Could you live without electricity?

Deleted User wrote: »

Read the excellent One Second After/One Year After, which details the events after EMP attacks across the world, which knocks out power supplies/electrical equipment along large parts of the planet.

Probably not for very long, I would reckon.

Yeah an EMP attack would do serious destruction and take years to repair.

Ive toyed around with the notion of becoming an off-gridder since I had to do without electricity some time ago. It makes you very conscious of your electricity use and reliance on it. You would surprise yourself how resourceful you become.

Obviously, candles were used for light. I cooked and heated water on the BBQ. Hardly hard core off grid stuff but I managed just fine. It prompted a lot of off grid researching for me though. No harm in arming yourself with some tips if you ever have to do without power. But yeah, I can get by without electricity.

I could. It'd be awkward but we'd soon adapt.

It's easy to forget, but if you're from rural Ireland then it's very likely your grandparents lived a lot of their life without leccy. And also likely your parents were born before completion of the RE scheme.

I lived for a year on a squatted piece of land on the outskirts of Amsterdam, known as "The Village". It was a squatter camp without electricity and just one flushing toilet for about 50 of it's inhabitants. I lived in an old double decker bus that I bought from a bus company and drove it over via North Sea ferries. Heat and cooking was via bottled gas and light by candles. Some caravan dwellers fixed up wood burning stoves.

We spent evenings getting stoned and talking in each others caravans/buses or making love with the drifters of both genders who wandered into the "village" at different times. Our bicycles were our most important possessions as we scavenged the city for empty plastic bottles to reclaim the money from self service machines in supermarkets to pay for items that we could not find for free and we eat from surplus food left out by bakeries and other shops.

A life without electricity and almost no money. I learnt a lot from that period of my life and remember it fondly...

I lived without it for 3/4 weeks when I first moved into my house. We were waiting for it to be switched on and there was an issue with the cost.

It was fun we were newlyweds, married two days before we got the keys so we went to bed with candles every night! I really enjoyed it , wasn't half as bad as I thought it would be but I wouldn't want to do it again soon!