Judging the Extent of Your Needs

You’ll get to know, over time, how reliable your power is.  Are there windstorms or other occasional/seasonal issues that see you losing power, and if so, are outages typically brief or sometimes do they run for an extended period of time?

Most of us can manage a brief power outage with the only problem being how patient we are.  But as the minutes stretch into hours, and into days or even weeks, more than patience is required.  The adage PPPPPPP applies.  Proper prior planning prevents piss poor performance.

This article series helps you with the proper prior planning.

I’m writing it after suffering two power cuts in the last couple of weeks.  One as a result of a car knocking down a pole, and the other explained vaguely as “equipment failure”.

I discovered, when responding to the first one, that my generator needs to be stripped and cleaned.  I fear some old fuel has clogged up a fuel line or something, and it is overdue for an oil change too.  Because the first cut was during the day, I simply packed up my computer gear and went to the local library and happily worked there until the power was restored, making a mental note to do some work on the generator soonish but not urgently.

Alas, a punishment for my lackadaisical response to my failed generator arrived swiftly.  A second power cut came hard on the heels of the first, and I’d not yet had a chance to repair the generator.  This cut was at 6pm on a Sunday, the library was closed, and as the daylight faded, and the ETA for return of power extended out every time I checked, I started to wonder what to do in the dark.  The power – originally promised to be restored by 8.30pm, finally came on again just before 2am.

More to the point, if you had an extended power cut overnight, what would you do?

As it was, I enjoyed watching an HD movie in a not-dark room, read a book for a while, and eventually went to bed.  Could you do the same?

Identify and Classify Your Power Needs

The first part of ensuring that your answer to this question will be yes, is to inventory the essential things that need power during an outage and then understand how you can continue to power them.  There’ll be a mix of “must have”, “would be nice to have” and “can live without” entries on that list.

For each item identified, you should make a note of its power requirements – both the watts it consumes, and also its “duty cycle” – is it on all the time (like a light) or just some of the time (like a fridge/freezer compressor).

There will also be some seasonal changes (heating/cooling) and some things that are not needed for a short outage (fridge/freezer) or which are not needed during the day (lighting).

You further should categorize items that you can not have unpowered for any period of time, those you will need at some time within about 4 – 8 hours, and those you won’t need for a day or two or more.

Find Your Hidden Power Needs Too

Be sure to include “hidden” things that you might take for granted or not realize need power.  For example, do you have an electric or gas hot water supply?  If it is gas, does it use an electronic ignition (which means you need power) or a pilot light (which makes it fully independent)?  And keep in mind that gas fired central heating will almost certainly need electricity for the fan/blower system, and probably for electronic ignition and circuit controls and thermostats, too.

Do you have a water pump or a septic system pump?

Also keep in mind that if you wish to have internet or phone or cable service, there may be things you’re not aware of that also need power.  We’ve fiber and there’s an external unit on the outside and inside of our house that needs power as well as, of course, a router inside the house; if you have cable, there’ll be a cable box that needs to be powered, probably in addition to a router, too. 

We suggest doing this in a formal manner, perhaps on a spreadsheet so you can quickly calculate total wattages and shift things around into various different what-if type scenarios.

We’ve prepared a possible spreadsheet that helps do some of this automatically for you, as you can see from the image above.  The image excerpt from the spreadsheet probably gives you some ideas about how to do this yourself, too.

We also provide this spreadsheet, in Excel and PDF formats, to our kind and generous Travel Insider Supporters.  If you’d like to access this, and be able to more confidently and conveniently do an emergency power survey to plan and prepare for a power outage, please consider joining us as a Supporter too.  Instant access to this and plenty of other premium content is granted as soon as you’ve joined.

Note – if you are a supporter already, you need to be on our website and logged in to read this section.  It doesn’t appear in the emailed copy of the article.

The next section is visible only to logged in supporter members.

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We now return to the main part of this article.

Our Example

In our case, for an overnight outage, we identified

Must Have

• Light to see by
• Cell Phone

Would be Nice to Have

• Internet
• Computers and Screens
• Light to read by
• Entertainment

Can Live Without

• Heating/Cooling (we’re in mild Seattle, never too hot, never too cold)
• Cooking (We have a gas stove-top so a box of matches enables us to still use the burners on that if necessary)
• Fridge/Freezer (but don’t open the door, the temperature seems to rise 1 1/2 – 2°F/hour)
• Landline Phones
• Hopefully Everything Else

Now that you’ve identified what you need to provide power to, the next step is how to provide the power needed. 

There are five main ways to plan for power outages.

Well – there’s a sixth – candles, warm blankets, cold showers, and not much else – but you don’t need to read this article if that’s your strategy!  There’s also a very grim seventh strategy – evacuation – and that’s something that has to be kept in mind when really severe outages happen.

Future articles in this series will look at each of these power sources/solutions.