Alan Graham :
I have 30 solar panels, five batteries, two electric cars, a backup generator, and a super efficient underfloor heating and cooling system that runs off of a heat pump. I have no natural gas in the house, I have two fireplaces, everything else is electric. I designed the systems in my house so we can either use larger amounts of energy during solar production times or to even be able to scale back to the bare minimum. It doesn’t hurt that our house is a 200 year-old stone Italian farmhouse with 3 foot thick walls, which gives me an enormous thermal mass to work with. I don’t like to think of myself as a prepper I like to think of myself as being prepared. I think it’s very possible we could see fuel constraints not just extreme price swings, which could affect everything transported. Luckily where I live in Italy, there’s a lot of of local produce and other foods because we’re in an agrarian area so it’s very easy to eat local and even if I buy other foods that aren’t local, Italy is a huge producer of food, so it doesn’t have to actually be transported very far. I have six months of dry goods stocked and have filled the freezer with all of the garden produce we’ve grown so far. We have a second winter crop coming soon, and I’ll have an olive harvest in about three months. One nice thing is that we also have a number of fruits and vegetables that are late season. I keep a fair amount of canned goods that we canned and keep in the wine cellar along with preserved meats. I have a fridge just for cheese. Now, with all of that said, I think the most important thing you’ve said in this video is number four, which is community. It’s important that you take your skills, knowledge, and resources to help others that can then intern help you and each other. I’m lucky and that we have farming communities around us who have been living off the land for hundreds of years. We’re gonna make it work. I also appreciate that we are coming from a position of privilege, but the reason we bought this property and restored it was so that we could be able to also help others. I can’t stress enough how important it is to make sure you have community and ready to help one another.
2026-09-18 22:05:06