Prepping – Turn off the Lights

This is the prime time to test your preparations. Christmas is over, but people are not settled. It’s not “usual” scheduling because kids are off school, and you may be off work. So… Go turn off your power at the main breaker.

Why? The answer is that preparation only works if you’re actually… prepared. You cannot KNOW that you’re prepared until you test your preparations. That’s where turning off the power comes in.

In my house, the first thing to happen if the power goes out is to locate light sources. Immediately, that might mean the flashlight on my phone, but only briefly. I want to keep the power up on the phone in case I need it as a phone. I find the flashlights, candles, oil lamps, and I get at least one lamp lit. This means I have fire, which means the world gets that much easier. With one tiny bit of fire on hand, I can start numerous others.

When the kids were little, the next item at hand would be child wrangling. If it was daytime, the kids would be sat down near the wood stove with books appropriate to their age, or a game to play that wasn’t electronic, and told to stay out of the way. If they got in the way, they got to do “fun things” like shovel and gather wood and other stuff they hated. When they were little (under 10), it was easier to keep them busy and out from underfoot.

As they got older, the kids were expected to do many of the “power outage” tasks on their own. It was their job to locate flashlights and solar lamps and make sure they worked. One was set to starting the fire, if it wasn’t already. The other went around and turned off all the light switches and other power hogs, so that we wouldn’t overload the circuit when power came back on. If the power was going to be out for more than 24 hours, items in the fridge were moved to our inside but unheated porch (it gets cold, but rarely below freezing) to keep them fresh. Frozen items went into the outdoor freezers, which would stay frozen for a very long time.

After a few practice runs, we had it down to an art form. Everyone did their jobs, and within a half hour, the entire house was ready for there to be no power for however long was necessary. We had blankets over windows to hold in heat, pulled out sleeping bags so that they were ready for night, if we wanted to sleep in our beds, had easy to prepare foods on hand in case we were tired from shoveling or whatever. Everything just worked.

The house went without power for anywhere from several hours to a few days on a number of occasions. We’ve always been fine. The wood stove sits over the water pipes in the basement, so the residual heat keeps them from freezing. We always have access to water, even if we have to go tromping to get it. We know how to make sure water is potable, too. By nightfall, we usually had everything in place, and we were all cuddled up by the wood stove, reading or talking or playing cards.

It’s not difficult, but it is complex. There are a lot of moving parts to get figured out, and until you put them all to the test, you don’t KNOW how it’s going to work. It’s much better to do some test runs long before you actually require all this stuff to be working. Make your family a well oiled machine before the emergency happens, and the emergency won’t be catastrophic.