Evolution of 3d printers made them as much of a tool as chisel or saw, they’ve stopped being a gimmick or something geeky and became fully fledged tool for every shop.

Currently, you can easily buy sets like Bambu X1 Carbon Combo or Creality K2 Combo which (especially Bambu) are closest to being “iPhone of 3d Printing”, you get it out from the package and it’s ready to print in 10 minutes.

First part will mostly cover preparation phase, how to choose proper energy source for such extreme scenario!

I remember times of Anet, then Prusa, then Voron — guys, 3d printing was a chore, a job or a hobby — long story short, something that takes time and gives back only satisfaction of finished task (what’s important, not always).

Scenario: Zombie Apocalipse

Every doomsday prepper is preparing for some sort of cataclysmic event, as Holywood shown us, Zombie Apocalipse is one that gives us most thrills and sets us in one of most challenging environments, where you need to stay in move, resources are always scarse, and you can’t rely on stable source of power. It doesn’t need to be extremely powerful, and that’s the key difference between 3d printing and any other machining style. Bambu X1C takes ~150W when printing (up to 1kW when heating up for few minutes). That means that average 3d printer energy consuption for 24h is around 3.6 kWh, which gives us 24/7 ABS/Nylon printing powerhouse!

If you’re not native to electrical engineering, I’ll put that into perspective:

• Electric kettle uses 2000-2300W
• Fridge uses 200W
• 50″ flat screen TV uses ~70W
• Bandsaw uses 1100W
• CNC router uses 6900W (small one)

Printer uses 150W, what it tells you? That instead of watching 2 TVs during Zombie Apocalypse, you should run your 3d printing empire!

Let’s set ourselves in non-US grounds, so weapons will be more a spike or big knife, than AR-15. Think about it as Eningeer’s Perspective Zombie Apocalypse (EPZA™).

What we need?

Energy Storage(s)

How we can store energy? We can use Fuel:

• Diesel / Petrol
• Natural Gas / LNG / CNG
• Alcohol
• Kerosene

When Kerosene and Alcohol are not really popular as energy storage, and alcohol is considered quite precious as disinfectant let’s scratch that of the board.

Diesel and Petrol are also considered precious as they are fueling your car, as they are great when it comes to energy density (12 Liter of Petrol gives us 16.2kWh , weighting 9 kg — nice!) it’s highly flammable (dangerous to store where you live), we also have quite vast reserves, but are they going to be accessible or rather heavily guarded? It will be quite hard to extract crud oil and refine it when there is no power and Zombies are pounding the fences!

Gas — well , gas is cool, 9kg (20lb) can fuel 1600W generator for 12.5 hours (full throttle) which is leaving us with approximately 20kWh Energy to be used. Damn! But let’s face it? How to handle Propane easily? It’s highly flammable, it’s smells bad, most probably it would be quite hard to find it when Apocalypse kicks in, and would vanish quickly as it can be also used for LPG converted cars are obviously for cooking. But afterwards? You can’t easily extract it or dig it. You can start generating methane and find or build conversion kit to get your generator running on Methane, but that’s hardly considered mobile setup.

Also, let’s remember that we’re not tackling general energy needs — but our ability to make things, maintain and tinker around.

We also have batteries or battery energy storage, well — that’s a story for whole another article probably.

But let’s take a device from the company that i’m quite a fan of — EcoFlow Delta Pro. It offers 3.6kW of Power (damn!) And 3.6kWh of energy ( well, less, less damn…), but rechargeable batteries are safe to store, not prone to damage or spilling and you would easily sleep on 1 or 3 battery storage units, instead of few tanks of Petrol wouldn’t you?

Power Generator(s)

Propane / Diesel / Petrol

Let’s start with Propane / Diesel / Petrol generators which are great! They offer ton of power, they are quite portable, efficiency is good but remember — Zombies are reacting to sound, and those are quite loud — when running on 100% of power, they will generate sound at level of 60-70dB noise (measured from 7 meters away) that’s maybe fine if you’re using it inside of building or you can put it in some sort of chassis that would silence it down a bit. But you can’t really use in closed room without putting exhaust pipe outside, otherwise your usage of that type of generator will be quite short (you’ll die.).

Renewal

Wind

We have some portable wind generators in the market like Shine Turbine but it’s a bit of a gadget as it’s rated as 40W max power.

We can point ourselves to vertical / helical turbines, which are far better when it comes to production, you can easily find turbines that will generate up to 1kW (1000 Watts) with height lower than 1 meter. Downside of any Wind Turbine generator is of course, lack of wind. If you’re not putting it somewhere high, or if your region is not really know for high winds — you will have some issues with that setup. But for Nordics, or any type of Islands it’s a very interesting choice.

Solar

Solar is almost perfect. If you’re not living underground or on one of the Poles , it will give you good portion of energy without any additional effort. You can put it on a roof of basically every vechicle. It harvest sun energy without hassle and additional effort, it’s highly portable, not very prone to damage. You should have one — stiff attached to roof permanently, second portable that you can always get from the trunk and charge with it when you’re camping.

If we would get 2 x 400W Panel ( on a big SUV or RV you can easily pack twice that much) — this setup needs between 3.5 and 7 hours to completely charge up your Delta Pro — that’s nice.

Water

Portable water generators are not very popular, but as the principle is quite similar to wind generators — we can find some solutions that will help you squeeze some juice from water.

They will be rated from 200-1000W and for decent performance you need to drag it behind your boat or be permanently attached to its bottom. When in comes to car usage, it’s has limited scope.

Summary

We’ve already established that we’re living during Zombie Apocalypse, so old prepper saying couldn’t be more accurate — One is None.

Let’s diversify! For Power generation let’s use mainly Solar and Wind. Solar will give us more than enough energy to charge our battery Pack even when we’re moving. Wind will take care of us when weather is bad (lack of sun often means bad weather, bad weather = Wind and Rain).

Then whole setup is dead silent, around 30dB so we can literally sleep when it’s working.

As a backup generator we have BiFuel generator, so we can still use Petrol and Propane when stationary or when weather was not in favour for our Solar and Wind generators.

With setup above, we can print with Nylon or ABS 24/7 even when there is no Sun and we’ve encountered bad weather.

If we will keep our consumption below production (in other words, devices connected to our Power Pack will use less energy that is generated from Sun or Wind) this setup should more than enough for all of our energy needs.