Single Point of Failure

We live on the Gulf Coast, an area noted for its vulnerability to hurricanes.  Our family has evacuated several times in advance of storms and on other occasions, we've stayed put and weathered fierce storms.  We've incurred moderate damage in some storms and had virtually no damage on others.  I work for a Company that has personnel and assets in close proximity to the Gulf of Mexico and over the years, we've gotten evacuations down to a science and have become very good at it.

2013 has been a quiet hurricane season for us, but in early October we had Tropical Storm Karen bearing down on the Southeastern part of our State and our Company evacuated people and assets out of harm's way. After such an undertaking, we always meet when the strong winds subside in order to determine what went right and what we need to improve upon.  Reviews like this have helped us become better each and every time we do it.

This year, although our process was excellent, a Manager talked to us about Single Point of Failure (SPOF). In other words, if we have one part of our system go down, it would doom the entire endeavor.  The point is that you critically think through your process and build in redundancy where it makes sense.  In short, have a back-up plan.

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I began to think about this.  While this principle is important when you have hundreds of people and millions of dollars of inventory in harm's way, it can also be important from a personal standpoint on a homestead.

Lots of times we're trying to learn how to do things the old fashioned way.  It is interesting to learn new skills. We also take very seriously trying to separate ourselves from the current fast-food, industrialized, worldly culture as much as we can.  Oh, we still enjoy many modern conveniences, but we like the "old ways" of doing things.  There's something to be said for the simplicity and honesty of the 'good old days.'  We grow most of our own food and try to reduce our reliance on the store as much as possible.

If the power goes down, we have candles, oil lamps, flashlights with batteries, etc. for light, we have crops and eggs and milk from our own land, we can food and dry food, have an inventory of food stored, and we have learned skills that will help us to do things the old way if the lack of power prevents the 'new' way from working.  But sometimes, many times in fact, the old way is just hard.  I came into the house the other day and saw Tricia grinding grain with our hand-operated grain grinder. I posted about this and if you missed it, you can read about it here: The Daily Grind  Grinding grain to make flour (the old-fashioned way) is a labor intensive deal.

So I put on my thinking cap and began to think of how I could help my wife.  I should've thought of this idea sooner!

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Electricity is our Single Point of Failure.  If the power goes down we lose all sorts of modern conveniences. We thought ahead and purchased a hand-cranked grain mill to make flour out of wheat berries, buckwheat, and spelt groats, as well as corn meal from whole corn.  To make things easier, we could always buy an electric grain grinder, but those bad boys cost in excess of $200.

How could I convert our existing hand-operated grain meal to an automated one?  Easy!  I pulled the hand crank off and found that the fitting was exactly the size of a 3/8 inch socket drive.

So I fit that onto my 18V cordless drill.  The only problem was when I pushed against it, it pushed the grinding mechanism right out of the grinder.  You can see I tried a rubber band to hold it in, but that did no good.

Improvising...

Finally, I enlisted Benjamin's help and he held the grinding mechanism in with a letter opener while I ground grain with Tricia pouring that groats in the grinder.  You can see that it was grinding the spelt so fast, that it blew flour all over the counter!

Now we're cookin' with gas!

The hand crank for the grain grinder laying on the counter.  As I was grinding the grain into flour, Tricia told me that I shouldn't use the battery-operated drill, but should use our electric powered drill to save the battery for power outages - good point.  I'll do that from now on.

Flour Power

So while we eliminated our Single Point of Failure (electricity) and have redundancy in a hand operated grain grinder, we can still enjoy the convenience of making our own non-GMO flour and cornmeal with a "conversion kit' automated grinder (and do it with a little lease elbow-grease and much quicker)!  And that makes my wife happy...