Remove enterprise UPS battery backup system from home lab and use it to charge my hand held gaming consoles and phones. This was in Texas when ice storm knocked our power out for over a week
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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I have a pair of lanterns which work great to light up a room.
With those on or if it's daytime, I like to either read or play cards or a board game.
Go to bed early because it's dark.
Worry about all the food in the refrigerator.
Be hot (or I guess in your case, cold.)
Read books in the daytime, go for walks.
Cook stuff using the grill, drink cold brew.
Take dreadful cold showers.
Count how many socks and underwear are left, do I need to resort to hand washing some?
The best light is the cheap usba plastic bulb ones that plug into any power bank. They last forever on battery power and provide decent enough light.
I like taking a walk / being outside, because all of the power tools/ leaf blowers/ ac units are shut off and the world is finally quiet
Alas, generators.
The cars sadly still exist.
It's true. When the power is out because of snow is the best because the cars drive less
Hahaha you should see the outage map of Washington State.
What do I like to do? Nothing, I hate power outages.
What I typically do is I have a large stockpile of candles from an old MLM scheme. I light those and play on my phone if there's Internet. We have multiple battery banks for these occasions.
If there's no Internet I will read. Both ebooks and regular books because my attention will shift.
I also try to do something productive like study for something.
Most of all I pile like eleventy billion blankets on the bed because I'm so cold. The furry ones are poor space heaters.
When I was a kid we always played games. Like charades or something. My dad would light the camp stove and we'd entertain ourselves for the evening as a family. They were nice.
I think my last power outage was 30 years ago and i loved it. Lighting candles and playing boardgames. I never even considered that that's a thing that still happens.
I live rurally and have spent the night without power 3 times in the last 2 months.
It gets old.
I don't remember when the last one happened. We have like 5 minutes of downtime per year in Germany on average
The area out here on Canada's west coast is tricky to power, and expensive; and we're as far from our nation's capitol as Tehran is from Berlin, with I imagine similar feelings of disconnect. It's a lot of overhead power-lines, nestled in among beautiful, thick, tall trees that really catch the wind during winter storms like the one now (go see on windy.com!). Those wires come down, maybe start a fire in the forest for the lulz, and teams of people in their trucks and cranes repair the breakage. It's planned and operated as well as our flatlander conservative opposition will permit (the cruelty to plebes is the point).
It should be noted that one of the biggest projects for power in this metro is the remediation of overhead power lines to underground cabling running alongside water and sewer service, much as Germany has done. It's trickier to fix, and thieves keep stealing it for the copper, but every time the ground was opened for any significant pipe work, our hydro-electricity supplier was there to use its access and string new cabling alongside whatever else was going in. Wiring that last-hectometer has been a challenge with the WWI-era homes, but even trenching up to a bungalow and running the cable up the side - so ghetto - gives us something unlikely to put people like Otter in the dark for so long.
But long-range power connection is still via strings of thick cabling up on the steel - or often wooden - poles, for long trunk-lines into the wilderness (so pretty!, and see how long that line runs), same as Germany will do. Then it's just the cost of accessing the transmission line to safely get there and fix it. With the vast distances they're traversing, breakage is both more likely and also more expensive to fix.
I'm in a new section of the metro, and the power infrastructure is solid aside from the blip and blinks caused by construction - for new buildings and for upgrades - in the area. It's been solid, so far, and 30 min drive probably from Otter's house could get her to mine. So the upgrades are happening, but it's slow, costly, and stymied at every stage.
Also German here, that seems a high estimate. The only downtime I had this year was when the workers building our sidewalk grazed a cable bug I can't remember any over the last few years...
In the northern US we probably have about a week or so a year without power. From lightning or random wind knocking down lines. No hurricanes or tornadoes.
We only have the big transmission lines above ground, so our grid is not that weather sensitive. A week would be insane here
I assume even stuff like ahrtaal is calculated in. So for the average person it's a lot lower.
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Trying to think of the last time I had a long outage here, it might have been 5-10 years ago.
Apparently a bunch of trees fell over power lines / infrastructure last night, and so there were outages all over the place
I remember we used to get power outages all the time in my countries. But that was the 1970s, modern infrastructure has moved on
Well, everywhere except AHEM 🤔
I live(d) in Asheville, NC for a decade. I've had the power go out pretty often, most recently for Hurricane Helene (4 days for us, and we were on the low end!). Seeing a 24-48 outage is frequent here.
We have our house wired for a generator, so it's mostly about a cycle of rationing fuel to keep the fridge cold, charge things while it's on, use water and fill things while it's on (we are on a well not city water).
Beyond that, reading books, playing handheld games like the Steam Deck, lots of talking. Losing power is not the worst thing most of the time to me.
Playing a game on my phone
Read books. Go to bed early as soon as it's dark. Empty the fridge if it's going to be a while longer.
The longest I was without power was as a kid. A winter storm knocked out power lines all over. It was a week before we got power back on, the longest it took for some was 12 days. We had a wood burning fireplace so my parents invited all the elderly neighbors to stay with us. I wasn't happy about sleeping on the floor while some weird-smelling old person slept in my bed, but looking back now I'm glad my parents modeled civic-minded behavior.
Us kids played a lot of cards and picked fights with each other. Dad had us scooping driveways in the neighborhood and eventually the streets by hand just to keep us active and out of the house. It was not a fun week.
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Contemplate how close to total collapse we are every day
Hilbernate. The other half uses the e-reader. Anything e-ink should have incredible battery life.
Can confirm. I generally prefer the comfort of holding a real book but e-readers are a godsend for blackouts and vacations.
Wait for the power to come back on.
Think about opening the fridge and pointlessly looking to boredom eat, then remember I shouldn’t open the fridge and let the cold escape because the power is off. Repeat.
Think about how much of our lives revolve around and are entirely dependent on electricity, and how bad loss of power would be even for just a couple days, and disastrous it would be for a week or more.
Wish I’d remembered to recharge my phone power banks.
Where are all the books? I used to have books to read. They’re all on my phone now. Shit. Need to save battery.
Guess I’ll see if I can find some candles. Maybe the fam will want to play a board game.
Think about opening the fridge and pointlessly looking to boredom eat, then remember I shouldn’t open the fridge and let the cold escape because the power is off. Repeat.
ADHD, power outages, and a fridge. That's how that goes.
Read, sleep, and I usually have a hand held charged if I'm super desperate.
It usually happens in the summer in my area, when everyone had the air on full blast.
If during the day, I'll call someone on my mobile, do work out in the garden/yard, or read. If during the night, I'll browse the internet on my phone, play on my Nintendo Switch, or go to sleep if it's already late. I have many sources of backup lighting in the house including a couple dynamo powered torches that you wind up.
Playing the piano to pass the time. There’s a certain eeriness that I find quite enjoyable of having the music flow while in nearly total darkness.
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Make a blanket fort and read
I've experienced exactly one power outage in Germany in the last 50 years, so i haven't really developed a routine.
I was trying to remember the last time there was a power outage... I think workers had to cut the main power to our home for a few minutes a few years ago. It wasn't really a big event.
Living off solar and batteries, I'd get to work fixing it.
Stare.
The same things I do when there is power:
chat with my spouse, read, write, sketch, paint, play chess. I will also try to do some chores I have been avoiding for awhile ;)
Edit: we have a few portable reading lamps that will hold for many hours between charges, so we can read during the evening too. We also have flashlights and... candles, just in case we need them (so far, we never were cut off power long enough)
Several years ago we lost power for 4 days after an especially bad storm. We don’t have good enough cell service at our house to usually use data or run a hotspot. Mostly it’s like camping except we get to sleep in our beds.
Prepare: We keep filled water jugs for both drinking and flushing the toilets.
We have a small generator to run our fridge, so once a month we run it for about 10 minutes. We keep gas and spark plugs for it handy.
We have a weather radio that’s solar powered with battery back-up.
We have a solar-charging battery bank (to charge our phones) as well as lanterns and flashlights that use AA batteries and a stash of extra AA batteries. Winter here can be quite cloudy, making solar lights harder to use sometimes.
We have a camping stove and extra fuel, as well as some easy to prepare foods. We use the food when we go camping and get new ones to store for emergencies, making sure the food doesn’t expire. We cooked outside (it was summer but even in winter I would do the cooking outside).
For winter we have a kerosene heater and extra fuel and wicks.
Entertainment: I would guess you’re especially asking about evenings, as during the day when our power was out we’d go outside if the weather was nice. In the evenings we played board games and card games, did puzzles and crosswords, did art (drawing, coloring, and painting), did crafts, and read.
If we know ahead of time bad weather’s coming, I’ll download some shows and movies to my tablet. We also have a DVD player to connect to my laptop while the battery lasts.
Let it go unnoticed as battery and solar handled things.
Last outage we had, one of the first things I did was take a hot shower. Our water heater is electric and if it became extended I might not get another chance.
We lost power for 3 days back in 2006. The water heater still had hot water in it when power was restored. It wasn't piping hot that last day, but was still good enough for a shower. I was quite impressed.
Out by RCH here. Nary a blip. You good?
We're good! It came back on for us earlier. The crews are working hard out there
Beauty news -- they do prioritize well, at least. My work group (remote) still has a peer out in Sooke with issues, but that's a lot of greenspace and loooong cables. CobbleHill just came up as well. Islander communities will be out the longest, but the BCHydro map will get rid of most of those measles by day's end I think. I think they're doing well in a bad situation, but I have the luxury of saying so in comfort, so Grain of Salt and all.
Agreed, the map made it seem like a lot of separate incidents were all happening at the same time. I'm impressed with how efficiently they're working through it all
Light a candle and cuddle.
Sleep.
I like reading. Make sure your Kindle is fully charged, some books downloaded and articles downloaded in Pocket.
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