Prepping for Powering Down

I'm going to call our weekend without water, gas, or electric power a Power Down rather than continuing to struggle with awkward terms such as no-amenity staycation. Our plan is to shut everything off tomorrow morning upon arising. That means no last-minute logging onto the computer at 5:30 am. (Can I get away with a quick check at 3:30 am if the dogs want to go out?)

We've been talking a lot about how we wanted to do this and what we hope to accomplish. It dawned on me today that what we are really doing this time is a trial run of a trial run without power. The reason I say this is that we've spent a fair amount of time preparing for this experiment. In a true emergency, everything would just be shut off. No warning. No time to prepare. We'd just flip a switch or turn on a faucet and get ... nothing. We may set up something with less prep, other than our regular emergency preparedness, in the future.

We have never had to deal with a total loss of all utilities here. We've rarely dealt with the loss of even one. During the summer thunderstorms, it's not uncommon to lose electricity for a couple of hours. When water lines break, and they seem to be doing so with increasing frequency around Tucson, water may be shut off for a while during repairs. And a few years ago, a gas leak and fire nearby left us without gas for several hours until the situation was under control. Other than camping trips, we've never really been without amenities before.

What we hope to gain this time is an idea what it is like to have to do without the traditional utilities. How does one deal with staying warm in the winter or cooking food? Is there a way to have light in the evening or is it bedtime as soon as the sun sets? What about washing dishes without hot water from the tap? Taking a shower? We think we are prepared to deal with these issues and others, but we've never done a trial run to find out.

Why, you may be wondering, do we think this is even worth worrying about? The short-term answer is emergency preparedness. I've written about this before so I won't repeat myself or provide the links again here. Just keep in mind that emergencies generally do not announce themselves so it is better to be prepared ahead of time. Just like learning First Aid; the time to do it is not when you need it. The time to learn is before you need it.

The long-term reason for this little exercise is a bit different. Whether people are willing to acknowledge it or not, things are changing and not for the better. City and state budgets are under tremendous strain, and staff and services are being slashed across the board. Less money is available to maintain and repair infrastructure. Plus, there are warning signs about the increasing unreliability of the electric grid. As the economy continues to struggle, more small businesses fail and more people lose their homes. This, in turn, leads to lower tax revenues for the cities and states resulting in the need to cut yet more staff and services. Being prepared for the possibility of occasional outages of power or water is like buying insurance for your car. You hope you'll never need it but you'll be really glad you have it if you do.

Back to our preparations...

Electricity

We won't be unplugging the fridge so that we don't lose any food this time. We agreed, however, that while we can use food from the refrigerator and freezer, we can not put anything new into it to chill. Therefore, we'll have to go buy a bag of ice to go in the ice chest or use the frozen water bottles from the freezer for chilling food. Leaving the ice chest outside overnight will keep it plenty cold, too. I did not have to freeze new bottles for ice since I use them already to keep the freezer full for more efficient operation.

Because we will be the only ones powering down in the neighborhood, we are also not comfortable with giving up our motion-detector security light. Rather than shut off electricity at the breaker box, I'll be unplugging everything (except the fridge) tonight before bed and taping light switches in the 'off' position.

This won't simulate a true lack of power but it will still give us a good trial run.

For lighting, we pulled the hand-crank flashlights out of our emergency packs. We are cheating, in a way, since we plugged them in earlier to fully charge. However, it's not entirely cheating because we do this once a month already. We've got flashlights handy for middle of the night trips to the bathroom. The oil lamps are filled and the candles are ready to go. We could not find a hand-crank lantern locally so we probably won't be able to read in the evening unfortunately.

I suspect lighting will be a big challenge for me. I really like bright lighting and am guilty of turning on lots of lights when I am in a room. Knowing this won't be a possibility for a few days, I've been intentionally keeping rooms darker for the past week, using natural lighting where possible. It's unfortunate that all of the rooms in this house are painted with flat paint. I will definitely use semi-gloss in my own home just for the additional light it reflects in a room.

To keep notes while the computer is off, I've got the backs of used paper on a clipboard with a pen. Low-tech but it works.

Gas

When the gas goes off, we are going to get cold. I dug out our thermal underwear and down comforter for the bed. We'll wear more layers in the house and hope we can get it to warm up a little bit during the day. If Polie looks too cold, we'll throw a blanket on the floor for him to curl up on. Angel sleeps on a chair already, so she'll be fine.

We're lucky; the weather forecast is for mostly clear skies and highs up to 70 degrees. This means solar cooking will be an option during the middle of the day. Lots of options there, including heating water for washing up. No preparation is necessary since cooking with the sun is as simple as placing the solar oven out when the sun is shining.

We also have a small rocket stove, but a lack of appropriate dried sticks and branches. We picked up a wood pallet a couple of days ago. My sweetie cut it up today into pieces to burn in it. I fished some corrugated cardboard and packing paper out of the recycling bin to help get the wood burning.

We've got an old propane camp stove and fuel leftover from our last cross-country camping trip years ago. We cleared off the (metal) potting bench outside to use for cooking.

For hot water, we'll use the cooking stove options or solar oven. Tomorrow morning is going to be pretty brutal without the ability to quickly and easily make hot drinks. I may 'cheat' by heating water tonight and keeping it warm overnight in a thermos. In fact, the thermos would be very handy for keeping water warm for other needs over the next few days. While the solar oven can heat water to boiling, we only have good sun from 10 am to 2 pm this time of year, but the thermos could keep some water hot long enough to wash up the dinner dishes. I'll bet I could also keep a big pot of water hot in the retained heat cooking basket.

Water

Stored water will have to meet all of our liquid needs. The plan is to get as much use out of the water as possible, saving it for flushing toilets in the end. I picked up a cheap plastic colander at the thrift store this week and lined it with cheesecloth. After rinsing dishes in the bowl always kept in the kitchen sink, I'll pour the fairly clean water through the colander so no vegetable parts end up clogging the toilet float mechanism. Bowls in the sinks will catch water from hand-washing as well.

To supply water for hand-washing, I filled several 2 liter plastic bottles. It will be a bit awkward to use but better than no water at all. As these pre-prepared containers empty out, we'll siphon water from our recycled soda syrup drum full of stored water. I washed out several buckets today to haul this water wherever we need it in the house.


That covers most of our preparations and plans. All that's left to do in the morning is power down. See you in a few days. Happy New Year!