Last week DH and I went shopping for shelf-stable foods for the pantry. Our focus was obviously on what we’d actually want to eat, LOL; keeping in mind what we usually have in the fridge/freezer that would need to be eaten up/cooked first.
The selection of foods that are shelf-stable for a year or more has grown tremendously. A lot of aseptic packaging has very long pull dates. We’re also helped by the fact our stove and WH are gas, so unless the gas main has to be shut off (quake safety) we at least have cooking options.
Still have to add to our bottled water supply - we have about half of what I’d like to keep on hand. At any rate, I was pleasantly surprised by what we were able to find at the store.
Oh yeah, canned veggies (ugh). Gotta get those, too. Now THOSE I have no idea what I’ll do with when they expire, LOL! Maybe a pureed veggie chowder…?
We’ve had similar discussions on sailing fora on which I am active. There is an ongoing creative tension between classic propane cooking and new age electric (induction) cooking. Setting aside the inherent risk of electric it is much easier to be self-sufficient with propane, reasonable but fussy with natural gas (consider CNG backup tanks), and really hard with electric. Buy a small generator for oil or gas heat (blowers etc) or a big one for a heat pump. Add fridge/freezer, well pumps, sump pumps, and convenience items.
We’ll skip over that electric car in your garage when called on to evacuate.
We have both a charcoal and a gas grill. Although burdened with electric cooking inside I have gas catering burners. With minor inconvenience we cook as usual during power outages. We have the same government-driven issues California has (in your case Cal PUC and CalEPA) on our grid with the added inconvenience of peninsular topography so failures can’t be switched around. Snow, rain, and wind lead to regular outages that last for days.
A relatively small 5 kW generator supports fridge/freezer, fans, heat, and some lighting as well as convenience items (charging personal electronics). Internet seems to run a couple of days without power if we support the box in the house. Cell towers here run for a couple of weeks before needing to be refueled. Summer storms are actually responded to pretty fast so we don’t need a 12 kW generator for A/C. Our biggest issue is how far we have to drive to buy gas for cars and generator. Oh - and charcoal and propane and butane.
Which brings us back to cooking. We can cook the way we cook without power for about a week. Things get increasingly rustic for another couple of weeks before we would have to bail. The really big deals for us are sump pumps, well pump, fridge/freezer. If we run out of gasoline for the generator we have a problem. Our experience at sea and ashore is that freezer space is a bigger deal than refrigeration. Americans put a lot of things in the fridge that don’t need to be. We eat down as fast as we can and take the fridge off the emergency buss.
UHT milk helps. Cabbage over lettuce. Root veg. Apples. Some dried foods (mushrooms, fruits) but not a lot as if we lose the gen we lose water and rehydrating foods adds to the stress. Figure 1 gallon per person per day for water if you’re careful. Toilets are a problem. Showers are a big problem; baby wipes are your friend.
With all due respect the whole state is not burning, whatever the media wants you to believe to sell papers and views so they can sell advertising.
Two weeks without power is two weeks without power. I’ll grant you that having your house burn down is different than having two feet of water in the ground floor of your house. I will say the fatalities reported in CA are lower than in East Coast states in heavy weather.
While I am not new to our wildfires, I AM new to planned outages, and at this stage of my learning, I’m noticing the differences as WELL as the similarities.
I’m hoping it’s not a “contest”, but suspect disaster relief is finite.
BTW, the expression “with all due respect” always makes me smile.
I’m seeing friends post on FB.
The deep state MSM and whatever other cliches you choose have nothing to do with it.
BTW, I’m 10 miles from the California border. I’ve no interest in comparing disaster body counts or properties destroyed.
May all of our West Coast friends stay safe and of course, fed. Thinking of you and any other Onions who may be affected by power outages and/or fire conditions.
We’re in Oakland and +1 on the inverter. We were traveling during the last outage but around this past weekend. If you don’t mind extension cables all over the place, we used ours late Saturday/Sunday with our nearly fully-charged electric car to power some lights, keep our fridge cool, charge electronics, run our modem/router, and maintain the water heater. All in all, we used about 20% of the car battery while our power was out. It’s back on as of Noon today, but worst case, we were planning on driving over to a charging station in Emeryville or Berkeley to top up. I think it would have been possible to hook the inverter up to a gas car as well.
The Jetboil came in really handy for easy meals like oatmeal, coffee, tea, and instant noodles. We drove out to grab food for meals like pizza, banh mi sandwiches, jian bing, and tea eggs. Also, we still had some extra camp food packets, so my son got to “indulge” in his camp food of choice for one meal - the Mountain House spaghetti out of the packet. The Good-to-Go brand Thai Curry works in a pinch too.
Good luck to those affected in the Bay Area, and hopefully, we have power through the rest of the week!
Your inverter can power a fridge and water heater? What kind is it? Mine will barely charge a laptop. It’s great for low-power uses, like LED lights and the fiber modem/router.
I’d be interested in finding out how you think this works. While the last few years have been fine, I always dread the super stormy and snowy winters we can get – guess, the opposite of what you have. I always wonder if a smaller generator would be wise. I’ve lost power during bad blizzards before, and I remember one time eating only peanut butter and fluff sandwiches for a day.
I didn’t even think about the how this constant rotation of power outages might affect the food in your fridge. Ugh - that would be such a pain in the butt. I’m sorry you have to deal with this. I have a few friends in the Bay area, and then two down south in LA and then San Diego. Makes me wonder how they’re handling the situation there too.
My mom used to have an old propane stove, which I always found to be a hazard. But during one particular blizzard where we lost power again, she used the stove and saved the day. She only lived a few blocks from me, but she was able to use the small propane stove to cook hot food and brought me dinner that night.
