Environment & Energy

You'll want to make friends with an electrician who is competent with AC, DC, and exterior electrical power systems.

If it's panels on the roof you'll need competent roofer too.

You can become that person yourself, but that's more than one book.

It's much easier to conserve electricity than it is to produce it yourself.

I have a few hundred watts of solar. It could power our phones, internet, and a few reading lights in an extended power failure, but I'm not at all certain our phone and internet service would continue working in any catastrophe. It's not the 'sixties anymore, back when phone networks were built to survive nuclear attacks.

The nice thing about solar is that you can start small and scale up as you gain experience with the technology.

Youtube can be a good resource or a terrifying one.

This guy doesn't terrify me but I imagine some of his viewers don't really know what they are doing and have improvised some pretty scary systems.