Ask Lemmy

Hahaha you should see the outage map of Washington State.

What do I like to do? Nothing, I hate power outages.

What I typically do is I have a large stockpile of candles from an old MLM scheme. I light those and play on my phone if there's Internet. We have multiple battery banks for these occasions.

If there's no Internet I will read. Both ebooks and regular books because my attention will shift.

I also try to do something productive like study for something.

Most of all I pile like eleventy billion blankets on the bed because I'm so cold. The furry ones are poor space heaters.

When I was a kid we always played games. Like charades or something. My dad would light the camp stove and we'd entertain ourselves for the evening as a family. They were nice.

Out by RCH here. Nary a blip. You good?

Read a book

Make a blanket fort and read

I like taking a walk / being outside, because all of the power tools/ leaf blowers/ ac units are shut off and the world is finally quiet

Sleep.

If during the day, I'll call someone on my mobile, do work out in the garden/yard, or read. If during the night, I'll browse the internet on my phone, play on my Nintendo Switch, or go to sleep if it's already late. I have many sources of backup lighting in the house including a couple dynamo powered torches that you wind up.

I live(d) in Asheville, NC for a decade. I've had the power go out pretty often, most recently for Hurricane Helene (4 days for us, and we were on the low end!). Seeing a 24-48 outage is frequent here.

We have our house wired for a generator, so it's mostly about a cycle of rationing fuel to keep the fridge cold, charge things while it's on, use water and fill things while it's on (we are on a well not city water).

Beyond that, reading books, playing handheld games like the Steam Deck, lots of talking. Losing power is not the worst thing most of the time to me.

Wait for the power to come back on.

Think about opening the fridge and pointlessly looking to boredom eat, then remember I shouldn’t open the fridge and let the cold escape because the power is off. Repeat.

Think about how much of our lives revolve around and are entirely dependent on electricity, and how bad loss of power would be even for just a couple days, and disastrous it would be for a week or more.

Wish I’d remembered to recharge my phone power banks.

Where are all the books? I used to have books to read. They’re all on my phone now. Shit. Need to save battery.

Guess I’ll see if I can find some candles. Maybe the fam will want to play a board game.

Haven't delt with that in a long time. Closest I had was maybe an hour or less because I live close to an elderly home and they usually get power restored real quick. I just stayed on my phone, which thankfully was charged, as I went with my parents to get candles. Never got candles since power came back so quick.

Longest I was without it because of an outage was around 2014 maybe, in winter. Cold days/nights spent in the living room, probably using the fireplace for the first time ever since I lived there. Used my phone and probably had other means of keeping myself entertained. Don't recall much about it because it was a decade ago. Neighbor across the street was an amazing person because she let us take an extension cable cord thing from her house to ours when they got power back. I do remember watching a video when all of the sudden the power came back, though.

As for what I'd do now, probably cry and hope my Steam Deck/laptop/phone are charged. Also probably get batteries for a radio CD cassette mini boom box thing I got from a thrift store recently and play music, plugging in my headphones. I've got enough CDs to last a short while.

Living off solar and batteries, I'd get to work fixing it.

Several years ago we lost power for 4 days after an especially bad storm. We don’t have good enough cell service at our house to usually use data or run a hotspot. Mostly it’s like camping except we get to sleep in our beds.

Prepare: We keep filled water jugs for both drinking and flushing the toilets.

We have a small generator to run our fridge, so once a month we run it for about 10 minutes. We keep gas and spark plugs for it handy.

We have a weather radio that’s solar powered with battery back-up.

We have a solar-charging battery bank (to charge our phones) as well as lanterns and flashlights that use AA batteries and a stash of extra AA batteries. Winter here can be quite cloudy, making solar lights harder to use sometimes.

We have a camping stove and extra fuel, as well as some easy to prepare foods. We use the food when we go camping and get new ones to store for emergencies, making sure the food doesn’t expire. We cooked outside (it was summer but even in winter I would do the cooking outside).

For winter we have a kerosene heater and extra fuel and wicks.

Entertainment: I would guess you’re especially asking about evenings, as during the day when our power was out we’d go outside if the weather was nice. In the evenings we played board games and card games, did puzzles and crosswords, did art (drawing, coloring, and painting), did crafts, and read.

If we know ahead of time bad weather’s coming, I’ll download some shows and movies to my tablet. We also have a DVD player to connect to my laptop while the battery lasts.

First, I check the lower power company's website for an estimate of when the power will come back on. If no one reported the outage, I'll take a few minutes to do so. We usually have the battery powered lights out during a storm, if it's a surpise outage, I go fetch the lights.

If the outage is going to be longer than 6 hours, I go buy some gas for the generator. I pour what isn't used during the outage into the car's fuel tank.

I use an rss reader on my phone with a lot of saved articles. I try to get through some of those.

When it to stops raining or snowing I pull the genny out of the shed, fuel it, get it running. Next, I run a few extension cords for the fridge and freezer.

Use the batteries.

Sit in the dark and enjoy solitude for once.

I've experienced exactly one power outage in Germany in the last 50 years, so i haven't really developed a routine.

Light a candle and cuddle.

Let it go unnoticed as battery and solar handled things.

I really really enjoy complete and utter silence and lack of any electronics outside, depending on how wide spread it is and the weather. Sometimes I just get a chair outside and enjoy the silence of all the electronics that are everywhere. Especially at night it's even better without lights ok everywhere

Read books. Go to bed early as soon as it's dark. Empty the fridge if it's going to be a while longer.

The longest I was without power was as a kid. A winter storm knocked out power lines all over. It was a week before we got power back on, the longest it took for some was 12 days. We had a wood burning fireplace so my parents invited all the elderly neighbors to stay with us. I wasn't happy about sleeping on the floor while some weird-smelling old person slept in my bed, but looking back now I'm glad my parents modeled civic-minded behavior.

Us kids played a lot of cards and picked fights with each other. Dad had us scooping driveways in the neighborhood and eventually the streets by hand just to keep us active and out of the house. It was not a fun week.

I don't remember when the last one happened. We have like 5 minutes of downtime per year in Germany on average

I like reading. Make sure your Kindle is fully charged, some books downloaded and articles downloaded in Pocket.

That’s actually something I think about quite often recently. People 150 years ago didn’t have electricity at all, what did they do?

First the things that would be really helpful if already built into your home: It helps if you have a gas or wooden stove to cook meals. Same with heating, a masonry stove for example could really make a difference.

Stuff that’s good to have is a small camping gas stove, some LED lanterns, tons of batteries and candles. Powerbanks to charge your mobile phones, maybe a few solar cells on the roof with some batteries connected to it. Maybe even a small emergency power generator. Don’t forget the fuel for it.

What you can do: Go for a hike. Read books, play boardgames and cards. Do puzzles. Write! Get a notebook and a pen ( I recommend actually fountain pens) and do some journaling. Write about your day, your dreams or your concerns. Make a list what parts of the world you want to visit before you die or anything else you can think about. Learn to draw or to paint. Maybe it’s time to put up the guitar that’s gathering dust in the corner.

Something like that. Thanks for coming to my ted talk.

Stare.

The same things I do when there is power:

chat with my spouse, read, write, sketch, paint, play chess. I will also try to do some chores I have been avoiding for awhile ;)

Edit: we have a few portable reading lamps that will hold for many hours between charges, so we can read during the evening too. We also have flashlights and... candles, just in case we need them (so far, we never were cut off power long enough)

Hilbernate. The other half uses the e-reader. Anything e-ink should have incredible battery life.

Sleep and hope that I dream and that my dreams take me to the dream noosphere.

Playing the piano to pass the time. There’s a certain eeriness that I find quite enjoyable of having the music flow while in nearly total darkness.

Last outage we had, one of the first things I did was take a hot shower. Our water heater is electric and if it became extended I might not get another chance.

Obsessively refresh the "There is a power outage in your area!" page.

Last time this happened to me we hastely turned our dinner in a romantic candle lighted dinner.

Mostly nothing special in preparation. I have a grill in the back, a propane and a sterno camping stove, so I can still cook food. I have a one-gallon water-filtering thing that I can use if we need to go to boil-water status (our water treatment plant is probably a bit lower than it should be), and I have a camping solar panel (and several power banks) that I can use to recharge the electronics. We also have lanterns, flashlights, headlamps and a lot of candles.

If it's going to be a major storm, I'll fill up the gas tank and stop by the ATM - get small bills where possible, sometimes people can't make change. Oh, and if you're running low on a prescription, see if they can refill it early. If it floods: a long time ago, in a 3am fit of doomscrolling, I figured out what the nearest highest point I can get to without crossing any streams or storm drains. And after Katrina, when all those people survived the flood but died when they got trapped in their attics - well, I had nightmares about that for a long time, and I eventually mounted a hatchet to the attic wall.

How do we pass the time? We'll talk with each other or our neighbors - gotta check in on everyone, make sure everyone's doing as okay as we can be. Maybe go for a walk to check out the neighborhood as well. We all have books and magazines and been meaning to catch up on, so it's a good time for that; family jigsaw puzzles in the early evening before the light gets too bad. It's also really nice to just sit and listen to the world without the constant background noise of civilization.

I only seem to get power outages at night, after the sun has set. So besides burning some candles or using flashlights until I'm sure I have everything I need, I usually just call it a night early and go to sleep. The power is usually back on by the time I wake up in the morning.

Before that, I'll make sure to shut down my computers. I have several of them running on an UPS, so they don't lose power when it goes dark; however, they burn through my UPS battery within 30 minutes or less, so I need to make sure they're safely shut down first.

My power used to very unreliable and I'd get rolling brownouts (flicker of power) every now and then. Which would kill my PCs. So I got the UPS so they maintain power, regardless of a blackout or brownout. Ever since, my computers stay on 24/7 without problems.