Ask Lemmy

I don't remember when the last one happened. We have like 5 minutes of downtime per year in Germany on average

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.

Hilbernate. The other half uses the e-reader. Anything e-ink should have incredible battery life.

Contemplate how close to total collapse we are every day

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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)

Stare.

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.

I've experienced exactly one power outage in Germany in the last 50 years, so i haven't really developed a routine.

Mostly nothing special in preparation. I have a grill in the back, a propane and a sterno camping stove, so I can still cook food. I have a one-gallon water-filtering thing that I can use if we need to go to boil-water status (our water treatment plant is probably a bit lower than it should be), and I have a camping solar panel (and several power banks) that I can use to recharge the electronics. We also have lanterns, flashlights, headlamps and a lot of candles.

If it's going to be a major storm, I'll fill up the gas tank and stop by the ATM - get small bills where possible, sometimes people can't make change. Oh, and if you're running low on a prescription, see if they can refill it early. If it floods: a long time ago, in a 3am fit of doomscrolling, I figured out what the nearest highest point I can get to without crossing any streams or storm drains. And after Katrina, when all those people survived the flood but died when they got trapped in their attics - well, I had nightmares about that for a long time, and I eventually mounted a hatchet to the attic wall.

How do we pass the time? We'll talk with each other or our neighbors - gotta check in on everyone, make sure everyone's doing as okay as we can be. Maybe go for a walk to check out the neighborhood as well. We all have books and magazines and been meaning to catch up on, so it's a good time for that; family jigsaw puzzles in the early evening before the light gets too bad. It's also really nice to just sit and listen to the world without the constant background noise of civilization.

That’s actually something I think about quite often recently. People 150 years ago didn’t have electricity at all, what did they do?

First the things that would be really helpful if already built into your home: It helps if you have a gas or wooden stove to cook meals. Same with heating, a masonry stove for example could really make a difference.

Stuff that’s good to have is a small camping gas stove, some LED lanterns, tons of batteries and candles. Powerbanks to charge your mobile phones, maybe a few solar cells on the roof with some batteries connected to it. Maybe even a small emergency power generator. Don’t forget the fuel for it.

What you can do: Go for a hike. Read books, play boardgames and cards. Do puzzles. Write! Get a notebook and a pen ( I recommend actually fountain pens) and do some journaling. Write about your day, your dreams or your concerns. Make a list what parts of the world you want to visit before you die or anything else you can think about. Learn to draw or to paint. Maybe it’s time to put up the guitar that’s gathering dust in the corner.

Something like that. Thanks for coming to my ted talk.

Obsessively refresh the "There is a power outage in your area!" page.

Let it go unnoticed as battery and solar handled things.

Video games lol

I like reading. Make sure your Kindle is fully charged, some books downloaded and articles downloaded in Pocket.

Last time this happened to me we hastely turned our dinner in a romantic candle lighted dinner.

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.

Living off solar and batteries, I'd get to work fixing it.

Read a book

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.

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.

I think we just went to bed, because it was pretty late anyway. It was like 4-6 years ago. Outages are pretty rare here, where I live.

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.

Sleep and hope that I dream and that my dreams take me to the dream noosphere.

In order. Turn off the main breaker Turn off the breakers for HVAC and hot water heater Unplugged my car charger Wheel out the generator Power on the generator Plug the generator into my house Put my security camera that can see the street light on one of my screens so I can see when power comes back on. Resume activities

If I can get all that done in less than 10ish minutes my WiFi and computer don’t even power down.

To resume I just unplug the generator and then flip the breakers back to the on position.

Playing a game on my phone

Watch TV via the agm batteries and eBay inverter that I got a couple years ago.

I basically start collecting everything that has power and can provide power. Basically I just check on my laptops, power banks, phones, the bag of random batteries, estimate how long I can keep going, and try to reasonably save power regardless: Shutdown instead of sleep for laptops, mobile data off on phone if not needed, prefer dedicated flashlight over to phones, fetch other options like candles.

Kills enough time that the power gets restored during that time. Then I think of how unprepared I was, how I am going to improve it, and then never do it. There's a bag of old 18650s from power banks and laptop batteries under my bed for like 2 years. I don't know what state they are in now. I know I measured their capacities, disposed of dead ones, put good ones into the bag, planned to use it for a giant power bank, but did absolutely nothing with it in the end.
I should probably dispose of them at this point. They all had like 60% of capacity anyway and years of use.

And then I also think about the bag of batteries from dad's disposable vapes. They're rechargeable, but it's possible they were overdischarged and shouldn't be used anymore. On some the wires running along those batteries were partly melted too.
I should dispose of that too. So much damn waste.

In the end after each power outage I turn to the web, obsessively looking through power banks, get amazed by those with built-in mains inverter, but in the end don't get anything as it isn't necessary.