Darragh Power Cut

Hours after getting power restored from Storm Darragh, I feel like I need to capture some lessons learned.

• Emergency power lights work well… for a few hours - 12 hours is a stretch
• Oil and Gas boiler require electricity to operate, so no heating or hot water. This is a major problem.
• Wood fire was my personal saviour
• Korean gas cooker was a godsend, but boiling water quickly ate up the gas canisters
• An power bank is great, but I’ve yet to find one that is able to charge as well as charge connected devices at the same time to better harness the rare case I grab a few minutes of power
• My test with a Portable 5v Solar Panel 12v in the winter sun was very dissapointing.
• Candles have a really nice light, but really impractical
• Vodafone’s network was down.. My parents had a weak but effective 5G signal with EE.
• Tesla was great for charging my phone, but as soon as left the car, the car went to sleep and stopped charging! Annoying. Update: I should have activated camp mode, but that would have drained the battery with the heating on.
• We were terrified to open the fridge and freezer, so we didn’t. Some food was lost, but I’m more concerned about the missed opportunity to cook the food before it went off.

We need a product like the Tesla power wall, however it’s max capacity is around 10 kWh, and a large household we can consume 40 kWh in a day… it would be non-trivial to restrain our power usage to 10 kWh a day.