Emergency Preparation - The Prepper Corner

2.4.5 - Prepper - Power

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Download: 2.4.5 - Prepper - Power

On the Main Prepper page, we talked about the rule of threes

three minutes to get to a safe place (or to get oxygen)
three hours to get warm - three days to get water, and
three weeks to get food

A source of electricity could be a valuable and life-saving asset for a variety of reasons:

Many people have medical equipment(such as CPAP units) that require power - Many medications must be kept cold
And a phone can keep you in contact with family and help you get reunited.
Those working Emergency Response and needing their laptops and/or Ham radios will need power to keep batteries charged and to keep functioning.

Solar
A good option, but to be effective you will need to have a battery system for storage, and you are at the whim of the cloud cover. Efficiency can drop by 10-25% on a cloudy day.

Whole-house Generators
If you can keep your whole house running, that’s great, but likely it will take quite a bit of fuel and may only be for a few days. Some generators only power a few functions in the house. Many whole-house generators run all or nothing – an 11.6Kw Generac can blow through about 100 gallons of propane in three days, run continuously. To get more out of it you might have to keep turning it on and off. And that’s not necessarily convenient nor good for the generator.

Inverter Generators – here are some good, small units
Inverter generators can run on a variety of fuels, such as gasoline and propane(some even run on multiple fuels) that are easy to obtain and use. But the main advantage of an inverter generator is that it runs to meet load – this avoids the fuel waste of some of the whole-house generators.