdier. As long as you’re going to depend on any bike, sooner or later you must consider repairs. If the parts and repair techniques are just as easy, and the high-tech hardware is more dependable, then high tech is the way to go. Another example? I’ve been designing and testing survival hardware for many years, including a two-pound backpacker’s woodstove that any tinkerer can build. The only high-tech part was developing certain shapes, baffles and flues, to triple the stove’s efficiency. My own “Woodpacker” stove has kept me cozy in knee-deep snow and Sierra storms, and needs to be stoked only once every half-hour. Its design is clearly high-tech-but its construction is low-tech. In the same category is the “safety net,” stiff mosquito netting sewn into a yardwide sack so you can wear it, backpack and all, even while fishing.

  High tech? Yes, in the sense that these things weren’t previously available and had to be perfected (thin mosquito net won’t qualify as a “safety net”; it won’t stand away from your skin). But these gadgets can be made and repaired by low-tech means. They were new in concept, but could’ve been built and maintained with simple tools, generations ago.

  Then there’s the other kind of high tech, like solid-state electronics and the new H&K caseless ammunition. No matter how cheap it might be to buy, most of us have only the vaguest idea how to build or repair it. If a solar-powered hand calculator quits on you, chances are you’ll have to toss it-but you might invest in a few cheap foil-wrapped spares. Just don’t discard your old slide-rule, and make sure your kids learn how to use it. As for the new ammo: could it be manufactured locally? It takes a factory with special tooling and rare know-how to make caseless ammo. Many small-town chemistry teachers could manufacture guncotton, smokeless powder, even primers from basic chemicals, and handloading is an old art; but when you’ve fired your last caseless cartridge, that high-tech rifle is NO-tech!

  Maybe for our purposes, high tech is anything that requires support which is beyond the means of the average small town. Has your car’s fuel injection pump gone belly-up? If there’s no mechanic near you with the parts and knowledge to repair it, this is the kind of high tech you must not depend on in a survival situation. Even mag wheels can be a problem if you have no special equipment to remount a new tire without gouging that tender cheesy magnesium. If you’re now storing vital information on computer disks, you’d be smart to keep printed copies of it all, for that Great Gulp when permanent failure of power, or a computer chip, makes those disks useless.

  None of these warnings should make you sell your fuel-injected car, or your home computer. They should make you think about low-tech backup systems for anything that requires sophisticated support beyond what’s local and dependable. By “local,” I mean within walking distance. And thereby hangs a tale . . .

  Once, when I lived in a city, I knew a bachelor who was nuts about high tech. He didn’t own a lot of things, but what he owned was nifty: foreign sportscar, solid state stereo, Cuisinart, gadgety camera and other mouth-watering boytoys. He used to joke that he “ . . . couldn’t survive beyond the city” because only a big city could provide the services to maintain his toys. He took pride in trading for new hardware that was so high-tech, few others had it and fewer still knew where it could be maintained. No problem, he said, so long as he kept a current list of all the wizards at adjusting Weber carburetors and trouble-shooting electronics. He was a user, not a fixer.

  This guy was carefully adjusting his life so that he needed the city’s high-tech services, and his lifestyle could not survive without them. He assumed that he could always drive across the city to find somebody who could fix his problems. In other words, he lived a high-tech existence with the full intent of becoming utterly dependent on it. It seemed to me a little like an addiction, and it made me more than a little sick. The more I thought about that, the less I liked depending on distant folks to maintain equipment I depended on, but didn’t understand.

  I thought about it so much that now I live in a small town. As soon as I learned to fix my inexpensive home computer, I bought another one like it for a spare-but I have whopping big file cabinets and a manual typewriter with spare ribbons, too. I have a transistor radio, but I also have a 1933 GE brute with spare tubes, though its fifty-two-year-old original tubes still work and they were so over-designed they’ll probably survive a nuclear weapon pulse.

  I admit that I enjoy high tech; it’s convenient-but when it gets too gimmicky for local repair, I try to make sure there’s a more primitive backup system handy. High tech is a metaphor of the city: we can use it, but we must not depend on it.

  And at this point, some readers will be objecting that they must have fuel, and spare parts, and technology that requires special expertise-including medicines. Take heart; so long as small towns are in business, we can enjoy many medium-tech conveniences and necessities. Almost any small clinic could manufacture penicillin, given the need. Many small shops can rebuild electric motors and generators. We can manufacture fuel alcohol from wood and grain; lubricant from castor beans; passable (barely!) bike tires from a length of water hose stuffed with bits of rubber and wired onto rims; and we can even melt and recast aluminum scrap for machining at any small machine shop. What we must not do on a personal level, is allow ourselves to become absolutely dependent on technology that can’t be matched locally.

  Meanwhile, don’t curse the nation’s pursuit of high-tech knowledge. It gave us penicillin (which could’ve existed centuries ago if we’d known what to do). It taught us heat transfer so some gadgeteer could develop an efficient woodstove anybody can build. And at present, with space-age experiments, it promises you and me the first real hope of defending most of our civilians against nuclear war. After all, isn’t that the first duty of a government-to defend its citizens?

  MILLENNIAL

  POSTSCRIPT

  You may notice a shift in tone in these last two pieces. They’ve been extracted from another book, The Chernobyl Syndrome, because publisher Baen and I believe readers will welcome a positive, proactive stance on the “Y2K” issue.

  Chances are that most of us won’t suffer much over the expected compute
r glitches of the year 2000. Still, it won’t hurt to bias our bets. If you have important medical prescriptions, you’ll be wise to be certain you have a two-month supply of medication on hand by 31 December 1999. If you don’t have fifty gallons of drinking water and twice that much “gray” water (for flushing, etc.) on hand at that time, you could be sorry-and thirsty. A propane-fueled burner for cooking isn’t that expensive, and the food staples you store would be eaten anyway, eventually.

  We simply have no excuse for ignoring the possibility that much of our high-tech existence could flounder for a time. That’s not only true for Y2K; the future has always been notoriously unreliable. Face it in good health!

  THE 12-VOLT

  SOLUTION

  It doesn’t take a global disaster for you to have a serious 110-volt problem. Virtually all of us have had it, and will again. Examples? About 20 years ago, my Texas kin huddled in a cyclone cellar while the infamous Lubbock tornado juggernauted overhead, dismantling most of their house in the process. In the center of a modern city, they and many others went without electricity for days-unnecessarily. That’s what I mean by the 110-volt problem; it wouldn’t be so much of one if we didn’t unthinkingly depend so much on public utilities. Twice, in Oregon, winds and ice storms have left us bereft of house current for a day or so-yet we scarcely missed it.

  There are ways to lessen that panicky feeling when your lights all wink out at once, your stereo groans to a halt and your coffee maker cools. First, you could get used to doing without; lots of folks do. Or you could assemble camping gear where you can find it in the dark, for use when house current fails. Or pile in the car and drive to a friend’s-weather permitting-if your friend hasn’t lost all his volts, too. We don’t rely on this option because our place is reachable only by roller-coaster roads, and tire chains don’t always keep us headed in the right direction during the worst weather.

  Many people recommend home-generated electricity and, oddly enough, a few of us even have it! If you invest in a turbine or wind-generator system, you’re talking about a lot of time and money. It’s an excellent idea, but most of us probably won’t do it. Then there’s the emergency engine-driven alternator; they start at about $400 surplus, but usually cost several thousand. I can testify that they take up a lot of space, require maintenance, make noise, burp carbon monoxide and heat, and don’t always work properly. The last time our power lines petered out, we didn’t even start our two-kilowatt unit because we had a handier solution to an evening’s inconvenience. We’ve dubbed it the 12-volt solution.

  If you’ve ever converted a van into a camper, you may have guessed what I’m suggesting. The solution involves the family car. Naturally, you can’t run a washer and dryer, or a microwave oven, off your standard auto battery-but it’s astonishing how many amenities you can have if you don’t overdo it. We’ve all seen 12-volt gadgets that plug into a car’s cigarette-lighter socket. But have you noticed the extension cords for them? If you can’t buy 12-volt auto extension cords locally, you can order them. Or you can sometimes buy male and female receptacles and attach them to standard 16-gauge insulated wiring of the sort normally used for household extension cords. It’s best to avoid wiring thinner (with a higher number) than 1-gauge, because the thinner the wire, the greater your line losses-especially using direct current. Ten-gauge would be ideal, though costly, if you’re cobbling up your own.

  Those line losses needn’t be great if you’re using your car battery for things like low-amperage lights and radios with 12-volt adapters. Even here you can get cute with energy savings. A fluorescent lamp provides more light than most incandescents of the same power. You should buy your accessories with amperage ratings in mind.

  But just how varied are those accessories? Very! A partial list of our 12-volt plug-ins includes:

  Accessory

  Approximate Amps

  Small magnet-backed trouble light

  less than 0.5

  Fluorescent two-tube reading lamp

  0.4

  High-intensity map light

  0.2

  Powerful spotlight

  2.1

  Coffee maker

  7 to 10

  Tape recorder(small, with adaptor)

  less than 0.5

  Radio (small, with adaptor)

  less than 0.4

  Vacuum cleaner(powerful canister type)

  about 10

  Sparkplug sandblaster(motor-driven)

  1.5

  Electric fan (small)

  0.5

  Air pump (160-psi capacity)

  3.5

  Hand calculator (with adaptor)

  0.1

  Ask a friend who owns a camper; probably you’ll discover even more accessories that’ll run on 12 volts. What if you wanted to rig an emergency fluid pump? It might pump gasoline from one tank to another, or water from a brook up to your radiator. The pump delivers about two gallons per minute, a pretty respectable volume-but it must be primed and won’t push water uphill very far. For higher pressure, but a somewhat lower volume, you could use an electric fuel pump. After all, an electric automotive fuel pump was designed to run on 12 volts.

  Your camper-owning friend might also introduce you to the inverter or voltage converter, which converts battery voltage to a level compatible with your household voltage, though it’s likely to be fairly expensive. But his eyes are likely to gleam when he tells you about the auxiliary-battery idea. Many recreational vehicles have a second hefty battery which doubles the electrical-storage capacity in your car. Your alternator recharges them both, which works the alternator a bit harder. The auxiliary battery should be installed with a “battery isolator,” a solid-state device that’ll withstand a 500-amp surge and is available for under $20. The battery-isolator wiring is very simple; just don’t install it in a high-temperature location. The gadget directs the alternator’s output to whichever battery has the lowest charge and, better still, prevents the discharge of the main battery while you’re draining power from the auxiliary. The cost of this whole auxiliary-battery system runs about $60 to $70, which is very near the total cost of all the accessories we’ve accumulated.

  Do you own a word processor? Whether it’s portable or not, check for an adaptor that converts it to 12 volts DC. If it’s portable, chances are it can be converted easily.

  With this array of gadgets you could find your power lines down some evening before having friends over and barely break stride. You can vacuum the living room, update the family records on your computer, make coffee, listen to weather reports, warm the baby’s bottle, clean the sparkplug on your lawnmower for the heck of it and then entertain your friends with tape cassettes and mood light-all using the 12-volt solution. You’d be smart to minimize use of heating elements, but the point is that you have a lot of options available.

  So let’s pretend your house current has gone belly-up temporarily, and your cars are near the house. The first thing to do is route your 12-volt extension cord(s) from the car through the nearest window. If your cars aren’t near enough, see if you can push one of them within a dozen feet of a window. Don’t start your car up with its battery to bring it nearer unless you have to, because starting the engine is a tremendous drain on the battery. (Car batteries could be a mere one-third the size they are, if it weren’t for the huge jolt it takes to start a cold engine!)

  On the other hand, you could start the car up and keep it idling for an hour or so, letting its alternator resupply the battery. Many cars will overheat if left idling very long, so monitor your engine’s temperature if you’re running it as an emergency-power plant. Since you might forget, perhaps you’d do better by just keeping tabs on the amount of amperage your 12-volt accessories are all using together.

  Often the amperage rating is printed on the accessory-but all too often it isn’t. The table in this article was compiled with the aid of a multi-tester, and can be used as a very rough estimate of the amperage drains you can expect. You’ll find that any ac
cessory which works primarily by generating heat, such as a curling iron, bottle warmer, coffee maker, etc., will use up lots more amperage than a gadget that produces a modest light, or runs a small motor. Big motors and spotlights make medium to heavy demands on your battery. If you intend to run several accessories off the same lighter socket, you’d better know where its fuse is and have a spare. Ask a mechanic if your lighter-socket wiring can handle a somewhat higher fuse rating. Most fuses are literally two-bit items-unless you’re one shy! I’ve been known to bridge a blown fuse with a piece of wire-but not to recommend it to anybody.

  You’ll surely want to run more than one device at a time, which can be done any of several ways. You could run extension cords from more than one car; run several extensions from the same car; or jury-rig a multiple-outlet from a single extension. Since few cars are factory-equipped with more than one lighter socket, you might have an extra socket or two installed. Or you can buy an extra socket with its own beefy little clips, and clip those leads directly onto the battery terminals.

  I’m still searching for a commercial 12-volt extension cord with multiple “female” socket outlets. Meanwhile, I cobbled one together. If you’re in doubt about how to wire the sockets in parallel, ask your mechanic-or perhaps he’ll do it himself for a fiver.

  After discussing how you do it, maybe I’d better caution you how not to overdo it. Most recent car batteries carry a four-year guarantee and, when new, will survive a drain of 25 amps for around an hour without damage from excessive discharge. (But many a socket fuse will blow before you reach that rate of discharge!) With a six-year guarantee, a new heftier battery will let you draw that many amps for upward of an hour and a half without damage from excessive discharge. But whatever accessories you run off your car battery-without the engine and its alternator running-if they draw 20 amps for an hour, or 10 amps for 2 hours, you’re in danger of overdoing it. You mustn’t wait until your electric fan stops, or your reading lamp dims to a glow, because when low-amp accessories perform poorly you’re running out of juice.