Not a replicant

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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: May 30th, 2024

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  • We’re in a bushfire zone, even had one get close, late last year. We looked into suppression systems, and there’s two types - one has a series of garden sprinklers positioned on your roof gutters or overhangs. They get turned on to create a large, extended fan-type spray of water. The idea is not to extinguish a fire, but to absorb the heat so it doesn’t get hot enough locally to ignite your house.

    The other type - which we chose - puts agricultural sprinkler heads on your roof peaks. Fed by a substantial pump from storage tanks ( 2 x 22,500 litre/5000 gallons), they throw in intersecting circles out to a distance of about 15 metres/50 feet. The idea is to saturate your roof and walls, and surrounding foliage sufficiently that it won’t ignite.



  • I’ve got a fire suppression system. An agricultural sprinkler on each of the two roof peaks, fed by a pump from storage tanks. We’re off-grid (no mains) and already have the storage tanks - 2 x 22500litre/5000 gallons. With full tanks, the sprinklers should operate for ~7 hours, which is way more than necessary - three to four hours would be enough. The sprinklers “throw” interlocking circles of water, they intersect over the roof and saturate all the ground and foliage out to about 15 metres/50 feet. Water falling on the roof goes back into the tanks. The pump is electric, but being off-grd, we’ve got big batteries and a backup generator, so I’m confident the pump would run long enough for the fire to pass.







  • Same in Australia. The libnats (right-leaning) broke the fibre-optic rollout by claiming it would be too expensive, and replaced it in non-metro areas with wireless, claiming 25Mbps was adequate. They didn’t mention that slow internet would benefit the Murdoch -owned Foxtel satellite services. And here we are now with internet services worse than some poorer countries.

    I chose Starlink because I will never get fibre optic, my only broadband option is geo-synch satellite, with speed and data caps, and 600ms latency.