I woke up to a power outage that had been going for 30 mins so I was able to test a portion of my emergency plan. My router/home server was on a UPS and still powered, so I hooked it all up to a larger power bank from my camper van to give it a few more hours of life and actually have Internet at home.
Gas heating (simple battery-powered thermostat) and stovetop meant I was able to be warm and make coffee (equally important). So I guess I'm saying it could be worse, and so far my prep paid off.
Update: power is still out, supposed to return this evening. The power bank was at 20% with a bit over an hour to go, but instead of firing up a small generator to charge it, I decided to try my portable solar panel setup I use when camping.
It is supplying enough power to the battery bank that there is a small surplus, so I should be able to keep the equipment running for a few more hours without resorting to a generator.
Update 2: Power is still out. The solar panel was not providing enough energy so the battery bank ended up slowly draining. I had to fire up a portable 700W propane generator I normally keep in the camper van to charge it back up. With all that, my home server/router has stayed up the whole time.
After it was clear the outage was going to be longer than a few hours, I plugged my fridge into the larger battery bank I've been using inside to charge devices. It still has plenty of charge to go.
Final update: The power came back on a bit after 5pm.
This was a good exercise to see what worked and needs improvement for an extended outage (like in a major earthquake). In summary, if I want to use solar to help charge batteries, I will likely need larger (probably permanent) panels. An additional, larger battery pack would help too.
@repeter I just have two portable battery banks (industry calls them "solar generators" but I think that's a silly name) that normally power my camper van. I have an Ecoflow Delta (~1kWh) and an Ecoflow River Max (~.5kWh) as a backup. The River is what I connected to my server gear and I used the Delta inside.
I try to make my emergency gear dual-purpose with camping so I have maximum flexibility and also test the gear frequently.
@kyle What kind of battery and kWh? We have a SunPower 13kWh battery and I wish we just bought a natural gas generator. It's rated for 13kWh but only has ~8.5kWh available because of reserves that out of our control. That said, I do have a root shell on their management gateway 😁