How to Thrive in the Suburbs, When the Grid Goes Down ... 'cause it will!

It snowed.

Big, fat, wet, HEAVY flakes that aren't the kind Julie Andrews wants sticking to her nose and eye lashes.  Rather it's the kind of snow that is back-breaking to shovel and often results in downed trees and damaged power lines, both of which tend to disrupt people's lives.  

In fact, a co-worker of Deus Ex Machina's had to find an alternate route to work this morning - as he said, "looking for a road without downed trees."

And, perhaps, worse, in town, less than two miles from where I live, many homes lost power this morning, which means that most of those people will be hunkering down and waiting until CMP can repair the line or fix whatever it is that's broken.  

Losing power means more than just no television or electric lights.  For many it means life comes to a complete standstill; they are paralyzed, unable to do much more than wait.  Without power, even the simplest, most quotidian tasks (like boiling water for a cup of tea) become impossibilities, because most of us depend on electricity for EVERYTHING.  

For me, that sort of dependence and lack of control is terrifying.  We lose power with enough regularity that it would be horribly disruptive, if we were wholly dependent on it, and for me, that's an uncomfortable feeling.  I do not want to be wrapped in six layers of clothes, huddling in a blanket in the dark, starving, dirty, and bored, because we don't have electricity.  Or worse, end up with a caffiene withdrawal headache, because I can't have my morning cuppa.

So, I did something about it.  I made my lifestyle about preparedness - or maybe better would be to say that I looked at those things I need to be comfortable, and I found a way to have them without electricity.

Don't get me wrong - there are things for which I depend on electricity to make my life a little easier (more convenient), like washing clothes.  I don't "love" my clothes washing machine, but having done clothes by hand, I am thankful for the ease and convenience of throwing a bunch of dirty clothes in the washer, hitting a button, and walking away.  

Refrigeration is essential.  To be completely honest, my freezer is the primary way we preserve our food, because a significant part of our diet is meat, and if the harvest season gets busy (like we're in the middle of renovating a bedroom, but the tomatoes are coming in at the same time), I can put the extra produce in the freezer until I have time to deal with it.  I also do a lot of baking when we have a glut of eggs, and I will freeze the extra baked goods to enjoy when eggs aren't so abundant.  We don't have a back-up system for the freezer, but we do keep it fully stocked, all of the time, so that we have a couple of days of buffer before stuff starts to thaw to unsafe levels.  

For me, a hot shower is one of life's greatest pleasures!  Which makes it both fortunate and unfortunate that we have an on-demand electric hot water heater.  We have unlimited hot water, if we have electricity, but when the power goes out, so does the hot water in the shower and at the kitchen sink.  

I suppose none of those things is essential to our survival, but they are nice things to have, and I didn't want the very fragile power grid to dictate, to me, how comfortable my life would be.  

So, I did some things to ensure that WHEN the power goes out, I'm not hamstrung until CMP gets around to fixing the issue on my low priority, side road.  Have I ever mentioned that one time that the only road in my part of town to lose power was mine, and it took two nights and three days to get it restored?

The most important piece of my off-grid infrastructure is my woodstove.  It provides heat and has a cooktop so that we can cook and heat up water.  Our woodstove is our primary heat source.  We don't just use the woodstove in inclement weather or *if* we lose power.  It is a part of our every day life.  

We use it for more than just heat, too.  We make our morning coffee using a French Press.  Add coffee grounds and hot water, et voila! in four minutes, we're ready to enjoy a steaming cup of heaven on earth! I always have a kettle on the woodstove, and so there is always hot water - no electricity needed!  

I also regularly use the woodstove for cooking.  Most of my daily cooking is still on the electric stove in the kitchen, because everything is in the kitchen and it's more convenient, step-wise, to just stay in there, but I do enjoy putting a roast or a whole chicken in my Dutch oven, and letting it slow cook all day on the back of the woodstove.  In a lot of ways, it's better than a crockpot.  It's certainly less expensive, and more sustainable.  In a pinch, I can use (and have used) the woodstove for all of my daily cooking.  I've even baked on the top of the woodstove using a Dutch oven or an inverted pot to capture the heat.  

In the immortal words of Ron Popiel, but wait, there's more!  I also use it for clothes drying.  I have a drying rack that I use in the winter, and it sits in front of the woodstove.  The clothes get dry, but the damp clothes also add moisture to the air.  It's a win-win.  

And it requires zero electricity ... and is sustainable.

A second very useful part of my off-grid infrastructure is lighting.  In emergency preparedness, it is recommended that one have flashlights and batteries, and candles.  I have both, probably, somewhere, but if we're being honest, those wouldn't be my go-to in a grid down scenario.  Instead, what I have are these bulbs* in several of my light fixtures, and, indeed, I purchased some inexpensive lamps from the Family Dollar, specifically, so that we could use the Boundery bulbs.  The bulb works exactly like any regular LED bulb, but as a bonus, these bulbs have a built-in battery.  They are actully charging when in regular use, so that when the power goes out, I will still have my lamp, exactly like I do on a regular day, when the electricity is up and functioning. I use those lamps every day, and the fancy bulb is just the bulb I use.  So, if the power goes out, and lamp stays on, and ... I don't have to think about it, and I don't have to search every hiding spot for that flashlight and batteries I know I put ... somewhere!

For fun, I have kerosene lamps and kerosene, and a bunch of candles, and a couple of different styles of solar camping lights and lanterns.  The ones I have also have a USB charge option, and so if I have to use the lamp, but I can't recharge it with the built-in solar panel (because it's cloudy or night time), I could plug them into one of my USB chargers.

A third part of my off-grid infrastructure is my connectivity.   My FB memory today reminded me that we haven't had a television since 2010.  It's been even longer since we had cable television.  For the record, we do use a streaming service.  We also have cellphones, but did away with our land line six years ago.

What's different about us and other folks is that we don't connect our phones to our wi-fi when we get home.  Our phones ARE our wi-fi.  Instead of a cellphone bill, a cable bill, an Internet bill, and a bill for our streaming service, it's all lumped together ... except cable, and ... well, we don't have a television, so we also don't need cable.  

The benefit is that, even if we lose power, nothing about the way we connect to the outside world has to change. We can still access our phones, still connect to the Internet, and still even stream movies or binge-watch Community.  We are only limited by our ability to keep our devices charged, and well, we have options for that, too.  I don't know how much the average user pays for cable, Internet, phone, and streaming services, because, for some reason, Internet service companies won't allow me to search their prices without giving them my address, which I'm not doing, because I don't want them to contact me, but the cost per month for our cellphone plan, which bundles all of it and includes a Netflix subscription with two screens, costs us $40 per line, and we can have up to four lines on our plan.  

There's another benefit to having our connectivity through our cellphone service rather than a grid-dependent ISP/cable company, and that is that, working from home and doing online classes are possible, even without electricity. I was chatting with a friend today who didn't have any electricity at her house, and she lamented that her family member had to "go to work" in the storm, because he couldn't work from home with no electricity.  

Fact is, for most of 2021, I worked from home over the Internet, and ... see above.  I don't have a "normal" Internet connection, but I had no problem doing the work that needed to be done, including connecting to my employer's virtual machines and/or downloading their files.  

In short, I can heat my house; boil hot water; cook dinner; dry my clothes; have "electric lights"; write my novel; do a blog post; scroll Facebook; and watch Netflix - even if we don't have any electricity.    

I guess the only everyday activity that I am not prepared to do if the power grid goes down is iron, and well, I'm thinking I need one of these. 

How much of your daily activities have to change when the power grid goes down?