Stage
Before You Buy Anything
Hours added at this stage
None
No hours are shown here because this stage buys no storage. What it buys is the difference between a household that knows what is happening and one that does not.
What this stage covers
This stage costs nothing and closes out more outages than any purchase on this site. It covers the first hour of a short outage, the one where the useful information is knowing whether the problem is your house or the whole street, and where the useful equipment is a phone that was already charged.
What this stage does not cover
Every stage on this site states its own limits before it states what to buy. These are the things that are still unsolved after this stage is complete.
- Anything past the point where the devices you already own run flat. This stage adds no stored energy at all.
- A house that goes dark at three in the morning with no light within reach. That is the next stage and it is the cheapest one.
- A vehicle that will not start, which is a separate failure from the house losing power and often arrives on the same day.
- Anything requiring a household AC outlet once the utility is out.
Do this first
Some of this costs nothing, and the free parts are the ones that get skipped.
- Charge every phone, every laptop, and every power bank you already own, tonight, and then keep them charged as a habit rather than as a reaction to a forecast.
- Find your breaker panel and open it. Confirm you can reach it without moving furniture and that you can see the labels.
- Label the breakers, in daylight, with a pen. Most panels are labeled wrong or not at all, and the time to find out is not during an outage.
- Find the main water shutoff and the shutoff for anything that can freeze or leak, and confirm you can operate them.
- Write down your electric utility's outage reporting number and your account number, on paper, and put it somewhere that does not need power to read. Report the outage from a phone as soon as it happens.
What to buy at this stage
Nothing. This stage has no purchases in it at all, which is the point of putting it first. Everything it asks for is work you do with a pen, a phone you already own, and twenty minutes of daylight.
If you would rather spend money than time, that is exactly the instinct this site was built to argue with. The next stage is where the first purchase appears, and it is the cheapest one on the site.
What not to buy yet
This block appears on every stage, and it is the part that separates a sequence from a catalog. Buying these things now is not dangerous; it is just out of order, and out of order is how people end up with the wrong equipment for the outage they actually get.
A large power station
Buying storage before knowing what you would run with it is how people end up with a heavy box and no flashlight. The device pages exist so you can decide what you actually want powered first.
Anything marketed as a solar generator
That phrase describes a battery with a solar input, not a battery with a panel. There are no solar panels in this catalog and no panel is included with any unit here.
A fuel generator
This site does not sell them and cannot advise on them, and the decision involves fuel storage, exhaust placement, and usually an electrician. It is not a first purchase and it is not a shortcut past this stage.
What skipping this stage costs
Skipping this stage means spending the first hour of every outage doing the free work under worse conditions: hunting for a panel in the dark, calling a utility number you have to look up on a phone you are trying to conserve, and discovering that the labels on the breakers are somebody else's guesses. The purchases in later stages do not replace any of it.
The loads this stage is about
| Device | Running draw | Duty share | Average draw used | Starting surge | Est. hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Phone Charging | 12 W | Continuous | 12 W | No | 73 h |
| LED Lighting | 30 W | Continuous | 30 W | No | 29 h |
The hours divide the average draw, not the running draw, so the duty share column is what reconciles the two: average draw is running draw multiplied by the duty share, and hours are (1024 x 0.85) divided by that average. These are estimates produced by the site formula, not guarantees, and they do not account for startup surge, temperature, or battery age.
The next stage
Finish this one before moving on. The order is the argument.