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Cooking, refrigeration and water pumping depends on electric power. It can definitely get nasty if it lasts for more than a day

This is one of the reasons I'm looking at extending my solar system to add a battery and islanding, so I can have a regular resupply of some amount of power/electricity for the necessities in case of extended outages.

I'm not sure how far into "prepper" that makes me. I don't have a store of canned food or weapons or a generator. I started down this track to keep my home lab (on which I self-host a bunch of stuff) online / protected through outages.

Additionally, the city in which I live has an ad-hoc amateur WiFi setup which connects over several kilometres. I used to be a member a long time ago but, ironically (in this context) getting fiber internet meant I kinda lost interest. It's one of those things that had just never gotten back to the top of my priority list: https://air-stream.org/

Feels like they're ahead of game on this topic.

This is exactly it. The other part is not just water pumping but operating the sewer systems - if the lift stations are down the whole thing fills up in about a week and the basic plumbing in your house - and thus pretty much entire city, stops working.

Cities are not setup to support their current populations without those services and once you run out of buffer things go downhill quick - wastewater is an enormous and immediate disease hazard.

Solar and battery for refrigeration seems a waste.

If you own a house I'd look into very old school options like digging a deep hole to store your food in a dark&cool place - forgot the name for it but it'll work for weeks or months without a single milliwatt

A "cellar"? :)

Or if you want to get technical I guess "root cellar".

Solar+battery is great for a few weeks locally with no power, or a couple of days nationally.

It's terrible in a society-collapse way - makes you a target.

That sounds really inconvenient (am I going to keep my food down there all the time, or is the plan to carry the entire contents of my refrigerator down there in an outage?) not terribly effective (RIP all the frozen stuff) and probably not any cheaper. Plus the hole can’t be used for other things like charging my phone.

> It's terrible in a society-collapse way - makes you a target.

A target for what? People to come charge their phone at your house?

Why would you be a target if 50%+ of population have solar setups?

Convert a chest freezer into refrigerator and you don't need batteries.

https://www.notechmagazine.com/category/refrigeration

If society actually suffers a sustained "collapse," access to electricity won't even be among your top-20 problems. You're going to be more worried about how you're going to obtain water, food, and protect yourself from the roving looters and/or warlords that will immediately spring up in the absence of law and order.

It'll work just great to keep half the things in my fridge safe and none of the things in my freezer safe.

Refrigeration is top priority and I would happily buy solar panels just to keep it working (plus leeching a few watts for my phone).

That's very smart and might end my quest for a truly quiet bedroom fridge, if it really only runs two minutes in an hour. (Light fridges marketed as "quiet" just produce near-constant annoying fan noise, quietly.)

It really works, and if you fill half the space with water then it'll only need to run once or twice a week (assuming you don't open the lid often)

For folks with a private well, electricity is the key to fresh water. At least for a while.

Have you looked at hotel minibar fridges? They're generally pretty quiet.

> protect yourself from the roving looters and/or warlords that will immediately spring up in the absence of law and order.

This is a hollywood meme.

The reality is that aggressive looters/warlords will be very quickly disposed of and the remaining ones will fall in line and become semi-official protective militia forces, who will labor alongside farmers in small communities if they don't want to starve.

Food scarcity will be a much bigger issue that some nutcase trying to loot my solar panels.

What makes you so confident it would pan out that way rather than the meme way? Especially if potential warlords only have the memes for inspiration.

There are a lot more of regular reasonable folks who own guns (approximately 134 million in USA) than those who have some kind of meme warlord fantasy.

Which is to say, normal people really don't like shooting each other, and they REALLY don't like being shot at, so most normal folks would eliminate the threat of crazy warlords first, then form some kind of organized militia group to repel small groups of raiders/thieves.

Any large group of raiders would very quickly fall victim to its own internal politics and lack of resources, because they don't produce anything. You can't have a group that's 100% raiders.

It's just not going to look like Mad Max, ever. Sorry to disappoint.