NASA via Wikipedia Commons
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I’m known as the “battery guy” in my friend group because I frequently harp on about the fundamental importance of being able to store energy. It’s not an eccentricity to me, but plain common sense. When people imagine the sort of disasters it would take to interrupt our access to utilities like water and electricity, I suspect they’re picturing very rare, extreme events.
It doesn’t take rare, extreme events to interrupt utility access, sometimes for days or weeks at a time. Also, what constitutes rare and extreme, in the way of weather events, is shifting along with our changing climate. The other assumption I feel people commonly make that accounts for the average citizen’s lack of preparedness is that it’s “all or nothing”.
As if you need a fully stocked bunker beneath your home, and no level of preparation short of that extreme will be of any use. This is emphatically not the case. There are very simple, cheap precautions each of us can take that are of tremendous utility during disasters. Preparedness is like exercise. Even a little bit yields dramatically improved outcomes down the road. More is better, but only to a point beyond which it’s all diminishing returns (the prepper bunker).
Besides food and first aid, the items I most strongly recommend are a lithium power bank, a folding solar panel, and a reversible water filter. On paper, you need a minimum of 7 watts to charge your phone usefully fast on a bright summer day. In practice, you always want three times more PV than your calculations say you do, to account for unreliable lighting conditions.
You can get a 21 watt folding solar panel for $40. I chose that one because it keeps generating current even at severely off kilter angles to the sun, not the case for all PV. You can get power banks at different levels of capacity, which will charge recent smartphones 1–2 times for $23, 5–6 times for $50, or 7–10 times for $70.
Everybody has a smartphone. They’re magically hyper-useful, especially in a disaster. They let you call emergency services. They’re a GPS, a flashlight, offline maps, video and still camera, a radio, a compass, weather information access and a dozen other things in a gadget small enough to fit in your pocket.
Yet it’s a useless lump when the battery runs out, and modern phones last less than a day on a charge with regular use. Everybody needs a power bank but few have them. The inconvenience is just barely insufficient to compel preventative action. Then an ice storm hits Texas. Or a hurricane hits New Orleans.
Suddenly the media is awash with on-location interviews of desperate, frightened people whose phones don’t work. Complaining that there’s been no power for several days, they can’t contact friends or family, they can’t get in touch with emergency services, don’t know what’s going on, etc. There’s also typically fuel shortages during disasters.
During the Texas ice storm it’s because the pumps used to move fuel froze. Gas stations ran out of fuel in a hurry as people panic-bought all the gas. Hurricane Ida seems to have disrupted the fuel supply too. It’s frustrating to see the same problem happen over and over, with people never learning from it and preparing for the next time it happens.
Solar panels don’t run out of fuel. There is no logistics chain for sunlight. The tech really, really works if you calculate how much power you need and triple it. People just don’t trust solar because most have no direct experience relying upon it. When you show people like this a solar setup when camping, it’s like magic to them seeing it actually work.
I speculate this is because almost everybody experimented with it at one point. Being an experiment, they didn’t want to risk much money on it, so they bought the cheapest possible solar gadget they could find. Usually one of those chinesium power banks with a postcard sized solar panel built in. They had a bad experience with it, because that’s a uselessly small amount of PV and concluded solar power, in general, is uselessly weak.
You need more surface area than that. Like I said, 3 times the watts that you think you need, on paper. If you’re only looking to charge your phone and maybe run some USB LED light strips, just look at the watts rating written on your phone wall charger. Triple that. That’s how much solar panel you need.
If you do this, you’ll have a totally different, magical experience. Solar will “just work” suddenly, and really do the job you want and expect it to. Sure, maybe a cloudy day slows it way down. But the next sunny day, you’re good to go, whereas in a disaster area the next date of fuel availability is a big question mark and something you have no control over.
This brings me to water filters. Humans cannot go very long without water. The rule of threes states that we generally die after three minutes of oxygen deprivation, three days of water deprivation and three weeks of food deprivation. This is to say, you’ll die of thirst long, long before you starve in a disaster that interrupts utilities.
This would be a tragic, needless death. Unless you live in Arizona, the UAE or something, there’s water all around you. Ponds, rivers, creeks, even puddles of collected rain water. You only need to purify it for drinking. In the past this required single-use sterilizing tablets or boiling the water, as well as multi-stage filters to remove particulate that require consumable filters you need to replace.
Nowadays, thanks to innovations originally made for kidney dialysis machines we have reusable, reversible water filters from Sawyer that can be used tens of thousands of times. When it gunks up, you just send water through in the other direction to flush out the blockage. You can do this so many times that unless you’re an avid backpacker, a single Sawyer is likely to last your entire life.
You can buy a Sawyer Mini here for $20. That’s all! If you’ve heard of lifestraw, this is similar but reusable many more times. Both ends are threaded so you can screw on 2-litre bottles like an hourglass, to let gravity push the water through the filter for you instead of having to suck with all your might through the lifestraw every time. I get a lot of use out of this thing when I camp! Side note, the regular one does not remove viruses. If that’s a concern where you live, there’s a slightly more expensive model on the Sawyer website that does remove viruses.
If you camp, these purchases should be easy to justify, because they have multiple uses. They aren’t only for disasters, which are infrequent enough to be hard to justify spending a lot on preparations for. They can also be used to make life more comfortable and convenient off-grid, and may encourage you to get outdoors more, if only to use your neat new gadgets.
Now we’ve covered the absolute most basic, low cost preparations. But there are different levels of buy-in. The lowest level, which lets you keep a smartphone and some LED lights running, is very cheap as we’ve already seen. But this is far from the limits of what you can do with today’s battery and solar technology.
Would you believe me if I told you that these days, you can fry an egg on battery power? That you can boil water for coffee, you can steam dumplings and vegetables, even run a microwave oven? When I tell people this, they scoff and say “Yeah, maybe once, then you’re out of juice.” That’s not the case.
I cannot link it as it’s not my video but there exist demonstrations of Jackery “portable power stations” (aka suitcase batteries) cooking a full breakfast including turkey, hash browns, an egg and coffee, using up about 20% of the battery capacity in the process. I believe this was the Jackery 1,000 which has 1kwh of capacity but I may be wrong.
The key is duration of load. Methods of cooking that are high draw but low duration can get your cooking done without eating up too much battery. Boiling water for instance is quick and there’s all manner of dehydrated backpacking food you can cook and hydrate with just the addition of boiling water.
Frying stuff on an electric skillet is also quick. Steaming is slower and more energy hungry, unfortunately (I like my dumplings). The point is, if you haven’t kept up with the trickle-down of new generation lithium batteries from the EV industry into other consumer products (like portable power stations) you’re likely to be astonished at what they can do.
I testify, they can do everything for camping purposes that you used to rely on isopro, propane, butane, alcohol, white gas or other camping fuels for. If you’re smart, you choose appliances carefully to make sure every watt hour is put to good use, since batteries still store much less energy per unit of size/weight than liquid hydrocarbon fuels.
But this just means choosing, for example, resistive heating (like an electric blanket) over radiative heating (like space heaters). You want all the heat being generated to go only where it’s needed, into your body, not into the surrounding air.
Likewise you can find compact travel appliances, like collapsible kettles for $18, on Amazon which use much lower watts than usual (400 in this case, vs. 1500 for normal kettles) with the tradeoff of (in this case) boiling less water at one time. Still only takes a few minutes, though! You can also usually find 12 volt versions intended for use in cars and RVs, which is still more efficient.
The power demand increase from just charging your phone and running LED lights up to frying eggs and boiling water is extremely steep though. Consequently, so is the cost increase. While power banks for phones are typically less than 100 watt hours, Jackery and similar suitcase batteries go up to 2,000 watt hours. Some Chinese units like the iForway go up to 5,000 watt hours. But they also start as low as 167 watt hours, it depends what you want to spend.
The entry level 167 Wh Jackery will run you $140. Even this is sufficient to power laptops for a while, with an output of 100 watts. The next level up is the 240 Wh Jackery, with 200 watts output at any one time, for $200. The next one up is the 500 Wh Jackery with 500 watts output at once, for $500. Then the 1,002 Wh (1kwh) Jackery with 1,000 watts output for $1,000. Then the 1,500 Wh Jackery with 1800 watts output for $1,600. There’s a 2,000 Wh Jackery on their website, but not on Amazon. At the time of writing, it’s sold out.
As you can see, it gets expensive quickly as you scale up. Don’t forget that besides the battery you’ll also need solar panels, which at this scale aren’t cheap. The folding SolarSaga panels from Jackery cost $270 for 100 watts of output, but you can buy off-brand solar panels that use the same plug as Jackery (and so will work with the Jackery power stations) for much less money, at higher wattage too. These ones offer 120 watts for $120 for example.
If you want maximum recharge speed from solar, and to still get good performance on less than sunny days, you’ll want to maximize your number of panels. The 1,000 model and up can accept up to 4 SolarSaga panels connected to the same unit for 400 watts of charging power. But that’s also a little over a thousand bucks, just for the panels.
If you shop on Amazon, the best setup you can buy from Jackery will cost you a little over 3 grand. They offer some products on their own site that aren’t on Amazon though like the 200 watt SolarSaga panels. Their bundle of a Jackery Explorer 2000 battery plus four 200 watt solar panels will set you back a whopping $4,300. That buys a very, very nice generator.
The kind of generator you need to tow behind a truck. That can make enough amps for arc welding. That can run on either gasoline, diesel or propane. A fine, top of the line name brand generator. But no matter how nice that generator is, once it runs out of fuel, if you cannot source more, it’s game over. Period.
That is not a problem for a solar + battery setup. It’s the single biggest perk. Sure, if you can’t afford the highest capacity Jackery, unless you make miserly use of the stored energy you’re likely to deplete all of it over the span of a day. But then it’s full again the next morning, like magic. Like new, a 100% charge waiting to be used up all over again.
“Not in an ice storm!” you scoff. True, but unlike fuel, there’s many different ways to make electricity. Heat, sunlight, wind, hydro. If you can find a creek or river nearby you can use your own DIY micro hydro turbine to recharge a battery bank. Small scale wind power kinda sucks but will work in a pinch, just slowly and very intermittently. If you’re really desperate you could rig a dynamo to an exercise bike and start pedaling.
Consider the value proposition of a personal, private, guaranteed reserve of electricity that is always there when you need it, waiting to be used. One which can self-replenish quickly and easily, requiring only sunshine. Is that not worth its weight in gold? This is a harder sell than the $20 water filter but they’re both tremendously high-value tools.
Again, this is only if you insist on changing nothing about your energy usage habits and want to do all the same stuff on battery power that you do while camping, using isopro and other hydrocarbon fuels. It’s now absolutely possible to use batteries and solar for all those same applications, it’s just expensive.
Take inventory of what you really, really need during a prolonged interruption of utilities and food access. You’d be surprised at how energy efficient modern refridgerators are. A top of the line, Jackery would run one for multiple days. If you can scale down to lower watt appliances, you can greatly stretch out how long you can run them on a more modest, affordable battery.
It’s also true that for many people, the right answer is a mixture of solar/batteries and gas. A fully electric solution that can do everything is costly. But if you take care of personal heating and cooking with gas (Burning gas for heat is vastly higher efficiency than using it to make electricity) you can do everything else with a much smaller, less costly battery and solar setup.
Even if you do make use of a generator, charging a battery bank from it while it’s running means you don’t have to run the generator all the time, which stretches out the fuel supply. Generators aren’t safe indoors, something many families tragically found out the hard way during the Texas ice storm, but you can recharge your Jackery from the generator outside, then bring it in with you. An extension cord is cheaper, but again, that requires running the generator non-stop.
Incidentally I don’t own stock in Jackery. They didn’t sponsor this article. They’re just my go-to recommendation even though chinese competitors offer much the same product for lower prices, because Jackery’s customer support is based in Australia and does an absolutely stellar job. That’s really what you’re paying for when you pay a little extra for Jackery over off-brand power stations.
They can absolutely be a viable alternative on a budget, just realize you’re on your own if anything goes wrong. The important thing will be to ensure you correctly match up solar panels to the battery you buy according to what plug the panels use (many come with multiple adapters) and what ports the battery has, as well as matching the wattage of the panels to what the battery will accept.
Generally they won’t accept enough to damage them, they have protection circuits to prevent that. But if you don’t size panel capacity to what your battery can accept proportionally you can wind up over-paying for PV capacity you can’t make full use of, for example. Needless to say, the voltage of the panels must also match what the battery is designed to accept. Usually these portable solar kits will include a short list of popular name brand power stations they’re compatible with in the product description.
Hopefully this equipped you with all the knowledge you need to pick out a battery and solar panels sized to suit your particular needs. Remember you don’t need to be a crazy prepper who pours his life savings into a bunker and lives off-grid, a little preparation goes a long way.
Many coast through life making no preparations and then simply suffer the consequences when access to basic necessities is interrupted for prolonged periods. Then they don’t learn from it, thinking “this was a fluke, it won’t happen again soon” and are once again caught with their pants down when the next disaster hits.
Don’t let that be you! You don’t need to break the bank, just be realistic about what you really need in a disaster, and miserly about how you use your precious reserve of energy. Though, weather willing, you can always fill it back up by the next day.