Peak Oil Survival – review

Today I read the last page of the book Peak Oil Survival: Preparation for Life After Gridcrash, another Amazon purchase. Since I planned to post here every week, it’s a great I have something to write about.

The book’s title indicates that it’s about preparing for living after the electrical grid crashes. It’s not a manual on off-grid living, it doesn’t describe how to supply your own water and electricity and how to heat your home for permanent off-the-grid conditions. Instead, it helps one to deal with a grid crash in a normal, or low-energy building. It won’t tell you how to make your house autonomous, but how to deal when the energy you normally use becomes unavailable.

Because of that, I didn’t learn anything I would want to use in practice. The book is a great source of information on such various subjects like:

  • how to make expedient toilets (outhouses),
  • how to make composting toilets,
  • how to dig wells, gather water (including rainwater harvesting) and how to filter it and make it potable,
  • how to use graywater to reduce water use,
  • how to build efficient wood stove,
  • how to cool stuff in improvised root cellar or improvised cooler (ice box or evaporative cooler),
  • how to cook using solar energy.

If you want to be prepared for such grid crash, but don’t want to make your house off-grid-ready, this book is a great resource, though it’s rather short.

I wouldn’t buy this book again, because I don’t need knowledge on how to deal with short or long periods of grid inavailability, but I want to make my home autonomous, which is not the subject of this book. It costs about $10, so I don’t regret buying it.

You can buy it on Amazon using the following link: Peak Oil Survival: Preparation for Life After Gridcrash.

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