Mock Emergency Alert – Day 5: Everyday Emergency No Power!
Scenario: Today’s challenge starts with an unexpected twist: A drunk driver has struck a power line near your house, and the entire neighborhood is without power for the entire day. Now, you’re tasked with cooking a nice meal for your family and keeping them entertained without the convenience of electricity. It’s a reminder that emergencies can happen at any time, and preparedness is about adaptability and resourcefulness.
As we face this scenario together, let’s share our thoughts, ideas, anticipated problems and at the end of it, the unanticipated problems we encountered, and what solutions we came up with.
Goal: Practice powerless cooking techniques today. Practice using appropriate lighting. Practice meaningful ways to spend your time without the use of power.
Today’s Tasks
- Cook all three meals without electricity
- Make a NICE dinner from scratch. No opening a can of soup, eating cereal or a peanut butter sandwich. Yes, I know those are viable meals now and again, but for today, that’s a cheat. Remember, you might have water, but you don’t have hot water – that requires power for your hot water tank.
- How do you entertain your kids all day without their usual pattern?
- How do you tell time? Get up in the morning? Get your kids off to school?
- How do you keep your phone charged?
- What is your source of light all morning, afternoon and evening?
- Do something fun with the people who live in yourself that does not involve power. Tell me about it.
- Do up an inventory of your fuel storage. What kind of fuel do you have? How many days of meals could you expect to cook with the fuel you have stored?
SHARING TIME: What tools-fuel did you use to cook without power today? Share a picture or description in our Facebook challenge group or in this blog’s comments!
Today’s Limitations
- For this day, no spending money, no going to the store of course and NO restaurants. In a real emergency that is not sustainable.
- Remember that your fridge and freezer use electricity. Every time you open either of them, you lose ‘cold’ and introduce heat. Open the fridge ONE TIME – so choose wisely. Same with the freezer – ONE TIME.
- Speaking of freezers …… in the event of a power failure, the food in your freezer is in jeopardy. In a full freezer, you can expect it to stay frozen for up to two days – depending on what it is. Density will last longer: meat longer than bread for instance. A half full freezer will not stay frozen as long. It is imperative that you keep your freezer closed as much as possible. Every time you open you shorted the time.
- You cannot use any electric appliances in your kitchen to cook (or any other room – that’s cheating too)
Advanced Tasks because you’re a super hero:
- There is a big storm going on outside, so your barbeque, fire pit or camp stove is of no value. You can only cook indoors. Good luck.
- Your pipes froze during the night so you have no running water. Use your stored water.
Things to know:
- In a real power outage, using perishable food in your fridge first and freezer second is important. Whatever you don’t use, you will loose.
- Camp stoves were intended to use OUTDOORS not indoors. Fire from the flame is of course a risk, but more insidious than that is the very real risk of carbon monoxide (CO). Carbon Monoxide is a silent, invisible, odourless killer! It bonds with the hemoglobin in your blood better than oxygen, building up in your blood and literally squeezing the oxygen out. It causes dizziness, confusion and tiredness. You will NOT KNOW you’re being affected and it will cause you to pass out. If you remain in that CO filled environment, you will die!
click here to read The Night We Nearly Went to Sleep Forever - Carbon monoxide is produced whenever a carbon based fuel is burned (like oil, coal, gas and wood), which is why a stove, fireplace and wood stove are vented to the outside. Using an average camp stove in the kitchen may seem like a good idea. Don’t do it. Where is it doing to vent? Use it outside.
- There are stoves that are suitable for indoor use – and if you have one, you’ll know it.
- click HERE for a list of what to do in a power outage
*note: I do NOT have a small portable stove suitable for indoors. This challenge is a good reminder to me to look into that. We have a wood stove downstairs, but I don’t want to light a fire in our woodstove just to cook a meal if its not cold outside. We do have a gas barbeque outside that we can certainly use to cook food when its not cold outside, but we’re not skilled at using it for things that are not your typical barbeque foods. If we had to use it for a few days, I’d need to get pretty creative on how to do that.
9 powerless cooking methods
1. a Solar Oven
I know some people who use solar ovens and though they’d take some practice getting used to, I think they’re brilliant. Its kinda like a slow cooker, but you need a sunny day. I guess it would depend on how many sunny days you get in your area. Personally, I decided against buying one, just because I didn’t think I’d get enough sun in my back yard to make it a viable solution for us.
2. an outdoor fire pit
Just like you’d cook on an outdoor fire when you’re camping, but think outside the usual hotdogs and s’mores. Do you have a rack or grill you can use over the fire? Experiment with making “food storage” meals. If you can heat water, you can use emergency ‘just-add-water’ meals. Having several of those on hand for such times as this could save your sanity. Using freeze dried eggs, sausage, and veggies to create your own omelets or scrambled eggs are quick to cook over a fire.
3. your barbeque
Whether you have a gas barbeque or a brickette barbeque, if you use it regularly, you know how too. Go for it!
4. make an emergency stove, oven or grill using a #10 Can (gallon size)
here is a one page instructional guide from Food Storage Made Easy
5. using Your Dutch Oven
Because a dutch oven is traditionally very heavy, it retains heat for a long time. You can use it on your barbeque, over your fire, or on your camp stove. True dutch oven cooking can be a fun adventure and the food can be delicious! But its a skill that should be developed and practice makes perfect, so start doing it now when you don’t have to.
Check out this blog on dutch oven cooking.
6. your camp stove
If you’re a camper, you may have some sort of propane or butane camping grill already. Perfect. Use it. But use it outdoors unless it is rated for indoor use. Now would be a good time to pay attention to fuel usage so that you can make a plan for how much to store. That’s what these trial runs are good for.
7. Ever heard of a Wonderbag?
A wonderbag is a heavily insulated bag that keeps food cooking at a low, but safe temperature over several hours to continue cooking your dish while you are away or busy doing other things. Though its strength comes through in a power outage, it has other more frequent uses too. I have some friends who use their bag almost every Sunday, to cook their meal while they’re at church and doing other church related things. When they get home, dinner is ready to put on the table.
The wonderbag has no ability to ‘cook’, it only keeps something slowly cooking through insulation – which means you have to have a primary source of heat to bring that pot (or dutch oven) up to temperature to begin with. Its strength is to use LESS fuel, not NO fuel.
You can buy Wonderbags or you can make them. I found this tutorial video quite helpful and even a little entertaining. If you like to sew, then check it out. Its really quite an easy project.
8. Alcohol stoves
These stoves burn cleanly, using liquid fuel. There are disadvantages as with everything, like you have to let the stove cool down before refueling. This can be inconvenient if you run out of fuel while you’re partway through cooking a meal. Worth looking into though.
9. Canned heat.
Canned heat is a condensed alcohol gel that comes in a can, similar to what caterers use to keep serving pans warm. Simply pop the lid off, light it with a match, and you’re ready to cook. It’s fuel is nearly transparent so you’ll have to be careful with that.
REMEMBER, TOMORROW’S CHALLENGE WILL BE DIFFERENT.
Make sure your fill out today’s REPORT CARD to see how well you did, to keep track of areas you can improve, to remember things you need to do, and things you need to buy. Use the data you gathered to make a game plan to take you to the next level of preparedness, whatever that may be.
7 Day Challenge REPORT CARD
Today we focused on what to do with NO power. Really, we’re just going back in time a couple of generations, or pretending we’re on a real camping trip (not in a travel trailer). It wasn’t that long ago that our great grandparents were living with minimal to no electricity, and they did just fine. We just need to think outside our 21st century box – for a short time. This scenario plays itself out often, and sometimes for extended periods of time. If not in your life, then in who’s? Why not you? Don’t assume you’re immune. Have some fun and figure this out.
Goal: Learn what its like to go without electricity. Most people in the world do it every day. Buck up. You can do it.
Daily Evaluation Questions to ask Yourself
- How’d you do?
- How difficult was it to come up with several viable meals that didn’t require power to prepare? Share your menu and a picture of the meal you cooked in the comments.
- What did you use to cook?
- Though eating is pretty important, going without electricity is about more than what to eat and how to cook it. You still have many hours left in your day. How did you spend them?
- And its about more than eating and entertaining the family. How did you know what time it was, and how did you get to work on time?
- What did you use for light?
- What kind of things do you need to ‘acquire’ before the lights go out for real?
Daily Notes
Cindy, Karen and Linda