What If The Electrical Power Grid Goes Down? How Preppers Think And Prepare

Even if you’re not a “Doomsday Prepper” yourself, you probably would appreciate knowing how these survival experts plan and prepare to live without electricity if the electrical power grid goes down.



If you are prepared for a major catastrophe like living without power for an extended period of time, then suffering the inconveniences of a few days without power or even a week or more (like the Hurricane Sandy victims) should be a piece of cake.

You might be surprised that preparing for a return to the 19th century if the national power grid is fried indefinitely will not necessarily serve you so well if you just suffer a local outage. The reason is that preparing for a life without electricity is a lot different than preparing for what amounts to being a campout, if your neighborhood power is out for a day or two.

If you lose power for a short period of time and it is localized, then spending a few hundred dollars on a gas powered backup generator is a move that you will be glad you made. You can drive to a gas station that has electricity to pump gas, fill your tank and your generator will keep your refrigerator cold and your house lit.

However, if the national power grid goes down, then the money you spend on the generator will not be a wise investment, because as soon as you run out of gas, you won’t be able to get more.

A prepper or a survivalist thinks in terms of learning skills and techniques to be able to get by with much less instead of trying to maintain his current lifestyle. It’s far better to know how to light your home without power than it is to try to “stockpile” power. After all, how much can you stockpile?
So a prepper will have a good supply of LED flashlights and batteries to get him through the first week of a power outage. But then he will also have a solar charger for his rechargeable batteries so that he can go on indefinitely.

A prepper or a survivalist uses family vacations to “rough it” an a campsite without taking along an RV that is hooked up to electricity. Instead, he prides himself on how well he has developed his skills to be just as comfortable without electricity, and not minding the tiny inconveniences.

So the difference comes down to something you can learn from the old saying “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, but teach him how to fish and he’ll eat all his life.” Taking the first steps to learn how to prepare for a power outage by learning a skill or two pays much greater dividends than just trying to “buy your way” out of it with a power generator.

http://www.bioprepper.com/2014/08/11/what-if-the-electrical-power-grid-goes-down-how-preppers-think-and-prepare/