🌳⚡Power Out Planning⚡💡

We don’t live off-grid here. We live… semi-grid? But we lose electricity often enough to have power-out checklists. I’ve shared them before, but people say they find them useful – or at least curious. So here are a few items from the list, and a couple of places we’ve made changes.

🌾 FOOD: Fill cooler with ice pack and perishables.

We’ve worked to become less reliant on our fridge, so we hustle much less to fill a cooler — just fresh veg in winter, and nice-to-haves like cheese or tasty leftovers. Because we keep chickens, we nearly always have eggs (unwashed eggs with the bloom intact are safe at room temp for many days). Granola, seeds, nuts, oats, dried fruit, tins of salmon and soup, are kept stocked. Mayo is easy enough to whip up from scratch. In warmer months, fresh produce can come from the garden.

💡 Longer-term goals: A greenhouse. A root cellar. Oh yes, one day…

💧 WATER: Fill human water, fill animal waterers, fill butt waterers.

We’ve probably made the most progress on “offline” water. We keep a Berkey now, for clean drinking water. A hand pump installed inside the house allows us to pull water directly from our well, even without power. So good.

Buckets of rainwater are stored in the bathrooms, so the toilet can be flushed if needed. (Also, we live in a forest, so the call of nature can often be answered outside.)

💡 Longer-term goals: Composting toilet; rainwater system for chickens.

🔥 HEAT: Restock firewood rack, especially bigger logs.

If the fire isn’t currently lit, we prep a nice big one, so it is ready to WHOOSH ignite when the power goes out. A heat-powered fan helps circulate the warmth.

🐦 Refill Wild Bird Feeders I do this especially when the power is out due to weather that seems Anthropocene in nature, disrupting wild cycles. Seeds, suets, peanuts, water. Eat up little friends!

The list is much longer than this, and everything’s connected to bigger goals. Solving for “why”, and searching for “enough”. They’re rewarding, centering, reassuring projects. They’re full of contradictions. Simple but abundant. Making more out of less. Lights out, imaginations on.