Hi everyone.
As you know Hurricane Irma visited us recently. I wanted to thank everyone who emailed us their well wishes during her visit. It was really nice just knowing you guys were out there! We were lucky enough not to have suffered major damage, but this was the first time in my life I had to prepare for a hurricane of this size. In the past, it has been mostly just removing all loose items in the yard. The real challenge with Irma came in her aftermath actually.We had no power for a whole week, which was the longest I have ever been without power. That meant no internet, little to no cell phone coverage and, for us, no water. One doesn’t realize how reliant we are on power and you only truly start appreciating it when you don’t have it!
Fortunately, a good friend gave us a generator last year and I could not thank him enough during this time! We used it to run our refrigerator and portable AC unit.
Lucky for us, we had plenty of batteries! 🙂
My wife and I each used one of our “Executive” batteries for our cell phones and it they kept both phones charged the WHOLE week! I also had the “CEO” ready to go and used that for our Macbook Pro’s, hooking the portable printer up to it too just in case we would have to go a week more.
Because we had little internet, we didn’t use our laptops much, but by mid week I noticed that cell coverage improved so I started making alternative plans should we not get power. That meant subscribing to mobile hotspots for internet and finally beginning to process our backlog orders.
I did a lot of thinking in that week in the dark. I have been thinking of a shift in our business model. I have done a lot of things for our house that border on “off grid” living including the way we keep the water running (we are on a well and not dependent on city water). To blog about all my ideas would take up a whole new series of blogs…so…in short…I re-piped our well so that we have a secondary lower powered pump for water. I learnt that you need to be more efficient with your power resources when living off the grid.
Have you been thinking of ways in which to be more efficient with power should it ever run out? Does off the grid living interest you? Send us your emails or simply comment below.
Ok, well…Storms gone, and I still have much to do. Thank you for your patience with our orders.
Mike