Plans B and C for power outages and commo outages

Posted by John Reed on Mar 21, 2023

I am trying to come up with plans A, B, and C for both home needs usually provided by grid electric and/or natural gas and communication, i.e., internet, phone, and TV.

Complicated.

If you lose grid electric, you can use natural gas for things like hot water, cooking if you have a gas stove, and heat although nowadays, most gas appliances and systems need electricity for ignition and controlling.

I can plug my tankless hot water heater into an extension cord to my portable propane generator. But my furnace is hard wired so I do not know how to power its electronics and thereby heat the house through our central warm air heating. We have gas log fireplaces in the family room and living room which is probably enough in our coastal California climate. I really ought to inquire about being able to operate the central heating off the portable generator.

Some people with back-up generators are wired into a circuit breaker panel to power the furnace and other selected high priority appliance and systems.

I need to stop here and extoll the virtue of the plug and outlet connection to electricity for dealing with power outages. In my house, which is maybe slightly more modern than the average house, the following have a plug that goes into an outlet instead of being hard wired:

• garage door opener

• tankless hot water heater.

• toaster oven

• fridge

• dishwasher

• disposer

• kitchen hot water dispenser (those last three may surprise you; look under your kitchen sink; mine has three outlets that are the power sources for these appliances; so you can plug them into a generator; in the case of the disposer, it will always be on so you would just plug it in briefly to run the disposer then pull the plug out)

• TVs, electric recliner, lamps, desktop computer, charger for laptop

• My clothes washer and dryer are plugged into outlets, 240 v in the case of the dryer.

• Although we have central air and heat, we also have a back-up window air-conditioner in the MBR. The central systems are hard wired, but not the window air-conditioner. It is plugged into an outlet.

• Our printers, desktops, computer modem/router are plugged into outlets.

• ditto Biobidets and towel warmers in the bathrooms (wife)

The following are hard-wired meaning that they cannot be run by generator unless it it hardwired into the circuit breaker panel:

• electric range and oven

• compactor

• microwave

• ceiling lights

• exterior lights

• central heating and air-conditioning

I am not an electrician, but it seems to me that all the hard-wired stuff could be plug and outlet. Extension cords are considered unsafe. But that could be dealt with in a short-term power-outage situation.

The whole idea of hard-wiring seems to assume a pre-climate-change cult world where grid electric became more and more reliable with each passing year—like all other technology. Now they are enroute to becoming quite unreliable—necessary sacrifices to the climate-change Gods.

All hale the plug and outlet and recognize its flexibility and Plan B facilitation role.

On to commo. Basically, you need to be able to call 911. And nowadays, you need access to the internet and broadcast and cable TV.

Cell phones now seem to have battery or generator back-up. Okay, but I wonder how many hours if they are using batteries. Cell phones are actually a back up to your coaxial or fiberoptic internet provider. Nowadays, your DATA capability in your cell phone can give you TV streaming and internet if your Xfinity or whatever goes out but your cell service is still working.

So I only have a Plan A (Xfinity) and a Plan B (cell service data) for TV and internet. I am not happy with that. I need a plan C for those two functions.

We used to have copper wire land lines which would be a third Plan C phone. But my impression is that generally no longer exists. They removed it from where I live. We had this house built in 1983 and it came with Pac Bell copper wires as the ONLY commo system. I thought we still had that in 2019, until I tested it. It was dead during that power outage. I called the company, which I thought was AT&T. They had sold to MCI. And they switched to fiberoptic instead of copper wires, but their fiberoptic was dependent on grid electricity to operate. The old copper wires were not.

I do not know if the Xfinity cable and the MCI types are using the SAME fiberoptic cable. Or are they using parallel fiber optics that are not both depending on grid electric fro relays and such.

Are there other ways to communicate with the outside world—both sending and receiving? I have Iridium satellite phones that are powered by batteries and need no earthly connection to anything. They connect by radio directly to low-earth orbit satellites at an altitude of about 400 miles.

There are also geosynchronous satellite 22,236 mile altitude phones that work in most areas, but not in the oceans or at higher latitudes or on the north side of a mountain. It is possible that low-earth orbit sat phones may not work when geosynchronous still do. Although other than a war where enemies were destroying our satellites, I cannot conceive of a reason for outages of satellites. They use solar energy when on the sunny side of the earth and batteries on the other side.

In the Army commo branch, I learned about and used HF radios. Those can communicate from your house to the whole world. They are also called ham radios or shortwave. I trained on them and used them in Vietnam, but I am not a ham radio guy. But they have a whole very organized community who can help you if you want to get involved with that Plan D.

You can also use a satellite dish and get not only phone but also TV streaming and internet via such dishes. My Iridium phone may have some ability to do that. I have not needed it or inquired about it.

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