I aim to be more prepared than the average bear, but this past week has taught me that I am often completely unprepared. You would think with the amount of time I have as an early retiree to get things done, I wouldn’t ever fall behind. Still, I certainly do.
We had an unusual power outage at our house on Sunday. It lasted from about 2:30 PM in the afternoon until almost 8:30 PM at night. No worries, I thought, we have an “emergency preparedness station” in our basement for just this sort of emergency. We put it together when my son was in Boy Scouts, on his path to Eagle. I have tried to keep it up-to-date, but I guess I have fallen behind.
When I went to get our essentials, I found that the batteries had corroded the inside of the radio, the tea light candles were much too small to really provide any light, and the flashlights had disappeared to other parts of the house. Fortunately, we had other candles in the house and a giant power station battery that I use in my Jeep for camping. That was enough to power a couple lights and to listen to the Minnesota Vikings Sunday night football game on the radio until the power came back on.
Over the weekend, my wife started not feeling well. A bad cough and cold turned into bronchitis. Our medicine cabinet, of course, was more empty than it needed to be. I’m sure it got depleted the last time one of us was sick. That resulted in several trips to the pharmacy to get her the best medicines to treat her cough and cold. You would think we see these things coming, but it seems that we never take the time to replace them in our cabinet.
I also went golfing with one of neighbors on Friday. On Thursday night, I found my clubs dirty, a big hole in the thumb of my golf glove, and only a few golf balls left in my bag. Off I went to the new PGA “Super Store” to get everything restocked. I might enjoy a trip like this if it wasn’t last minute and hurried.
I think I need to put together a one page list of things to do quarterly when the seasons change. In the Spring, I’d list getting the mower blade sharpened, double-check the yard tools, buy all of the lawn fertilizer I need for the season, and double-check that golf bag. Right now, as Fall begins, for instance, I’d make sure the furnace filter has been changed, the tires are good on the cars, and put away the furniture from the screened porch.
Having a list might help me get ahead of what is going to be needed, as opposed to my current catch-as-catch-can approach. I am not usually a list person, but when I do put together checklist, it makes a big difference.
Are you a “list person”? How do you stay on top of the “administrivia” of life?
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MrFireStation 
I used to not be a big fan of lists, but now I am. One of my favorites is one on my refrigerator door where I list out the meals that we can make with the food on hand. At the bottom of the list I have a To-Buy category. Whenever someone is cooking and something is either out or in short supply, we immediately add it to the list. We don’t live next door to a grocery store, so forgetting something you need has consequences.
I am finishing my weight room AKA workshop AKA garage cleaning up the electrical and plumbing. Whenever I run into something I need to complete the project, I add an item to my To-Buy and To-Do lists.
My recommendation regarding disaster preparation is taking an assessment of what went wrong and figuring out what you need to do to avoid problems during the next one. For example during the Palisades Fire our power was cutoff due to high winds, so we had no power or cellular signal. I pulled out my Coleman Stove and tried lighting it and it wouldn’t light. I took the Coleman Fuel outside and dumped some on the ground and it wouldn’t burn. I didn’t know that Coleman Fuel gets bad after the can has been opened. I now know. I was able to use unleaded lawnmower gas. So it turns out just plan old unleaded fuel is fine as long as its fresh. And, don’t leave left over fuel in your stove or your lantern because it will surely turn no bueno.
We were kept out of our house for 24 days. So have a friendly hotel you can go to on an as needed basis. For us it is a nearby Marriott. They know our Doberman and Rottweiler and are cool with them. When the fecal material hits the fan everyone is going to be scrambling to book hotels.
Since returning I have added Starlink as a backup to my normal fiber optic internet to have very hard to interrupt communications. We also have an automatic backup generator. A couple months ago our electricity was out again for 12 hours. It happened in the middle of the night and we didn’t even know the power was out.
My final comment is take a Kaizen approach. You are never going to get everything perfect for all situations. But if you assess what went wrong and how you avoid recurrence and things will get better. This is how Japan went from making joke products to being renowned for making very good products.
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I thought of your preparations as the sun set on on our dark house and I could hear my neighbor’s generator running. I did a AI search on the cost for a generator for my size house. It said between $10K-$15K. Later, my neighbor said his was $14K. Given the relative infrequency and short duration of blackouts in our area, I don’t think that’s worth it. We’ve lived in our town for 25 years and this 6 hour outage is the worst that we’ve had.
(I also could have run an extension cord out to the outlet in my Jeep Wrangler and idled the engine, too)
I was disappointed with my cell coverage when the wi-fi was off. We only have 1 bar in our area (T-Mobile). I could get texts and do voice calls, but couldn’t really use any webpages that had graphics. Still, I don’t think backing up our wi-fi and cell with StarLink is worth the money for us. Maybe it would make sense to replace Comcast, though. How much is StarLink?
We thought of just checking into a hotel or going to a friends house, but because my wife was sick we couldn’t really do that. I’m sure there would have been plenty of places to go to if we really needed to. A tornado is the biggest natural disaster risk that we have in our area and damage from those are typically very concentrated.
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My experience with power outages started around 3 years ago during Thanksgiving. Because of high winds, SCE shut our power down to avoid potential fires caused by their power lines touching trees and igniting fires. We only had high winds for one day, yet they kept our power turned off for three days. Trying to call the outsourced fools in their call center in India and telling them we no longer had high winds got as much done as pushing a rope.
I got to cook my first turkey on the grill that year. It turned out awesome. We stored food in a cooler. The power outages have become more frequent with this year being really bad.
I recommend paying attention to your utility company and whether they try to convert to green energy. My engineering background calls green energy “very expensive occasional energy”. Green energy requires double the infrastructure because it needs to be backed up with conventional electric generation to handle times when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining. Texas a couple years ago had a very cold winter. Their grid couldn’t keep up and many were without power for three days. Three days without power in the middle of a Minnesota winter would be tough.
We were not allowed to live in our house for the entire month of January due to the Palisades Fire. There was no internet for the entire month of February. No WIFI means no cellular or VOIP where I live. I picked up a Starlink station. The large cheapest one offers the best performance, unless you go with the super expensive high performance model. Starlink provided free service through February. I have now changed my account setting to Backup Mode. The cost is $5 per month and the performance is around .5 Mbit down and up. Good enough to get by. If we have another long term outage, I can bump the plan to a much faster one. Communications during disasters are important.
It looks like Starlink is $59 for Residential Lite and $80 per month for regular residential service. It would probably be slower than Comcast at higher cost. It is great for places like Door County that don’t have cable.
T-Mobile has started working with Starlink. Right now the partnership only supports text messages in areas with limited coverage. Voice over satellite is coming. These feature only work outside, by will provide coverage in all their dead zones. I expect T-Mobile will come up with some sort of base station that you install in your home to get around the being outside limitation.
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It sounds like StarLink is actually even cheaper than what we pay for Comcast. We have our home alarms also rolled into a Comcast bundle, but that might be with looking at. Putting them on a $5 month “back up” plan is really smart.
Yes, we also have a green energy push here. It has also resulted in “occasional expensive” energy. Not as bad as CA, but MN using the same playbook.
https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/
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I learned the hard way about the backup generator. Windstorms in Southern Ontario (Canada) left us without power 2 separate times for a week each time. We live in a 1 Million plus size city but a sparsely populated neighbourhood so we are always last whena big storm goes through.
We broke down and bought the expensive generator. Yes its more then whatever we lost but peace of mind as we get older is nice.
Finally launched my retirement blog (vaderonfire.com). After reading blogs like yours for years I thought it was time as its getting harder and harder to find old school blogs
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VaderOnFire … cool, I’ll check it out!
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Our utility in Southern California seems to go out of their way to really irritate customers by shutting off power at the worst time possible because the winds are high and they want to avoid starting wildfires. Three years ago, they shut our power off just when I put a turkey in the oven for Thanksgiving. We had a house full of guests.
This year they shut us down at Christmas for three days once again just as soon as I put a turkey in the oven. And of course we had a house full of guests again. I wonder if SCE has hacked into my security cameras or oven to better plan their outages to have the biggest impact possible.
We put an automatic backup generator in May and it has already had to back up our third world grid twice.
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I am surprised that Starlink is actually cheaper than Comcast. Their website lists getting the equipment for $89 and getting a free month trial. If you haven’t done so already, I suggest getting a battery backup system for your internet, because your security is tied into to. You will need to read the manuals to calculate the power draw. Then design around how many hours you want to backup and then get a unit with sufficient Watt – Hour capacity.
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I checked the electric rate website and The People’s Republic of California is more than twice the bordering states of Arizona, Nevada and Oregon. They are about the same as yours.
There needs to be more effective messaging about the expensive occasional nature of green energy. Many of my neighbors have no idea how The People’s Republic of California’s electric rates compare with other nearby states. They think putting solar on their roof will save them. I tell them they need to calculate the return on investment they will get from putting up solar versus alternate investments such as using the same money to buy dividend stocks.
Most of this comes from politicians who are mostly lawyers and lawyers are famously bad at math, sciences and finance. They lack the background to be making decisions about energy policy.
We will soon be seeing a great reckoning because of the increased need for cheap electricity required to run AI datacenters. Many in the tech industry are green posers. I define green posers as those who have solar cells on their rooftops, drive Tesla’s, but fly private jets. But, they need lots of electricity to power their AI data centers.
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