Stock the storm kit — one shelf, once a year
Annual · typically May
Why it matters
Every climate has its version of the same event: the grid goes down and the house goes quiet for somewhere between 6 hours and 6 days.
And winter is your other season: an ice storm that drops lines can mean days of cold-house living, which is why the kit shares a shelf with your winter-storm drill. The failure mode isn't drama — it's a dark house, a dying phone, and a drive through the storm to buy things that were $60 last Tuesday.
What skipping it costs
$200–$5,000
The kit itself costs less than $100. Not having it costs whatever the emergency charges: spoiled food, a hotel because the house is 45° and dark, an ER trip for the medication that ran out, price-gouged batteries from the last gas station with power. Outages don't schedule themselves for convenient weeks.
Two ways to get it done
Do it yourself
You'll need: Water: 1 gallon per person per day × 3 days minimum, Flashlights or headlamps + batteries (not just phones), Battery power bank, charged, First-aid basics and a week of prescription meds, Copies of insurance docs and IDs in a zip bag, Battery or hand-crank radio (~$25).
- Claim one shelf — closet, pantry, garage — and label it. A kit scattered across the house isn't a kit.
- Water first: 1 gallon per person per day, 3 days minimum.
- Light: a flashlight or headlamp per person, plus batteries. Candles burn houses down during outages every single year.
- Power: one charged battery bank per phone, topped up when you change smoke-detector batteries.
- Meds and first aid: a week of prescriptions rotated so they don't expire, plus the basic kit.
- Documents: insurance declarations, IDs, key phone numbers on paper, in a zip bag. If you did your house-documentation video, note where it lives.
- Fridge trick: a quarter on top of a frozen cup of water in the freezer — come home to the quarter at the bottom, the food thawed and refroze; toss it.
- The generator rule, every year, out loud: generators run OUTSIDE, 20+ feet from any window or door. Carbon monoxide after storms kills more people than the storms do.
Hire it out
$50–$150National fair range — local labor moves this number.
There's no hire here ($50–$150 buys you nothing a grocery run doesn't) — with one exception: if outages are a regular feature of your life, generator wiring is real work for a licensed electrician. An interlock kit or transfer switch ($400–$1,200 installed) lets a portable generator run circuits safely. Backfeeding through a dryer outlet — the internet's favorite shortcut — energizes the line crews are working on. Don't be that house.
Ask the tech
- Nothing to ask — there's no service call for a shelf of water and flashlights.
Red flags you're being upsold
- Prepper-branded 'emergency kits' selling $400 of freeze-dried theater. The stuff that keeps a family safe for 72 hours costs about $80 at a grocery store, and half of it is water.
- Generator salesmen using storm anxiety to size you into a whole-house standby unit when a $700 portable plus a $500 interlock covers the fridge, the furnace fan, and the phones.
The call
DIY in one shopping trip and one shelf. Skip every deluxe kit ad you see — water, light, meds, documents, power. That's the whole game.