Jan 12th, 2015

Author: donich_admin

Be prepared….

In common with a lot of other people in the Highlands we lost power overnight on Friday. In our case we were lucky enough to get it back by 7pm, though many other people were out for three whole days.

During this outage we really discovered how woefully unprepared we actually were. We didn’t have any Internet connectivity because the power to the satellite was out (and as it turned out the cable to connect the ADSL was at the bottom of the Donich), we didn’t have any lights other than candles and one torch, and our only ability to cook was on a really dodgy camping stove which ended up making a scorch mark on my kitchen worktop. We also realized that with the Internet down we had literally no method of getting any news (like for example is the whole of Scotland without power). I had to resort to ringing my Mum and asking her whether they had heard anything on their (physical, analogue) radio about the power situation.

So we have made some improvements on the back of this. We’ve bought some wind up lanterns and a wind up radio. Also we are buying a large UPS (uninterruptable power system). The next time this happens we should be able to run the satellite over the UPS and also connect low power requirement laptops (such as the Surface Pro 3) if they actually run out of battery power. We tested the lanterns today and they are great – literally they run for ages on a very brief wind up http://www.amazon.co.uk/Silverline-Tools-723911-Wind-Up-Lantern/dp/B005DQ8Z5I/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1421083504&sr=8-1&keywords=wind+up+lantern

We also need to buy a better camping stove and make sure we have things in the house which can be eaten without cooking.