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What do you do when the power goes out?

Orange Furball

Orange Furball

macrumors 65816
Original poster
May 18, 2012
1,325
10
Scranton, PA, USA
Right now my power is out. I down to at&t 3.5g and a cell phone. For some reason, when the power goes out I have nothing to do. It seems everything involves electricity nowadays.

The most entertaining thing I have found so far is watching a cat play with a sock.

What do you do when the power goes out?
 
I fiddle with my phone or take a nap. Without electricity, I am as bored as can be. It's funny that you realize how important something is when you have to live without it.
 
I usually make no-bake cookies (yay gas stove) or go outside. Sometimes I'll read a book or play a board game.
 
Orange furball said:
What do you do when the power goes out?
Click to expand...

Read, go outside, run errands, etc.. It really depends on when the power goes out (day or night) and what I've got going on at the time. Of course I live in TX, so the biggest problem with the power going out is the loss of AC and the heat. If it's in the middle of the day then the family and I usually go somewhere that has AC like a store, the mall, a coffee shop, etc..
 
I'm guessing it's day time where you are, go out and have fun, shop, eat in a restaurant you have never been to, walk around, ride a bike.

If it's night time, sleep or have sex. :p
 
I always seem to lose electricity at night, never during the day, so I just go to bed.
 
Once a year, they service the electrical sub-station here (Out in the sticks) They notify us all in the affected area, and they switch the sub with a semi- generator...Takes them about 15 mins. I go 3G on my iPhone if I need to, but 15 mins? No big deal.

I watched these guys unplugging the cables and drag them to the truck generator....LIVE:eek:
 
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Generator kicks on as soon as my power goes out, the tank its attached to will power the house for about 3 days before it runs out. Didn't install it, it was already there lol.

Before than, read a book, fiddle with the phone. Cook something ( wooo old 1960s gas stove at the old apartment! ). Or just go for a drive.
 
Holy Cow... reading these posts make me feel smug. Lot of people here seem to be at a total loss without their toys. Kinda sad, too....

1) There are these little known things with paper inside, all joined on one side. There are words printed on that paper, and contained in those words are entire universes.
2) OP - If you are posting during the blackout... it's daylight there according to the time stamp, and the while the weather is not great... it's not bad. Go outside. Get some exercise.

--------

And you folks who can't cope without the juice... don't move into my neighbourhood. During the winter we can count on losing our power at least twice, for 24 to 48 hours. A couple of winters ago we lost our power for 5 days. (We have a gas stove, and a wood stove, and over a thousand litres of water in the basement.) At that point we started to go a little stir-crazy. The fact that we were also snowed in for 1st couple of days didn't help. We may get a generator or battery pack... for the fridge/freezer. We ended up tossing a lot of food.

Telephone worked fine since we have an old fashioned landline that plug into the phone jack when the power fails. And a windup radio to get the news. Cell phone coverage has never been great here. After a day's withdrawal, we discover that in fact the world does not end when the internet is off-line. Amazing, but true!
 
Happens so rarely here. Only once in my adult lifetime, in fact (and the last time before that was a year or two before I was born).

Anyway, I played poker by candlelight, listened to a battery-powered cassette player that for some reason had survived 20 years past the boombox era, and looked at the Milky Way, which is usually hidden behind light pollution around here.

If it happens to you a lot, keep some candles handy, learn a few card games, and stock a couple good books. You know, the dead-tree kind. I've also heard pubs can be a lot of fun in a power outage. :cool:
 
Well I wasn't freaking out :p just made me think and wonder what people do. I don't read much and the books I do own are just computer history and have been read a few times. The only one I hadn't read is my Steve Jobs biography. Such a long book. Anyway the power came back on so I'm happy.

If I lost it for more than a day I would go crazy. Mainly because I only get one day of battery out of my phone
 
Orange furball said:
Right now my power is out. I down to at&t 3.5g and a cell phone. For some reason, when the power goes out I have nothing to do. It seems everything involves electricity nowadays.

The most entertaining thing I have found so far is watching a cat play with a sock.

What do you do when the power goes out?
Click to expand...

Turn on the generator :D.
 
I have my router hooked into a backup UPS, so when the power goes out, the router can usually go for a few hours to keep everything going. Surf the internet for a few hours until my laptop dies. Then surf the internet on my phone till that dies.
 
Our internet has a built in generator (I assume, because even when the power goes out I'm able to have the internet for several hours), but i usually just do what I normally do. Read, use my phone/computer, etc. Since everything has such good batteries now (and not everything even requires batteries....like books :p)
 
I turn the oven/kettle/whatever off and go flip the circuit breaker. Gotta love Spanish wiring :)

And if it's a town wide outage, well, that's what Kindles and iPads are for.
 
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