Re: the stove- I was exaggerating intentionally about the inability to use it. It was more a matter of realizing how much of what I like to / prefer to do is dependent upon electricity that I wanted to express. A bit of poetic license is, I think, permitted š
It is odd to think that, a century ago, life was pretty much the same as it had been for a couple thousand years: light from candles/oil, heat from fire, nothing critically dependent upon technology that hadn’t really existed for thousands of years. In a mere century, we’ve supplanted several thousand years of human history with “necessities of life” that demand technical infrastructure that didn’t exist a century ago. Intellectually I’ve known this for decades, but it is intriguing to have it driven home by something so simple as a lengthy power outage.
Back up power beyond that provided by a battery UPS is something I *might* use, at most, twice a year. In my experience, mechanical devices that sit around unused for long periods of time are not very reliable. Also, I’d have to find a place to put it, have it hooked into the electrical system some how, have special “back up” outlets wired (since you don’t want to power *every* outlet in the house)…for the amount we’d use it, I don’t see the value. And in the climate here we’d be out of fuel long before the lack of electricity became “life threatening”.
Actually, so long as you have a gas fireplace, even in Edmonton you aren’t going to be in a “life threatening” situation in less than two or three days. Fire up the gas fireplaces and, even without fans circulating the air, you can probably keep your whole house above freezing for that long. You’d want to set up your sleeping area in the rooms with the fireplaces, but again, a couple of days would be doable. Even with an electric generator…you aren’t going to get more than a couple of days on the fuel you are likely to have at hand. Unless your water and sewer switches off without electricity like it does on an acreage, I am doubtful about the usefulness of an electric generator.
Instead, I might want to hook up two or three UPS devices to my key pieces of computing technology. I can more or less make the other essentials work: light the stove top with a match/lighter, run the gas fireplaces, use the BBQ. The one thing that I miss the most is being able to “entertain” my restless mind. Having a light to read by, or better yet enough power to keep a computer connected to the net, and I’m set š It would have been interesting to see how long a “home” UPS could have kept my network modem, hub, and wireless running. Current draw on those devices is, I think, pretty low: maybe as much as 8 hours on a 1000 VA UPS? As I say, it would have been interesting to try.