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Disaster Preparedness
All this talk of winter storms is making me think of our disabled fam who are probably struggling without power right now. What plans do you have in place in terms of disaster preparedness?
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2 Replies
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A generator is a must for us. We had a hurricane about ten years ago that wiped out the power for a week, and we weren’t prepared. After that storm we got a generator to hook up to the frig, a couple of plugs, and heat. (My BiPAP runs on battery.) A couple of years ago, we actually hired an electrician to wire the house to our generator which was even more helpful and gave the house probably about 50% of electricity in an outage.
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We have a few different things we do, depending on how long the outage is. If we think we miiiiiight lose power, first thing I’ll do is charge my batteries that fit my Vagabond Mini inverter. I have 3 batteries, and each will run my bipap for about 3 hours, so I will try to predict how many to charge. (Planned electrical line work: 1 battery. Storm with high winds or ice : 3 batteries). Besides those, we have a small RV which has batteries. Those will run the bipap for about 12 hours, if fully charged. The cool part is that the batteries will charge if we start the engine. (extra hour of bipap for every 10-15 of having the van running). If we are expecting to lose power for more than a few hours, we will park the van outside my bedroom window. This is somewhat of a challenge in the Winter, which is why we have left it there for the past couple of months (it is definitely stuck there until the snow melts). Thennnn….. If it were a long-term power outage, we would connect the solar panels to the RV (which we currently only use when we go camping).
With all this in place, I feel slightly more prepared for outages. They still give me a lot of anxiety, but as long as I have enough power for my bipap, I’m fine. I can deal with the cold and lack of amenities.
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