Tools & Self-Reliance Forum

What this board is for

The kit and the skills that keep a place running: chainsaws and saw maintenance, hand tools, small engines, welding and metalwork, repair rather than replacement, and the spares worth holding before something fails. It is the board for competence rather than for equipment reviews.

Off grid, the useful question about any tool is rarely which is best. It is which can be maintained, fed with parts you can obtain, and repaired by you at the end of a long road.

The questions that come up most

What tools do I actually need? Fewer than the lists suggest, and better ones than the budget versions for the things used constantly. A good saw, a good drill, decent hand tools, and the specific items your systems require go a long way.

How do I maintain a chainsaw? Sharpening, chain tension, bar care, fuel mix, and air filter, in roughly that order of frequency. A sharp chain is a safety measure as much as a productivity one, because a dull chain is what causes people to force a cut.

What spares should I hold? Whatever is critical, plausible to fail, and slow to obtain. That rule buys filters, seals, gaskets, plugs, and fuses and declines to buy a second of everything.

Repair or replace? Off grid, repairability is worth paying for, because the alternative to a repair is frequently a week without the tool.

What a useful post looks like here

Say the make and model, what it is doing, and what you have already tried. For small engines, say how it has been stored and what fuel has been in it, because that answers a large share of no-start questions on its own.

Photographs help, particularly for wear, damage, and anything mechanical that is behaving oddly.

The mistakes that cost the most here

Untreated fuel left in small engines. It is the single most common cause of equipment that will not start, and it is entirely preventable.

Buying cheap versions of the tools used daily, then buying them again.

Neglecting personal protective equipment on chainsaw work. Chaps, hearing, and eye protection are not optional, and a rural address makes an injury far more serious than the same injury in town.

Not stocking the parts that are specific to your equipment, on the assumption that a supplier will have them.

And skipping maintenance intervals on the machines that matter most, which are usually the generator and the saw.

Skills worth building deliberately

Small engine maintenance, because generators, saws, pumps, and mowers all depend on it and a callout is not available. Basic welding or at least metal repair, which turns a broken implement into a mended one. Sharpening, which applies to everything from chisels to chains and transforms how tools behave.

Then the system-specific skills: pulling and resetting a well pump, changing a stove gasket, working out a wiring fault safely, and knowing which jobs are yours and which need somebody licensed.

Teach at least one other person in the household the critical ones. A skill held by a single person is a single point of failure like any other.

Spares, storage, and knowing what you own

Keep the shelf organized by system rather than by type, so that the parts for the pump are together and can be found by somebody who is not you. Label everything, note what was used, and replace it immediately rather than after the next failure.

Store consumables properly: fuel stabilized and in approved containers, oil sealed, filters dry and boxed. Off grid the shelf is a small warehouse and it deserves the same discipline.

The spares reference lists what to hold for each system with part categories, and the systems binder is where the model numbers and fittings belong so that ordering the right part does not require you to be standing next to the machine.

How much of this is regional

Less than most boards, though what you cut, what you build with, and what the climate does to equipment all vary. Cold changes fuel, batteries, and lubricants; heat and dust change filters and cooling.

Parts availability is the regional factor that matters most. In some areas a rural supplier stocks everything; in others the nearest option is a delivery, which is exactly the argument for a well-stocked shelf.

So say where you are when the question is about sourcing, and expect the maintenance answers to travel well.

Where this meets the rest of the site

The resilience board covers backups and testing, and the power board covers the electrical systems whose spares belong on the same shelf.

The spares reference is the parts list by system, the reminders tool puts the intervals on a schedule, and lesson ten of the course covers deciding what is worth holding in the first place.

The lesson that covers this

Lesson 10: Backup, spares, and the habit of maintenance in the free course works through this subject in the order the decisions actually arrive. Set up the generator, the spare-parts wall, and the maintenance calendar so the first failure is a nuisance, not a cold week.

The whole course is twelve lessons, free, with no account required to read any of it: start at the beginning if you are new to this, or jump straight to the lesson above if you are not.

Tools for this topic

Most questions on this board come down to a number somebody has not worked out yet. These do the arithmetic and show their working, so an answer here can be checked rather than taken on faith.

• Spares: the parts worth stocking before they fail
• Tools/generator calculator: match a generator to the bank it will charge

How this board works

Posting needs an account, which exists so that answers have a name attached and so that the same person can be asked a follow-up six months later. It costs nothing and it is not used for anything else.

The conventions here are the ones that make a small forum useful. Say where you are, at least to the state or region, because almost every answer on this site depends on climate or on local rules. Say what you have already, and what you have already tried. Give numbers where you have them, and say when you are guessing. And when something works or fails, come back and say which, because the thread is read by far more people than post in it.

Answers here should be able to say where they came from. Experience is welcome and so is a rule of thumb, as long as it is labeled as one. Where a claim is about safety, code, or law, it wants a source, because the reader on the other end may be about to spend money or wire something themselves.

Boards next door

Off-grid questions rarely stay inside one department. A water question is often a power question underneath, and a land question is usually several at once. These boards field the neighboring subjects:

• Prepping & Resilience: Practical prepping and SHTF readiness without the doom: food, water, power, first aid, and communications so you are rea...
• Solar & Power: Panels, power stations, batteries, inverters, and wiring: how to make and store your own electricity, and what actually ...
• Shelter & Structures: Cabins, tiny homes, insulation, and building for the long haul in a place the grid does not reach.
• Homesteading & Livestock: Animals, fencing, and the day-to-day of running a productive off-grid homestead.

Asking a question that gets a good answer

The difference between a thread that gets three useful replies and one that gets none is almost always in the first post. Four things do most of the work: where you are, what you already have, what you have already tried, and what you are actually trying to achieve.

Location matters because nearly every answer on this site depends on climate or on local rules, and the same question has different right answers in Vermont and Arizona. What you have matters because advice that assumes different equipment wastes everyone's time. What you have tried stops people repeating it. And the goal matters because the best answer is frequently that the problem should be solved somewhere else entirely: a load reduced rather than a battery added, a parcel checked rather than a design revised.

Numbers beat adjectives. Give the figure where you have one and say plainly when you are guessing, because a guess labeled as a guess is useful and a guess presented as a measurement sends people down the wrong path.

Answering well, and the standard here

Experience is the most valuable thing on a board like this, and it is most valuable when it comes with its conditions attached: what you have, where, for how long, and what went wrong along the way. A rule of thumb is welcome when it is labeled as one.

Where a claim is about safety, code, or law, it wants a source, because the person reading may be about to wire something themselves or spend a large amount of money. Direct-current faults, combustion appliances, and structural decisions are not places for confident approximations, and saying you are not sure is a genuine contribution rather than a failure.

It is also worth saying when something has changed. Equipment, prices, and regulations all move, and an answer that was right three years ago can be wrong now.

Coming back with what happened

The most underused post on any forum is the follow-up. Threads are read by far more people than post in them, and a question with no resolution is a question the next reader has to ask again.

So come back and say which suggestion worked, what it cost, and what you would do differently. Say it even when the answer is that none of the advice helped and you solved it another way, because that is the most useful outcome of all to record.

If what you learned contradicts something published on this site, please say so. Corrections are logged publicly on the corrections page with the date rather than quietly edited away, and readers who have called the county or walked the ground are the best source of correction this site has.

Why location keeps coming up

Newcomers sometimes find it odd that half the replies here open by asking where they are. It is not gatekeeping. Off-grid answers are dominated by two local variables, and almost nothing useful can be said without them.

The first is climate. Worst-month sun hours decide how much array a house needs and differ by roughly a factor of two across the country. Heating degree days decide the fuel supply. Frost depth decides how deep every water line is buried, and design low decides whether a battery bank can live in an outbuilding. Two households running identical equipment in different regions have completely different experiences of it.

The second is governance. What may be built, what may be occupied while building, whether a composting toilet is recognized, and whether you may stay disconnected where utilities run past the lot line are all decided locally, and adjacent counties routinely differ. The laws section records what public sources say for each state, county, and in New England each town, and marks plainly where an answer could not be confirmed.

So say where you are, at least to the state, and expect the best answers to come from people within a few counties of you.

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