Joared from Along The Way has a detailed blog post on her problems with power outage. Her post has inspired this post.
I have considerable experience of being without electric power due to outages and the most important thing that one needs when there is outage is some form of lighting in the nights. I have experienced all the following choices during those difficult times.
A Hurricane Lamp so named as once lit, it would not go out even doing a hurricane as long as there was kerosene in it to fuel it.
A Petromax lantern with a Mantel that gave much better lighting.
Does that need any explanation? We used to have them in all the rooms in our homes along with boxes of matches alongside till cheap use and throw away cigarette lighters came into the market.
Then came computers into our lives and we needed electricity to use them before battery operated portable ones came along. So we opted for these:
Honda Portable Diesel Genertor. These were noisy but gave electricity for a few hours that could operated lamps and electric fans.
And finally, a simple solution came along:
An inverter with a battery that could offer enough power to keep some lamps and fans working as well as a computer powered for up to eight hours depending on the usage. Totally noiseless but requiring distilled water replacement once every four months. While the inverter is not in use, the regular power supply charges the battery and so there is little need for any attention to be paid to it.
In our home, the inverter also provides a warm bed for our cat!
The inverter is on top of a movable case on castor wheels and is stored below the staircase. I have checked that it is quite safe for the cat to sleep on the inverter. As I type this post, the cat is just five feet away from me to my left. The two little lights on the panel of the inverter indicates that regular power supply is operating. When the top one goes off, it would mean that the inverter is supplying the power to the home.
I wonder how many of my readers would have ever used the first two lamps shown above. Have you?