homelighting's blog
Well, another power outage caused me to get inventive. Thankfully I have battery operated hand drills all over the place. I took an old table fan that was going bad, making noise, and converted it into a windmill.
Above in the photo you can see it sitting outside. I simply opened up the fan, drilled some holes in the armature, inserted magnets and put it all back together. Now it is charging batteries in the wind for free.
All the details can be found here:
On Thursday last week, we got hit with a terrible snow storm. It dumped 3 feet of snow during the day and brought down trees. These hit power lines and cable lines. I lost power. That took out my water, light and heat. My car was under 3 feet of snow, so there was no running for supplies.
I had to improvise, so I took out some vegetable oil, a glass container and some twine. I made an oil lamp for light and heat.
The diy oil lamp worked surprisingly well. It helped warm up the place a bit and provided quite a bit of light. I made two of them and one had a double wick for more heat and light. The only thing I had to do was top off the oil once a day to prevent smoking. When the oil got a bit low, the wick was too long, making smoke. So, I just kept it full. The thing only burnt about a quarter to half inch of oil per 24 hours. That was a nice bonus. It is very efficient.
I posted all the details here:
