Power Outage Kit Checklist: What to Buy, Tier by Tier

Five items, $100 to $250 total, and every home should own them. Light, phone power, safe water and a way to know if the food went bad.

Light comes first. Candles start house fires during outages. A battery lantern for the room and a headlamp for your hands covers it. Keep spare batteries taped to each one.

A charged power bank keeps one phone alive for about two days of careful use. Charge it on the first of every month so it is full when you need it.

Water is the one people forget. Plan on 1 gallon per person per day. A 7 gallon Reliance jug covers two people for three days. A family of four needs two. On a well, fill them the moment a storm warning goes out, because the pump stops when the power does.

The thermometer settles the hardest question after an outage. A closed fridge keeps food safe for about 4 hours. Food that sat above 40 F for more than 2 hours goes in the trash. A min/max thermometer records the peak, so you do not have to guess.

Add these two for $100 to $250 if you get storms, hurricanes or ice. Cell towers run on backup batteries that can die in a long outage, and a weather radio still gets NOAA alerts when they do.

Three days of food you can eat cold or with hot water means nobody opens the fridge. Every open lets cold air out and shortens how long the food lasts.

A 1 kWh power station is the right buy if your outages run 6 to 24 hours and you do not need heat or well water. It is silent, runs indoors, needs no fuel and recharges from the wall or solar.

Here is the math. A typical fridge averages about 52 W over a day. Multiply the station's Wh by 0.85 for inverter losses and divide by 52. The 1,070 Wh Jackery gives about 17 hours, the 1,152 Wh BLUETTI about 18 and the 1,024 Wh EcoFlow about 16. Phones, a router and a few lamps barely dent it.

Every unit here has at least a 2,700 W surge, so the fridge compressor will start. Want a fridge and a chest freezer for two days? Go to 2 kWh, and the fridge guide covers that class.

A gas furnace still needs electricity to run its blower, about 600 W. A well pump is harder. A 1/2 HP pump draws about 3,000 W for the second it starts and a 1 HP pump about 6,000 W, almost always at 240V. No 1 kWh power station does that, so this tier is a generator.

Buy dual fuel. Gasoline goes stale in months and stations close in a blackout. A propane tank stores for years and swaps in seconds.

To reach a furnace or a hardwired pump, the generator has to feed your panel. An interlock kit and an inlet box, installed by an electrician, cost far less than a transfer switch and let you pick any circuit. An extension cord cannot reach a hardwired load.

Buy the CO alarm before you start the generator the first time. Generators kill people every winter. Run it at least 20 feet from the house with the exhaust pointed away from doors and windows, and put a battery CO alarm on each sleeping level, since plug-in alarms die with the power.

After three days, the problem is fuel and noise. An open-frame generator like the DuroMax XP13000EH runs about 8 hours at half load on an 8.3 gal tank at 74 dBA, and you hear it across the street.

An inverter generator throttles down with the load, so it runs longer per gallon and much quieter. Propane stores for years without going stale, so stock tanks before the storm and run the generator a few hours at a time.

The other route is a big battery that the generator recharges. Run the generator two or three hours in the morning, charge the battery, then shut it off and run the house quietly from the battery through the night.

Every home: lantern, headlamp, power bank, fridge thermometer, 1 gallon of water per person per day for three days. $100 to $250.

Storm country: add the weather radio and three days of food. $100 to $250 more.

Outages over 6 hours: a 1 kWh power station for the fridge and phones, such as the Jackery Explorer 1000 v2 ($250 to $500).

Gas furnace or well: a dual fuel generator with a 240V outlet, an interlock kit, an inlet box, a cord and a battery CO alarm on each sleeping level.

Outages over 3 days: an inverter generator or a big battery that the generator recharges. Run the generator sizer or the power station sizer to get your exact watts.