When the power goes out at my place, sixteen little lights come on by themselves.
They’re plugged into every outlet in the apartment. Every night they glow like night lights, and when the grid fails they switch to batteries and keep glowing. The computer keeps humming on its UPS. The internet stays up. Nobody stumbles into furniture, and nobody hunts for a flashlight that leaked its batteries three years ago.
None of that is luck. It’s layers.
I live in an apartment in Safety Harbor, Florida, and I work from home, almost entirely over Zoom. I’m mostly a hermit. My work can’t run without an internet connection. Florida can’t promise steady power. We get spikes and surges here all the time, and every summer and fall there’s a storm with my name on the cone.
So I built the place so that every critical need has a primary and at least one backup, all set up ahead of time. When something fails, I don’t have to think. I just use the next layer.
Why put a UPS on every device in the house?
Because the power here blinks, spikes and surges constantly, and every one of those hits whatever is plugged into the wall.
Every device in my apartment sits behind an uninterruptible power supply of some kind. The computer has a big one. It’s a large machine, with five 10 TB drives and a pile of peripherals, and it still loads the UPS to only about 10 percent. The display says that gives me about 127 minutes of runtime.
It doesn’t. In a real outage that countdown runs from 127 to zero in roughly 30 minutes.
The UPS display promises about 127 minutes, but a real outage drains it in about 30, which is still enough to shut down cleanly.
That gap is normal. The runtime display is an estimate built from the battery’s rated capacity and the load at that moment. As a battery ages it loses capacity, and the load can rise once the unit switches to battery, so the number on the screen drifts away from reality. A runtime calibration or self-test brings the estimate back in line. But I don’t need two hours. Thirty minutes is plenty to close everything and shut the computer down cleanly, and that’s all I ask of it.
The routers have their own small UPS, so the internet rides through blips without dropping my Zoom calls. The TV sits on a $300 UPS, a monster. The power recliner and the lamps share one almost as big as the computer’s. That one is there for surge protection, and it doubles as a spare. If the computer’s UPS dies, I can swap that one in within minutes. I have several other units around the apartment I can scavenge from, too.
Should you replace the UPS battery or the whole unit?
I replace the whole unit, every time.
A new battery runs about $100, and after about three years the right one gets hard to find. A new unit runs about $180 from Best Buy and shows up in a couple of days.
For an extra $80, I get a new battery, new electronics and a new warranty.
There’s a better reason than convenience. Most consumer UPS units protect against surges with components called metal-oxide varistors. Every significant spike wears them down a little, and they give no warning as they weaken. A unit that’s absorbed three years of Florida power can look perfectly healthy and protect almost nothing. Swapping only the battery leaves those worn parts in place. Replacing the unit replaces them too.
UPS batteries last three to five years. Every switch to battery adds wear. My apartment is fully air conditioned, so heat isn’t shortening them further, but I still don’t wait for one to fail during a storm to find out it was dead.
Every critical need gets a primary and at least one backup, set up ahead of time. When something fails, you don’t think. You use the next layer. – Richard LoweShare on X
How do you keep the internet up during a power outage?
Two layers. The routers sit on their own UPS to ride out short outages and blips. Behind that, my phone is set up to tether, and I’ve tested it, so if the whole neighborhood’s service goes down I can get the computer online through the phone.
Tested is the important word. A backup you’ve never tried is a theory. I don’t want to learn how my phone’s hotspot settings work at two in the afternoon with a client waiting on Zoom.
What is the best emergency lighting for a power outage?
I use three kinds, because each one does a different job.
First come the night lights. All sixteen outlets in the apartment have plug-in lights that run on house current and switch on automatically when it gets dark or when the power fails. Each takes three AA batteries, and they only use them during an outage. I know plenty of people can’t sleep with a light on. I love having sixteen of them glowing every night. I find it comforting.
The batteries come in a box of 100 AAs from Amazon for about $20. I recently restocked all the lights and used half the box. I keep a 100-pack of AAAs too, for remotes and the like.
The second kind is four lamp and flashlight combos, rechargeable units that sit in the outlets and switch between lamp mode and flashlight mode. They cost about $30 each, and I bought them roughly five years ago. During Milton they were lifesavers. They’re bright enough to read by, and after 12 hours without power they were nowhere near empty. They’re getting close to replacement time. The easy test is to run one on battery and see how long it lasts.
The third kind is the heavy artillery. I have ten plastic lanterns that take four D cells each, and one of them lights an entire room. I bought them just before Milton and haven’t needed them yet.
Why keep the batteries out of the flashlights?
Because I’ve lost a lot of electronics to leaking batteries, and I’m not doing that again.
Carbon monoxide kills people after nearly every big storm.
Alkaline batteries that sit in a device long enough can leak potassium hydroxide. It corrodes the contacts and eats into the circuit traces. Plenty of devices are ruined before anyone opens the compartment. So the D cells for my lanterns stay sealed in their packaging, with expiration dates about ten years out. Sealed alkalines lose very little charge in storage. When I need a lantern, loading it takes a minute.
How do you cook safely when the power is out?
Outside, on a propane camp stove.
I have a Coleman propane camp stove and eight one-pound propane canisters. A canister holds roughly 21,000 BTU, and a camp stove burner on high draws up to about 10,000 BTU an hour, so one canister runs a single burner on high for about two hours, and a good deal longer at a simmer. One canister covers a day of normal cooking. Eight of them is a week or more of hot meals.
The stove gets used on the patio and nowhere else. Never indoors. Carbon monoxide kills people after nearly every big storm. I’m not stupid, and I’m not dead.
The canisters live in an outdoor closet that I share with a population of black widow spiders. They keep to their own corner and scatter when I open the door, and I keep my distance. Black widows are shy and bite when they get pressed against skin. The name comes from the female’s habit of occasionally eating the male after mating. A bite hurts badly and causes severe cramps, but deaths are rare. We have an understanding.
What’s the backup plan for getting around?
My car is a paid-off Kia Soul. It’s reliable, it hasn’t needed many repairs, and it has no acceleration to speak of. It’s perfectly fine for store runs, the occasional in-person client and trips within about 30 miles. I pay quite a bit more for replacement-value insurance on it.
Working from home changed what the car means to me. During my years at Trader Joe’s I commuted every day, and the car was a necessity. Now it’s a convenience. But a convenience you depend on still needs a backup.
I’ve never used Uber. I’m installing the app and setting up an account now, so if the car is ever unavailable in an emergency, the backup is already sitting on my phone with a working login. Set it up while nothing is wrong.
The book on this: Real World Survival is my field guide to getting ready for the disasters that happen to ordinary people, without turning your life into a bunker.
What did Hurricane Milton prove about this setup?
Milton knocked my power out for about 12 hours. I wrote about how frightening that storm was, and it was. But inside the apartment, the setup did exactly what it was supposed to do. The night lights came on. The lamp combos lit the place well enough to read, and they still had plenty of charge when the air conditioning finally kicked back on.
Nothing had to be improvised. I’m not building a bunker here. A setup like this is a handful of cheap, boring decisions made in advance, so that the night the power fails is mildly inconvenient instead of frightening.
| Need | Layers | Rule behind it |
|---|---|---|
| Computer power | A big UPS, with the recliner and lamp UPS as a swap-in spare | Thirty minutes is enough for a clean shutdown |
| Internet | Routers on their own UPS, then tested phone tethering | A backup you’ve never tried is a theory |
| Lighting | Sixteen plug-in night lights, four lamp and flashlight combos, ten D-cell lanterns | Keep lantern batteries sealed until needed |
| Cooking | A Coleman propane camp stove with eight one-pound canisters | Patio only, never indoors |
| Transportation | A paid-off Kia Soul, with the Uber app set up in advance | Set up the backup while nothing is wrong |
| Aging UPS units | Replace the whole unit, not just the battery | A new unit replaces the worn surge components and the warranty |
My take
Layers beat heroics every time. Put a UPS on every device, keep phone tethering behind the router, and own more than one kind of emergency light. When Milton took my power for about 12 hours, nothing in my apartment had to be figured out in the dark, and I’d want the same for anyone. Set up each backup while nothing is wrong, including the ride app you hope you never need. A handful of cheap, boring decisions turns a frightening night into a mildly annoying one.
Build the layers before the storm
You don’t need my exact setup. Start with the thing your life can’t run without. For me it’s the internet, so it gets two layers. For you it could be a CPAP machine, or medication that has to stay cold. Give that one thing a backup, then give the backup a backup.
Then do the boring parts. Plug in a few lights that come on by themselves. Keep the batteries sealed. Put the stove on the patio. The urgent version is in Hurricane Season: Do It Now. The funny one is Florida’s hurricane prep rituals. The Prepared, Not Paranoid hub collects the rest. When the lights go out, you want sixteen little ones coming on by themselves.
Real World Survival is my book on preparing without becoming a prepper. It starts with a Christmas hike in 1986 when nobody knew where we were.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Carbon Monoxide Poisonings After Two Major Hurricanes: Alabama and Texas, August to October 2005, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (MMWR)
- Black widow spider, MedlinePlus, U.S. National Library of Medicine
