Chapter 15

In this new society I could see changes already. We were going to have a few generations where women ran the country entirely by themselves. If I were a betting man, I would wager the sexes were swapping roles. I could see that by the way the women ganged up on me.

All males get occasionally brain dead and insist on having something their own way, and it's usually a wrong thing. I never got away with it. I was allowed to help make decisions and I had influence, but it was a 150 to 1 vote when I got stupid. To keep the peace I tried to let them handle things. Not much I could do if I alienated all the girls.

We were to the point that we needed more electricity. Our windmill power with batteries was not enough. A generator was not a long term solution since fuel would become a problem soon.

We needed refrigeration and we needed power for lighting and security. It occurred to me that we needed refrigeration with an alternative power source. That could only mean RV refrigerators which ran on both L.P. gas and electricity. There wwere a few RV dealers in the area and another in De Land, a neighboring town. Someone would need to see about getting one.

The other problem was power for regular lighting and security. The house had a burglar alarm. The alarm company was long gone, but the system still made noise if it was set off. The problem was that the battery used for emergency backup on the alarm system was too small. It would only last a half hour without power, worse the alarm would beep whenever power was off. It would just beeep and beep and beep driving everyone insane.

Fred, Donna, Beth, Sherrie, and Marla had a meeting and it was decided that Fred would help with planning and Donna would head up and scavenging that was needed starting with the refrigerators. Wanda normally would have been at any planning meeting, but she was at the farm helping out with the first corn harvesting.

Donna was back about four hours later. She and two of the girls found two RV refrigerators by Norcold. They were both 12-foot models with four doors each. The freezer compartment was smaller than they wanted, but between the two we would have full time refrigeration.

They had stopped at a hardware store and picked up a lot of tubing and fittings and the tools to work on the gas system. The Adams house had been all-electric. I drilled a hole up into the side of the house and ran the tubing through. Then I packed the hole with liquid silicone to keep the weather out. I put a "T" on the end in the hose and ran lines to each fridge.

She had brought a small tank for us to hook up to see if this was going to work. I hooked up the tank. I read the manuals quick installation instructions and turned on the gas and lit the pilot lights. Both fridges lit off.

A gas powered fridge is weird. It uses ammonia as the refrigerant. The gas is used to heat a boiler, which boils water. A heat exchanger is used to pass this heat to the ammonia side of the system and it acts somewhat like a normal refrigerant system after that.

I plugged the two fridges into the wall. When electricity was on, it would default to electric power. Now we just needed more gas for the future.

She had also found a 6,000 BTU rooftop AC system that ran on LP. We ended up building a plywood box the next day that fit into a window in one of the small bedrooms so we could use it as a lounge.

We mounted the AC on top of the box. We had cut a hole in the top of the box so the AC could pass the cold air through to the room. After shifting some couches to the new room and adding a TV and radio we had our lounge. It was usually pretty crowded, so we had a limit of ten people. Those in need like the very pregnant had priority. There was also a one-hour rule. You got one hour a day unless you were 5 months along or more. That way everyone got a chance to have a little cool. I didn't need it and never went in there unless they wanted something done.

Donna had brought back several 12 volt RV lights so we replaced the automobile dome lights with those. They were more efficient and gave off ample light. A small radio shack inverter was used to change our house batteries 12v DC over to 110v AC to power the alarm system.

We started plans for a windmill. The tower portion was great, but the vane assembly was not efficient enough. I remembered seeing fields of electric windmills out west somewhere on TV. They all used three long vanes rather than a bunch of short ones. Long vanes allowed you to start and run at lower speeds.

While searching online I found a website that talked about an automatic folding rudder for the vane. When the wind got too fast, the vane simply folded up turning the blades sideways to the wind so that it would not spin too fast. It was a simple and ingenious solution to a real problem. What do you do if you are asleep when the wind gets too fast for your windmill. That thing could be real dangerous.

The other problem was the vanes. We couldn't get cast plastic or fiberglass vanes. What would we mount it on? We decided on mounting the vanes to a large plywood wheel. We would sandwich two pieces of 3/4" plywood and mount the vanes to that with bolts. The vanes would have to be made of a good hardwood that did not have any real grain in it. We decided that maple was about the best available. Donna and her crew went scavenging for the stuff we needed.

We hand sawed two hardwood plywood circles using a keyhole saw. That took a while! We glued them with a two-part epoxy. Then we glued short 1' pieces of maple to three eight foot pieces of maple for the mounting end of the blades.

Now the hard work started. We had to hand shape the blades. Each one needed to look like a wing foil. They had a fatter side and a thin trailing side just like an elongated bird wing. This had to be done using grease pencils as markers and a large spoke shave to remove the wood. Before I started I did not know how to shape blades. By the time we got done I did.

At the mounting end of the blades we tapered a little angle into it. This would give the blades the tilt they needed to operate. We bolted the blades down with many stainless bolts and nuts and also used a healthy amount of epoxy fastening and finishing the whole assembly.

The remaining wood was shaped one evening when the electricity was on using a sander to feather the wood. Then it was bolted to a 2" steel pipe that was attached with hinges, a rod and a spring so that our tail assembly would fold up at high speed. When the tail folded it the blades would turn sideways to the wind and spin at a slow speed.

We mounted the new improved system and we were in business. We had generating capacity almost every day after that. We built a second bank of batteries so we could rotate charging and discharging between battery sets.

One of the interesting things Donna had found was a diagram for building low power light systems using white LED's. Three LED's and a small 50-ohm resister in series could be assembled into a 12V light unit. Several units could be grouped together for different amounts of light.

The diagram showed using simple voltage regulators, which were required in some cases but since we planned on using batteries in a stable power system, we would not need those. Donna went to the closest Radio Shack and got every resister and LED she could as well as small wire, soldering equipment and shrink tubing.

We started playing with them. It seemed that three units of 9 LED's gave enough light for small rooms like bathrooms. We could use epoxy to glue three LED's and a resister together. Then we soldered them and glued the three groups together we had a perfect lighting unit. It used very little current and would run for days on two small 6V batteries. The only downfall was that they acted somewhat like spotlights. They centered the light like a kitchen task light does.