Why do we pay so much to live? - Living Free
Hi Everyone!
Theres nothing better from an anarchists view than to share information on how we can live for much cheaper orr even free. The example I want to share now is how we can still live with luxurys but without paying bills in this modern day of technology all around us which feed off Electricity. I quit society 8 years ago and have lived around half of those years without electricity. In this day and age, to be self sufficient is much more enjoyable if you have at least decent lighting in the winter time to see what you are doing. This for me is the biggest benefit from electric, the power to actually see in the dark. To be constantly looking for stuff that is right under your nose but its dark is very annoying trust me!
In forever adapting to live independently and in peace, this knowledge im writing of should be regarded sacred. I live a life now where I have no insurance for anything, no active bank account, im not registered, I owe no debts and I pay no bills. There is no chance to go back to relying on the system- thats just out of the question. Since a while Ive been reading and seeing videos on people who have been making battery's from just mud or salt water, and some easy to recycle metals.
I was visiting the Science Museum in Olso, Norway - and there is a machine that was 100 years old, that apparently created more energy that it used to spin, thus having energy to be used on something else. Its very frustrating that the masses are so numbed down that over id say 1miilion people have stood and read the little caption card in the glass box about the machine, and then probably said " Wow thats cool", but they thats it- It dosnt even sink in that there was already free electric 100 years ago, but they will still go pay for it from the state without ever linking the museum trip to their life.
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So... Free electric! Heres the very basic Salt Water Battery
aka. Aluminum Air Battery (Below). Its so simple that you might think its a joke!
There is just aluminum foil clipped onto the side of the cup and copper clipped on the other side and the clips are from a voltage meter reader, both the aluminum and copper sitting in the salt water.
There is power!
FREE Electric! In the picture that is just 0.58v which isnt much.. But actually I have a USB LED light for the laptop (around 2 euros in ikea) which uses just 0.3v and lights up a small white room enough to read a book.
Ok, so theres 0.58v of free electric there just from easy to get materials in a very small cup. So let your imagination go to a bigger cup, with twice as much salt water and twice as much metals, youd surely get 1v?
I dont know much about electric, amps and volts watts etc, but from living in wagons and vanlife, I know that a car battery has 12v and that 12v systems are great.
If you can work out the size of cup needed to get 1 volt of power, then you can connect 12 cups up in a battery bank fashion, and you would have at least 12v, of free power right there. I imagine to be living on the sea soon and how it would be very easy to just have a bigger alu and copper battery floating in the sea.
I Watched a documentary about ancient Chinese war ships, they made immense floating fortresses as they were dubbed, and they were powered by underwater hamster wheels that were turned by peoples weight walking on them. Well imagine if you had enough energy to be turning a hamster wheel to move a big boat, most likely a ferry! Possibilities are huge, could even somehow have copper and aluminum plates on the actual hull of the boat exposing it to air and the sea water on the floating level. I just need to find a place to recycle copper, there is a place near with fridges etc maybe they have copper somewhere in them, foil I found in the trash a while ago!
Recently I found Earth Battery's, this is even more of a headfcuk!
People have made batterys from just dirt from outside and the correct metals pushed in the dirt. DIRT!!! That stuff thats in most countrys just on the ground! Again Copper is needed but instead of aluminum foil you need zinc rods. I watched a video on pootube of which I wont paste the link because thats just VERY un-original! Instead we learn together!
It was a guy who had made a 12 v battery and it was the size of an ice cube tray (tiny and light in weight) - well actually it was a 13 v battery an it was in an ice-cube tray and when it ran out of power it was just because the dirt had dried out , so you add more water and the free electric returns up to full power again.
My mind is still asking if this works until I try it out then I wont ever know!
Here below you see how easy it actually is to make an Earth Battery, an 8 year kid could even do it! So imagine this principle in an ice cube tray with 12 sections.
This knowledge would help many people not only to save an electricity bill, but in some countrys that have no mains electric, this would be life changing. Also If your someone who lives in a wagon or on wheels, and of course are running solar 12v system then your still dependant on the weather for electric and the battery is shit for the environment (and the pocket) in many ways and it will at some point also need replacing.
12volt systems and solar power
People who live in a house and pay for electric have most likely never heard of using a car battery for powering home appliances. There are a wide variety of things that is common in a house that have been made to run off of a 12v car battery. Kettles, Irons, Tvs, small washing-machines- basically all that you have as luxury in a house. And whats even cooler is you can get an Inverter, a device that connects to a car battery and they any normal appliance can be plugged into it. The problem is that the battery will drain quickly leaving you feeling that it was a bad decision to stop paying for electric haha.
With these salt water and earth batterys, they can easily replace a solar panel, and the battery itself if needed, but if you make just a small battery and have an old car battery kickin' around, you have then something to trickle charge it with.
We get ours from the trash, you can look in mechanics places or boat storage places.
I started to write this post the day before yesterday, and after my little incidentyesterday with the police I decided to not work the day and to go eat a very unhealthy chinease buffet. On my way I was looking in building trash (its actually a fulltime addiction I suppose!) and the first thing I saw was scraps of copper wires of various gauges.
Thank you universe!
I saw this as a sign to go get an ice cube tray and to get onto this free electric thing. I went to look for zinc screws but couldnt find them anywhere but its turn out that normal screws work to but not so good. I have all the things to do it now and so the second part to this post will be the making of both a saltwater battery and a earth battery!
Tomorrow when I wake up I will start to do the battery and then report on how it went with an epic post.
The way I see it is, if we want a change then we must change OURSELVES first, complaining and being sad about the problems , only brings more energy to that problem. But people are diversifying more and more by the day and if you want to do it you can! Quit the job, and start to travel (humbly) and the rest will be given to you along the way.
For me this free electric is the next step in my future as a free man.
Thanks for reading, and I would genuinely love to get links of old posts from people who have also been exploring these methods above and other free electric ideas. When the snow has gone and things are defrosted, I have here a 14m drop on a small stream to play with and ill sacrifice my fucked bicycle to be used as a water wheel and that will be great to make!
all images are from google images biaaaatch.
I didn't know about the earth battery. This is very interesting.
yep! im sat stripping the copper wires now :) im exited for tomorrow! Cronus my squat mate has a "new" video camera and we going to use it hahaha
it fucking works! test run just now lol
Sorry to say, there is no such thing as free unlimited energy. The energy in those home-made batteries does not come from the earth, salt water or potato, it comes from the metals being used - and those metals will oxidize as the process goes on, sooner or later the metals are simply used up. There is no big secret here, this principle has been used for ages, and as always the Chinese excels on doing things cheaply - you can buy "long life" AA-batteries for NOK 3 each at Biltema. It's exactly the same principle applied there, except they have found out how to make batteries without using salty water.
Also, don't confuse volts with watts - to see if a battery actually can be used, try changing the multimeter from voltage to current (amps) and see if you get anything at all. Effect is voltage multiplied with current, you may try to multiply the numbers you have. If you get as much as a full watt from that, still it doesn't mean it's possible to subtract as much as a watt from the battery, the voltage will drop once the current starts flowing.
Oh yeh we arnt actually using any zinc, 8v is from screws and copperwire
Ah, the screws are probably rich in zinc.
So of course you were correct about ampage, and I learnt something new! Even to get enough amp from an earth battery to power a TV you would need the metals to be 500,000,000 times bigger than what we have here hahaha. Anyway ill do the promised post of the experiment thats to be continued!
Im very exited to use the stream to hit a wheel connected to an alternator :) early night for me tonight im up early in the morning
I have no clue!
Love your enthusiasm!!!! I loved relying on solar.
Sorry to post an outside link but this is a good article too
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20131112-potato-power-to-light-the-world
Potato lamps do make me giggle though... mashed, fried, or with a light bulb?
That's an interesting article, and indeed there may be something to it - the article says that home-made batteries is indeed a lot cheaper than AA-batteries.
The article also correctly identifies that the energy doesn't really come from the potatoes, it comes from the zinc, which eventually will have to be replaced. Still, zinc is a lot cheaper than AA-batteries from the shop.
Yeh i think that to just get some zinc is much better that a solarpannel and 12v battery.. Alot lighter,cheaper and enviromental friendly
Sunshine is a free resource, zinc is not. Though, at least early solar panels was considered as a scam to some people, as more energy went into the production of the panels than what could be taken out from the panels during their lifetime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc#Production
First one has to do mining to extract minerals containing oxidized zinc in greater amounts, then one has to puts lots of energy into it to purify and de-oxidize the zinc. The theoretical limit for how much energy you can get out of the zinc is equal to the amounts of energy spent de-oxidizing it.
So, only a small fraction of all the energy that has gone into the production can then be drawn out through your battery. In addition the minerals containing zinc is a non-renewable resource. And in addition to that again, the mining is environmentally harmful.
After depleting the zinc battery, you'll end up with some brine/soil/potatoes with high concentrations of zinc in it, what is the environmental impact of just dumping it on the ground or in the sea? (my guess: insignificant - though the wikipedia article does state that plants and fish will get problems if exposed for too much zinc).
I did think about how the zinc was taken from the ground and obviously that is not env friendly :)
The sun is free yeh but zinc you can carry in a rucksack and like we realised lastnight was that you can travel with recycled metals which are recycled of course ☺ ,put your tent up,bang the rods in the ground,and hook up to electric. Even in the middle of the night :)
There are many factors of course,all of which an interlect like yourself can expose and teach me and others about but im not that diverse in knowledge haha so for me to get electric from trash metals and dirt, is just a winner haha:)
I don't know if you find a lot of zinc in the garbage bins? :-)
Zinc batteries packs energy much more densely than even the most expensive Li-Ion rechargable batteries, on that part you're totally correct.
Solar panels exists in very light-weight editions ... and they're even coming in fairly cheap nowadays, the only problem is that those cheap panels gives very little electricity. Still, I believe that in the not-so-far future one will be able to buy rucksacks covered with solar panels and with built-in Li-Ion battery packs and both USB and USB-C-outlets for charging devices and laptops.
I have the BioLite Campfire by the way ... the BioLite company is probably something to watch, though when I Google for "BioLite Campfire" and google tells me to buy the "BioLite Campfire #2" from my local sports shop I realize they are no longer a small "indie-startup" ... :-)
I never used it for its intended purpose ... charging cellphone batteries. Now that we got the boat and a family we've stopped doing long hiking journeys ... I can't remember last time we slept in a tent! It's a bit sad. However, I use this thing frequently in the winter time for grilling sausages on the go. Making a bon-fire in the snow takes so much time and resources, but with this thing we can grill sausages without spending more time searching for wood than grilling sausages :-)
Seems like the second edition is even better
I also got a flashlight that I bought from DX, it's working from a Li-Ion 18650-battery but with USB interface so one can use the flashlight for charging devices on the go, as well as charge the battery from a USB source.
like mini rocket stoves! My laptop decided to stop making noise and is playing silly buggers so its getting use of the warranty tomorrow (second time in its 2.5month life!) but used subtitiles for the vids :)
youd be amazed of what you can find in the trash, maybe zinc is used on fridges, there are always fridges and washine machines in certain places. I will do a post on the things i got from trash for a laugh in the future ranging from new bluetooth head sets to perfectly fine dewalt electric planer!
Apropos fridges...
Back when I lived up in Tromsø I bought my first sail boat, but before picking it up I needed to build a mooring buoy for it. The mooring was made from various junk. On the junkyard they had just been throwing a big claw of an excavator, it would be just the perfect piece of anchor for my boat, but since it weighted a full ton or more and was lying in the very bottom of the container, it was not possible for us to fetch it and get it home.
In the end, I found fridges to be the easiest thing. We picked up fridges from the return-point for electrics, took out the compressor part due to environmental concerns, carried the fridge down to the sea at the very lowest water, filled it up with rocks, sealed it with ropes, tied up some cheap air matresses on top - with slip-knots (theoretically it should be just to pull a rope to release the cargo, in practice there was always problems), waited for the high water, rowed it out in position and dumped it there. Totally I used three fridges and some other junk to anchor up the mooring buoy.
I was totally clueless on what I was doing, I'm a third-generation landlubber, if not more ... and the current past my home was super-strong, had to do an emergency dumping of one cargo as the current was too strong, even when rowing as hard as I could I was moving in the wrong direction. I did so many mistakes and had so many problems - and this was in the middle of the winter as well - but eventually I made it, and in the aftermath I can laugh of most of the mistakes. I certainly learned a lot.
All input is very welcomed :) thanks ! I saw the potatoes thing a while back, and didnt take it seriously (dam you conditioned mind!)
Potatoes is Dirt! ;) I can see a steemit competition now - #potatolampphotography ;)
There is a theoretical upper bound for how big voltage you'll get, it's all defined by the metals being used.
To increase the voltage further you will need several such batteries, connected in series - like shown on the potato battery picture.
Came to think, that's actually the reason why we call it "battery" at all - typically one would need lots of cells - a "battery" of cells - to do anything useful.
Had to try before going to bed lol
8v from an icecube tray with normal screws and copper! and 0.6v from a glass of water with 1 teaspoon of himalayan salt, alu foil and copper :)
sleep now though! Until tomorrow :)
Check out our blog post. We agree to live debt free! Thats the idea.
I like the idea and I agree, we should grab and use as much of energy from around us instead of burning fossil fuels. There's so much energy everywhere and all FREE to take by whoever wants it
Yes @voluntary-io, your correct- they hide all from us. Just imagine what else we lost throughout the centurys of conditioning! Everything could be free indeed, and actually I would like to ask do voluntarrrararararayyyyieests have principles similar to freegan? its only since joining steemit and getting back into "the real world" that i hear of all these different "labels" and yeh, its interesting!
Cool, thanks for sharing, I also live in a van and we were thinking about how to get some more power, mostly for sometimes being able to plug in the laptop and get online to read about stuff like this ;D
Oh yeh, to charge the alptop is a must :) Tune in for the next part to this post, the test run just now was amazing! Nice to "meet" you guys!
I was actually looking into tesla technology recently started working as an electrical apprentice.