Friday, August 14 · 7 min read
August and September are the peak of the storm season, and an outage is the one household failure that takes everything down at once. Most of what goes wrong in the first day is decided before the lights go off.
Below: what fails and in what order, the twenty-minute prep pass, the garage door release nobody has tested, generator versus battery versus neither, and the coin trick that tells you whether the freezer held.
Reply and tell us how long your longest outage ran, we read every one.
What Actually Fails When the Power Goes Out
The lights are the least of it. What matters is the sequence, because different things have different clocks and only some of them can be reset.
Immediately. Anything with a motor or a screen. Your internet goes with the modem, so the outage map you want to check is on cell data or nothing. A cordless phone handset is dead the moment its base loses power, which is why a cheap corded phone still earns its drawer. The garage door opener stops, and if the car is inside and the garage door is the only way it gets out, that's a problem with a solution most people have never located.
Within the hour, if you're on a well. No power means no pump, which means no water at all. Not reduced pressure, none. You get whatever is in the pressure tank, which is roughly one toilet flush. Municipal supply usually holds pressure for a good while, though tall buildings and hilltop neighborhoods lose it sooner.
If it's storming, the sump pump. The outage and the water arrive together, which is the whole design flaw. A sump with no battery backup is a hole that fills.
Gas appliances, contrary to what people assume. Most modern gas furnaces and many water heaters need electricity for the ignition, the controls and the blower. Gas heat generally stops with everything else. An older standing-pilot water heater will keep making hot water, and a gas range can usually be lit with a match, though a stovetop with an electronic-only lockout won't.
Then the food clock starts. This is the one with real numbers behind it.
TLDR: A closed refrigerator holds food safely for about 4 hours. A full freezer holds about 48 hours, a half-full one about 24. Every time you open a door, that clock shortens.
The rule that follows from it is simple: keep the doors shut. USDA guidance is to discard perishable refrigerated food after 4 hours without power, and to refreeze thawed food only if it still has ice crystals or is at 40°F or below. Never taste something to decide.
A full freezer holds cold far better than an empty one, which is worth knowing now rather than during the outage. Water jugs fill the gap for free.
The last one is the dangerous one. Every year people run a generator in a garage or too close to a window and are poisoned by carbon monoxide they cannot smell. A generator runs outdoors, well away from the house, with the exhaust pointed away from every door, window and vent. There's a battery-based alternative further down that has none of this risk.
This Weekend: The Twenty Minutes That Save Your Freezer
Image: The Homewire
None of this is interesting and all of it only works if it's done in advance.
Fill the freezer gaps with water. Old milk jugs or zip bags, three-quarters full so they can expand. Free thermal mass, and drinking water later.
Put the modem and router on a small UPS. It's the cheapest useful thing on this list, and it keeps home internet alive through the short outages that make up most of them.
Find and test the garage door manual release, following the section below. Do it now, in daylight, not with a car trapped inside.
Locate the main water shutoff and the breaker panel, and make sure everyone in the house can find both in the dark.
Charge the power bank, and put one flashlight in every bedroom. Headlamps beat flashlights because they leave your hands free. Candles are how house fires start during outages.
Keep one corded phone if you still have a landline, and save your utility's outage number in your phone rather than assuming you'll find it.
Photograph the inside of the full freezer. If a claim ever follows a long outage, that photo is the evidence.
One habit worth adopting for storm season: when a serious forecast lands, turn the fridge and freezer to their coldest settings the day before. A colder starting point buys hours at the other end, and it costs almost nothing.
Use the Garage Door Manual Release Properly
That red cord hanging from the rail is the emergency release. It disconnects the door from the opener so you can lift it by hand, and almost nobody has pulled one.
There's an order to it, and getting it wrong is how people get hurt.
Close the door first. Pull the release with the door open and a door with weak or broken springs can come down hard and fast. Only ever release a door that's already down, unless you have no choice.
Cut the power to the opener at the wall outlet, so it can't try to run while you're working.
Pull the red handle down and back toward the door. You'll feel the trolley disconnect from the carriage.
Lift the door by the handle, evenly, with both hands. A properly balanced door is heavy but manageable. If it's very heavy or drops when you let go, the springs are the problem and that's a job for a professional, because garage springs hold enough energy to cause serious injury.
To reconnect, close the door, then pull the handle back toward the opener, or just run the opener once and it will re-latch as the trolley passes.
If your garage has no interior door to the house, look for an exterior emergency release, a small lock near the top of the door with a cable through it. Without one, a detached garage in an outage is a locked box.
Test yours once a year. It takes two minutes and it's the difference between an inconvenience and being stuck.
The Handbook: Generator, Battery, or Neither
Three real options, and the right one depends almost entirely on how often you lose power and for how long.
A generator makes the most power for the money and it's the only option that runs indefinitely, as long as you keep feeding it. The costs are real: it's loud, it needs fuel stored safely, it needs maintenance it will not get, and it carries a carbon monoxide risk that kills people every year. Anything hardwired also needs a transfer switch installed by an electrician, because back-feeding a panel through an outlet can electrocute a line worker. We’ve used Generac. They’re pricey but reliable and not too pricey to maintain. Not ideal for non home owners.
A battery power station is a large rechargeable battery with AC outlets. Silent, no fumes, safe to run in the kitchen, no maintenance between outages. It's limited by its capacity, and it costs more per usable watt-hour than a generator. Buy this when you don’t need it. They’re often on sale by a variety of brands.
Neither is a legitimate answer, and it's the right one more often than the internet suggests. If you lose power once every couple of years for three hours, a good cooler, a bag of ice and a couple of headlamps cover it completely.
If you're shopping, two numbers matter and they get confused constantly:
Watt-hours is the size of “the tank,” how much total energy it stores.
Watts is the size of the tap, how much it can deliver at once.
A unit can have plenty of watt-hours and still refuse to start a well pump, because the pump's startup surge exceeds its watts. Work out what you actually want to run, add up the running watts, then check the surge on anything with a motor.
Two more worth knowing. LiFePO4 cells last far longer than older lithium chemistries, generally several thousand cycles rather than several hundred, and they're the standard worth holding out for. And a UPS switchover time under about 20 milliseconds means the unit can sit permanently inline, so a fridge or a desktop never notices the outage at all.
The Pick: The Battery Worth $689
If you've decided a battery is the right shape for your household, the one we'd point you to is the EcoFlow DELTA 3 Plus at $689, down from $799.
The specs that matter here: 1,024Wh of capacity, 1,800W continuous output with a 3,600W surge, 13 ports including 6 AC outlets, a full recharge in 56 minutes, and LiFePO4 cells rated for 4,000 cycles to 80% capacity with a 5-year warranty. Switchover is under 10 milliseconds, so it works as an inline UPS. It weighs 27.6 lb. We haven't run this one through an outage ourselves, so those figures are EcoFlow's published spec.
The cycle rating is the number worth pausing on. At 4,000 cycles this outlives the useful life of most cheaper units several times over, which is what closes the price gap against a $400 alternative with a 500-cycle battery.
Do the arithmetic before you buy, though, because 1,024Wh is a real limit. Divide it by the running watts of whatever you want to keep alive and you have your hours. It will carry a fridge, phones, laptops, a router and lamps. It will not run central air conditioning, electric heat, or a well pump, and no battery near this price will.
If you lose power for a week at a time, you want a generator or a much larger system and this isn't your answer. If you lose it for four to twelve hours a few times a year, this is the sweet spot, and the fact that you can run it in the kitchen without killing anybody is the whole argument against the cheaper gas alternative.
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Steal This: The Coin on the Ice
Freeze a cup of water solid. Put a coin on top of the ice. Leave it in the freezer.
If you come home after an outage and the coin is still sitting on the surface, the freezer stayed frozen the whole time and your food is fine. If the coin is at the bottom of the cup, everything thawed and refroze while you were out, and you should treat the contents accordingly. A coin halfway down tells you it partly thawed.
This solves a problem nothing else does. A freezer that thawed for fifteen hours and refroze looks exactly like one that never lost power, and the food inside can be unsafe while appearing perfect. Without the coin you're guessing, and the standard advice is to throw everything out.
It costs nothing, it works while you're on vacation, and it's the single best reason to spend two minutes on this before you next leave the house for a week.
Keep the cup at the back where it won't get moved. And check it after any outage you know about, not just the ones you missed.
One quick tap
How many power cuts did you have last year?
That's what fails and when, the twenty minutes that buy you the freezer, the release cord to test in daylight, the generator-or-battery call, and the coin that answers the question you can't otherwise answer.
Reply and tell us how long your longest outage ran, or forward this to whoever in your family still lights candles during a storm. See you Monday.
The Home Wire
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