Any Generators, Power Banks, Solar Panels, etc…?
Edit: So I’m gonna answer my own question. I’ll probably freak out and would have zero generators to deal with it. Heater is Gas, but I don’t know if gas would work during power outage. Cooking, well there’s a butane burner stove. I have 3 10000mah batteries, but they have 60% efficiency due to power loss during transfer, so its effectively 6000mah, enough to roughly charge my 5000mah battery once, 3 batteries is 3-4 charges. Then I’d be bored with zero entertainment, along with all the food melting and going bad, very not fun 🙃
I’m living in an apartment on the 8th floor. Heating is geothermal heating (from a big geothermal plant owned by the city I live in). So no heating in winter. My second worry would be the food spoiling in the freezer. I’d probably move everything down into the car to drive to my family’s place (that’s a bit of work, 8th floor, no elevator) and then notice that my car is trapped inside the garage below our apartment block due to the electric garage doors not opening. I’d probably get some help from other people in the house opening them by hand (might involve dismounting of the electronics box).
In other words, in case of a longer city-wide outage I’m screwed.
In case it’s a shorter one and my electric window blinds in the bedroom are still closed, I wouldn’t worry and find someone to screw.
I think I’d be able to macgyver enough to get by for some weeks
The only prepper thing I have is an alcohol camping stove.
I have ~250Ah worth of charged lead-acid batteries in the garage. The only way to charge them would be my car.
I have a 50 liter compressor fridge/freezer that runs off 12V. It draws maybe 4Ah, so perishables would do fine.
Heating is en electric heat pump, so that’s a no go. I have an inverter ready to hook up to the circulation pump to keep pipes from freezing. The Mrs has an obscene stash of tea candles, so I guess I’d pop some of those under some radiator pipes to heat that circulating water.
The water tower in town would dry out in a day or two. We’ve got a well with our neighbours for watering, but it’s drinkable. I’d have to borrow the inverter for the pump to fill up jugs.
Probably pretty long. There’s plenty of wood and propane, dry food, and salt to preserve things.
Tons of food in the fridge that would do fine outside with current temps. House is gas heated. I’d say we’d be good until we ran out of food. Probably a month or two including stuff from the pantry. Stove top and oven is also gas.
Very little electricity though, but you dont need that to survive. I’ll play with my tools if I get bored. Would suck without much light
My house has a gas-fired boiler. In theory, I should keep heat during a power outage, right?
In practice, the circulation pump needs electricity, so the house gets kinda chilly during power outages.
Hmm, I should see about getting a backup battery for the boiler.
Did two weeks after Helene. Generators, UPSs, and self-hosted services kept us entertained and the security cams powered up. There was some rationing for three or four days until the gas stations got power but we were ready. By the second day we were running the air conditioner at night to sleep and didn’t miss any football games on tv.
I have a wood burning stove with peltier device powered fans to distribute the heat.
It gets hot enough to boil water so I can cook on it.
And I have about 4 days worth of continuous fire firewood.
So assuming that I couldn’t just hop in the car and drive somewhere else I guess I would be okay for about 4 days.
Solar power on the roof, powerwall battery backup, and 3100 gallons of rainwater. All electric appliances here. We could go weeks without power.
I take it you live somewhere that’s fairly sunny year round? We had a visit from a door to door solar salesperson stop be recently, so I dug in a little. We get a little over 6 peek solar hours in the summer, but come winter we’re down to around 2. Our energy use last month was about 25 kwh/day. There’s basically no chance of us generating all of that :( Add in a third of that being my plugin Volt, which charges at night, and it’s really not looking good for generating all our own power.
San Diego, so yeah except for " winter."
As Hurricane Helene recently reminded me, pretty much nobody is prepared. Even the people/my family members who like to think they’re prepared. Nope. Didn’t really help.
We lost power for at least a week after Helene. There were plenty of people that weren’t prepared and freaked out, but by and large, I saw people pitching together to share fuel, food, water and company. It was a tough time, but it was nice seeing the kinder side of humanity.
When I first moved into my house I did try to create an emergency kit but with a lack of serious thought. A few weeks ago, the plastic water jugs had degraded enough to spontaneously start leaking. So yep, that’s why you don’t do that
That’s because the best preparation is a strong knit small commune worth of people (20-100) with diverse skills, good planning and community coordination, that’s set up somewhere away from disaster prone areas with plently of arable land and abundant natural water.
The above is way more difficult than the average American plan : one nuclear family of various ages, a shelf of canned goods, way too little water, a propane stove, and a gun.
I’ll be ok for a bit. My chest freezer will be good for several days, and my family room has a gas heater that doesn’t need electrical. Also gas stove top doesn’t need electrical, and I have a propane grill so cooking is set. For entertainment, I have books on kindle that should be good a couple weeks
Fridge, car, phone good for a day or so until batteries are used up - do we still have cell service? I’d try digging out my camping gear but hopefully didn’t leave fuel with that.
We have excellent power reliability here. I don’t think it’s gone more than 2 hours in the last 20 years
About a month. We have a supply of water and since it’s winter stuff will stay frozen because I can put it outside in the shed. Plenty of wood to cook over. But after a month I’m screwed on that end. I do have a natural gas tank for a grill but the grill doesn’t work. So if I can find a grill to use that will extend my time.
The only problem: toilet. Not sure if water can keep going if there is no power at the water plant and water treatment plant. Maybe they run by solar.
Heating the house. There is a way to use the wood to heat the house. But it won’t be pretty. I don’t need to heat the whole house. Just a part of it.
I’m downhill from a water tower which I guess is good. However I live in a major metropolitan area with water pumped from 100 miles away. So I can’t imagine that working
When they built a new tower, they were talking 1/2 supply, so I guess that
I guess that just depends on the area and how fast water towers are filled up/drained by the locals. I have no idea.
The longest power outage I’ve ever done was 2 weeks. The town kept the water and sewer going, we kept warm with a kerosene heater. My current house has a natural gas heater. I don’t keep like gallons of water stored up but I have a camp stove and a gas grill, I can cook if I need to, and we have three vehicles fueled and ready.
I’m prepared for basically any natural disaster that leaves the state government in power. If it’s so bad that the governor isn’t around to give a press conference than I’m either also already dead or I’m going to be the guy that flies an F/A-18 into the alien’s superlaser.
If you have a water heater you have a supply of drinkable water in the 40-80 gallon range, not counting what is in your pipes
I don’t know if I want to drink what will roll out of my water heater’s drain. I don’t think it’s been drained since installed and I’m kind of afraid to do it.
I’m literally dead in about a week. All of my heating, cooking, and refrigeration are electric, and I have no backup supply or the means to safely add a backup. So I’d have no food, very little water, and I’d freeze to death.
Try downloading this guide and following some of the advice in it. It’s Sweden’s emergency preparedness guide.
https://www.msb.se/sv/publikationer/om-krisen-eller-kriget-kommer-pa-engelska/
Damn, its scary how everyone is so reliant on the “grid” to survive. 😖
That’s how cities work - a 300-home apartment building isn’t going to have 300 generators on the balconies and expect each family to maintain one - it has a single grid connection with specialists to maintain the electric.
I’m on the grid, but I didn’t come from it.
If anything hits me too bad, I’m not beyond living in a car or just straight leaving the area entirely.
Been there, done that. I am currently in the home I inherited from my grandfather, and so I have a lot of old-fashioned things like a gas stove and a non-electric refrigerator. Only communication would be any issue.
careful with catalytic fridges, they will kill you. make sure you install monoxide sensors everywhere around it.
I’m way ahead of you on that one. Thanks.
Non-electric refrigerator? Like an old fashion ice box? How do you like using it?
Yes and no.
People tend to forget even ancient peoples had ways of preserving food. The Romans would either dig a ditch and dump their food in it and it would keep their food preserved due to the elements, or they’re keep smoke from a fire flowing over it, with the smoke keeping bacteria from forming (in fact, if I am not mistaken, the second of these works better than refrigeration for some things, since it is easier for bacteria to adapt to the cold in semi-sealed containers than where the air is actively harmful).
Even after electricity, this was all still common for a while (and people still do it now), but they would specialize it more (instead of, you know, digging some improvisedly crude ditch) and this is where the idea of ice storages in peoples’ basements came from. The setup all just kind of came with the home. Where most people have maybe two refrigerators, the pre-refrigerator containment area like my second refrigerator, which helps because the area where I live is prone to some challenging stuff.
I think more like a camper fridge. Runs on a small pilot light.
Long enough to where if power hasn’t come back by then, it’s not coming back at all. And at that point, power isn’t going to be the biggest problem.
Water heater holds ~40 gallons and that’s easily drainable. Worse comes to worst, there’s a creek at the back of my property.
You could probably get a couple of Life straws for that Creek and buy yourself several weeks of drinkable water.
Not worth IMO. There’s already a couple weeks of water in the water heater. If I end up needing the straws, water is only gonna be the first of many problems and most of them I won’t have solutions for.
I was always told that the thing to keep track of is 3 minutes 3 days 3 weeks.
3 minutes without air, 3 days without water, 3 weeks without food.
Used to love losing power during ice storms as a kid. Sure, I couldn’t play Bassin’s Black Bass on SNES, but my dad would stoke the fireplace and light up the extremely dangerous kerosine heater that smelled fucking awesome. Then we would chill with my mom on the couch and read Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
That kerosine heater never did blow the family up…
