Power outages and financial drills
June 10, 2019
As much as losing our power irks me, I remind myself that test runs are a good thing. They help you expose the flaws in your otherwise theoretical emergency planning with minimal pain.
With storm season, the winds were glad to oblige us with a couple power outages to highlight our areas of weakness.
The first: a powerful storm blew out our power for almost 2 hours. Gas and water lines were fine but we had no heat because our furnace / thermostat runs on power and didn’t have a back-up battery. I did not know this before, good to know.
We had the basics: food, water, candles and tea lights, and a long-lasting Bic lighter. I make it a habit of using and recharging my power pack regularly so we had two full charges for our phones. JB had a tiny but incredibly bright little flashlight.
I had finished cooking dinner just a few minutes before the storm knocked us offline so we had a hot meal while we dried off after walking the dogs. Had that timing not been in our favor, I know we would have struggled along a bit to get ourselves in order on the food front. I still haven’t put together a safe non-flame heating option for our food but I’m strongly considering a set of flameless heaters. If I can find a really good set that’s not an arm and a leg, that is.
We still had gas so could have cooked in the dark if we had to, but not knowing how long power would be out made me hesitate to open the fridge any more than absolutely necessary.
We’d bought a secondhand generator from a friend but I really should have done more research into what we’d be able to use it for earlier – generator safety. We can’t use this one inside so it’s useless for keeping our inside fridge running but it can keep our second freezer going though. That’s not nothing since we buy food in bulk.
We need: good lanterns, long-lasting waterproof LED flashlights that are easy to hold and can be secured on a belt loop or wrist when we’re working on something solo, a sufficient and safe water supply, and a safe way to heat up our emergency food stores. (We do have the true emergency water packs but we wouldn’t break into those during a simple outage.)
The second: a transformer blew. Since it only affected a small part of the neighborhood, PG&E took their sweet time coming out to even identify the problem. This was during the day and oddly enough that was worse because we needed to be up and about, doing things, and it was cold. Our furnace requires power to operate the thermostat and sooooo we were shivering for three hours. If it’d been at night, I would have bundled everyone into blankets and tucked ourselves into one bed for warmth. But during the day time, with guests, well. We’re not that close!
We need a safe way to generate heat that doesn’t require electricity and bonus points if it doesn’t require an open flame in case we have both a broken gas line situation in addition to the downed power lines.
***
Likewise, though I’m not forgoing income to test this out, I took these Alyssa’s prompts related to income to heart as a way to mock up a test run for ourselves in case we lose our jobs anytime, whether it’s now or during the recession:
1. If I lost my job tomorrow, I would do _______ to make income while seeking new employment.
Answer. I have a couple of low price point freelance gigs I can start up and I could probably pitch some fledgling ideas to a few outlets that pay more. I wanted to cultivate these options now but I don’t have the time to do a good job for them. I’d rather not burn a bridge by sending subpar pitches. At the same time, it makes me nervous not to be cultivating more income streams.
2. Have I asked for a raise since starting this job or in the past 12 months?
Answer. Yes! Every chance I got.
3. I will write a list of all my hobbies and star any that could earn me a side income.
Answer. Writing, dogwalking or dogcare (maybe). Resume and cover letter review, I generally only do these as favors to friends because I hate it even if I’m good at it. There has to be SOME benefit to being my friend.
4. How much more income will make me happy?
Answer. Honestly, though I am happy with and appreciate what we have, I know I want a LOT more. I want to double my income one more time so we can save against my disability, to give back to causes we care about, to support creators, and lend a helping hand to friends from time to time.
5. Do I need more income out of necessity or out of desire?
Answer. Both. There’s a lot more I want to do without living in the fear of being destitute should any of us suffer further health issues. I’ve learned over the past two decades that I want more money both to feel secure and so we can freely help those who need it.
If our power went out for a prolonged period in the winter, we’d probably manually light our gas stove and open up the kitchen to the rest of the house for heat (really the most important thing is that our pipes don’t freeze). Overheating during a power outage is less of an issue where we live. Having a downed gas line and electricity would be a frightful combination for us, but we are also not in earthquake country so that’s unlikely for us. Realistically, if it we’re a prolonged issue, we could just get outta Dodge (lots of friends and family in the immediate urban and surrounding suburban areas) until fix-up time. I have wanted to get a solar battery for us, but the ROI just isn’t there.
I’ve been thinking about the “what if I lose my job” thing for a while now and realized that we’re actually in an okay place. If I can’t find jobs for a long time I could get freelance dev work through my friend or start consulting in my old area of expertise when my non-compete runs out in a year. We would survive. Perhaps with less money coming in, but there’s enough buffer to be okay.
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I never thought about a solar battery, now I’m curious!
Oh, most of my answers to your questions are negatives.
Our emergency kit is nonexistent, a fact underscored to me when a kid on a nearby playground fell and hit his head on a rock recently. Two other moms converged on the kid and his mom with emergency kits to get his head bandaged prior to a hospital trip. I had nothing to be helpful with, and I wished that I did.
Power outages, we’ve mainly ignored at this house. It’s gone out a couple of times in the last year, but generally come back on within an hour. We had a gas outage at our old house that lasted nearly 48 hours, though, and things got very very cold. There was a lot of bundling up and the only cooking was in the microwave. My long-term thinking for where we are now is that we need to go solar, and not just because of electricity–we’re on well water and no power = no water pump. An outage of a few hours is no big deal but if something really went wrong, we’d be toast.
Professional/financial… if the bottom fell out of my niche field tomorrow, I’d probably look for a regular job in a related category. Or, barring that, maybe look into teaching credentials and a teaching job. I enjoyed teaching in grad school, so it’s not an impossible direction.
I don’t carry an emergency kit with me to playdates but now this makes me think I should! I carry bandaids, that’s it.
Are you very relaxed about your current state of preparation?
If the power goes off, I’m in deep trouble here in Phoenix. The house holds cool okay, but it’ll still creep up to 87 or so without A/C — and that was before the temps were breaking 100. It’s supposed to be 107 today, and lately the weather-guessers have been wrong about the highs. So I’m expecting 109 or so. So I’d be a sweaty mess, I suppose, if the power goes out. Especially without a ceiling fan to keep the currently 82-degree house bearable. (That’s what I decided to keep the temp at since it’s bearable with a ceiling fan.)
I do have a flashlight, candle and some lighters so I’m okay in terms of a blackout, though I’d be bored as hell. I guess I’d grab a book from the shelf and settle in to reread it by flashlight? I should really keep an unread book or two around, I suppose.
You’d have to get the heck out if you lost A/C and power, wouldn’t you??
I’m north of you, also in earthquake country, and I’ve gone through our version of the federal emergency team training program. I have enough water to last a month (more in my hot water tank) and enough food to last at least 60 (increasingly random and not appetizing) meals, so probably about 20-30 days. My water is stored in stackable 5-gallon cubes which I can just barely move on my own; I’m supposed to change the water every 6 months/one year and haven’t been very diligent. I figure yucky water is better than none at all!
I always wish that cities would emphasize that we should have emergency supplies whenever we have events like power outages, water contamination, etc. but so far I haven’t seen that.
If systems went down in the summer I’d be mainly okay as it doesn’t usually get TOO hot; winter would be uncomfortable. I have a warm sleeping bag and blankets, but as you point out, that’s not an option 24 hour per day!
I have a friend who is doing #vanlife and he provided me with links to safe indoor heaters when my furnace went out this winter. I seem to have lost those but asked him to send them again, and will come back here to share when I get the info!
Oh, meant to recommend you look for flashlights in headlamp format. I made SUCH fun of the first friend I saw using one on a camping trip but wow, that format is so handy.
Oh gosh, I have not stored up larger volumes of water because of space and “how will I LIFT this” concerns! Maybe we can do 2 gallon cubes?
Thanks for the recommendation for the headlamps, I hadn’t thought about it but that’s genius. Please do come back with the safe indoor heater suggestions when you find them again!
After the last presidential election, we bulked up our emergency stores pretty impressively. (The thought being that we couldn’t necessarily trust government emergency rescue efforts to be timely. We’re mostly set up for lasting at home for a couple of weeks after a natural disaster.)
We do not have a generator. We rented one once, the kind you keep outside: https://nicoleandmaggie.wordpress.com/2016/08/10/why-dh-is-awesome-even-when-he-screws-up/ We discussed buying one, but decided that in the event we needed to use one and couldn’t just go to Home Depot to get one, then the limiting factor would be gasoline and we didn’t want to store gasoline in or near the house. So that’s a gap. We’re hoping that by the time our roof needs to be replaced that solar will be more efficient and less expensive.
In terms of a financial emergency, we can live on one income. We can go for a while on no incomes too so long as the ACA still exists.
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Yes, we have a very small amount of gasoline in the generator and we should have some backup gas but I don’t think we have a good safe place to store it.
After a localized *ahem* power outage (aka someone flipped a breaker without realizing what was on it) a few years ago, we bought two “UPS Battery Backup & Surge Protector”. They are basically generators just for each of our desktop computers and they have saved us so many times when the power would go out for like 5-30 seconds and then our computers would lose power entirely. Really useful! Being in an apartment, that feels like all the generator power we really need / can have in our space.
Whoops! That’s really neat, I hadn’t heard of those before.