Energy · Generation
Backup power carries a household through an outage. This is the other thing: generating continuously, as a matter of course, from what a property already has. Sun, moving water, wind, wood, and fuel.
Six areas, each with its own demands, its own honest economics, and its own reasons you might walk away from it.
Who this is for
The rest of the Energy section is written for a household that owns a house: what to buy so the refrigerator keeps running, how to light a room without the grid, how to stay warm when the power is out for three days. That is most people, most of the time, and it is where nearly everyone should start.
This section is written for a property that intends to produce its own electricity as normal operation. Acreage, a woodlot, a stream, a clear ridge. The equipment is larger, the systems are permanent, and the maintenance is a standing commitment rather than an occasional chore.
Neither is more serious than the other. A person with two acres and a stream is not further along than a person in a townhouse. They have a different problem, and it takes different answers.
If you are sizing a battery station or a generator for outages
Start in the main Energy section instead. It answers that question directly and in less time, and nothing here will serve you better until it is answered.
Energy: build your independenceBefore any of it
Every page in this section resolves to the same four checks that govern a portable power station: what voltage the equipment needs, how many watt-hours a day the load consumes, how much continuous output it draws at once, and what it demands at the moment a motor starts.
A property-scale system is a bigger answer to those questions, not a different question. Work your load list first. Every decision downstream, from array size to penstock diameter to how many hours an engine runs, is set by that list.
Work out your load firstThe six areas
These are being written now. Each one gets a hub and a set of pages beneath it. Nothing here is linked yet, because nothing is finished, and naming a page before it exists is how a site starts lying to its readers.
Sizing an array to carry a property rather than supplement it. Battery banks, charge control, ground mounts, wiring and code, and getting through a run of grey days in January.
If you have moving water with real drop, it beats everything else on this page, because it runs at three in the morning in February. Measuring head and flow, run-of-river systems, waterwheels, and the permits.
Assessing whether your site has a usable wind resource, which most do not. Horizontal and vertical axis machines, towers and maintenance, and an honest account of why residential wind so often disappoints.
Turning what a property already grows or discards into power and useful heat. Gasification, digesters, Stirling engines, thermoelectric generators, and combined heat and power.
An engine that runs daily is a different machine from one that runs three times a winter. Sizing for duty, fuel logistics and storage, biodiesel, transfer switches and interlocks, and what daily running really costs.
Sources that depend on a property having something unusual. Geothermal, tidal and wave, human-powered systems, and one page on what genuinely does not work at this scale and why.
How the dangerous ones are covered
A few subjects in this section carry risk that is structural rather than incidental. Wood gasification produces a gas that is largely carbon monoxide, by design. Digesters accumulate methane in a sealed vessel. Distilling fuel alcohol requires a federal permit before the still is legally run. Small boilers fail in ways other equipment does not.
We cover all of them, because leaving them out would be dishonest about what property-scale generation involves, and because a reader who wants to know will simply find a worse source.
What we publish is what each system is, what it genuinely demands, why the risk sits in the design rather than in carelessness, what it costs in money and attention, and when it makes sense at all. What we do not publish is build instructions or operating procedures for those four. Each page says plainly what qualified execution looks like and where to find it.
In the meantime
Several pages in the main Energy section carry directly into this work, even though they were written for a house rather than a property.
The four checks, whatever the scale.
System sizing and the questions worth asking any installer.
The backup case, and the carbon monoxide rules that never bend.
Water rights, zoning, and what your property actually permits.