Cheap Ways to Prep Your Home for Power Outages

Preparedness marketing pushes expensive solutions, but most of what actually helps during an outage costs very little. The most impactful and highest-value items on this tier list are free.

Tier 1: Free

Fill your freezer. Empty freezer space is wasted thermal mass. In a power outage, a barely filled freezer will cause the food in your freezer to go bad much quicker than a full freezer. The best way to fill your freezer is to fill jugs with water and freeze them. A full freezer holds safe temperature for roughly 48 hours versus about 24 for a half-full one, and when it thaws you have drinking water. This is the single best free preparedness action available.

Learn where your water shutoff and gas shutoff are. Actually locate them, physically, today. Make sure you, your spouse, and your older children know how to operate them in case you are not around.

Fill your bathtub when a storm is forecast. This is free water for flushing and washing, at the moment when pressure may be about to fail.

Keep your car above half a tank in storm season. Gas stations need electricity to pump, and your car is effectively a generator.

Charge everything when a storm is coming. Phones, laptops, battery banks, tool batteries. A cordless drill battery with a USB adapter will charge a phone several times.

Take photos of your important documents and store them somewhere accessible offline.

Know your neighbors. Your community is the most useful resource in any local emergency and it costs nothing.

Tier 2: Under $100 total

A manual can opener, $8. The most commonly forgotten item in every emergency kit, and without it your entire canned food supply is inaccessible. Buy two just in case!

A battery-powered carbon monoxide alarm, $25. This is the highest-value safety purchase on the list, without close competition. CO poisoning is a leading cause of death after storms. Generators are the source in the large majority of fatal cases, and the majority of those involve indoor placement. This alarm is the difference between a mistake and a fatality.

Headlamps rather than flashlights, $15 each. Hands free light changes everything about functioning in the dark. Budget for one per person.

A NOAA weather radio with hand crank, $30. Information when cell networks are congested or down.

Two weeks of shelf-stable food you actually eat, roughly $60 to $100. Not a survival bucket. Common foods include rice, beans, pasta, canned tomatoes, canned fish, peanut butter, oil, and oats. Buy a few extra items on normal grocery trips over a couple of months and rotate them over time: first in, first out (FIFO).

A case of bottled water plus refilled jugs. One gallon per person per day, for three days minimum, but ideally at least two weeks.

A pot cozy, $0 to $20. This can be a cooler and some towels. Boil, cover, kill the heat, wrap. The residual heat finishes rice, beans, or grains over hours, which cuts your cooking fuel needs by more than half. However, almost nobody has one.

That whole tier is under $100 and covers the large majority of what matters in a real outage.

Tier 3: $100 to $700

A two-burner propane stove and a 20 lb propane tank, $60 to $150. This provides roughly ten to twenty hours of two-burner cooking. This can be your primary outage cooking source.

A large cooler, $50 to $300. Extends refrigeration substantially, and in winter lets you use outdoor cold weather to refrigerate safely.

A portable power station, $200 to $600. Runs a CPAP, charges devices, powers a lamp and a laptop. Will not run a refrigerator for long or anything with a heating element, even though their marketing frequently implies otherwise. Understand what you're buying.

A small solar panel to pair with it, $100 to $250. This turns a few hours of battery usage before it dies into a renewable and reusable battery. Without it, the power station is a one-time resource.

What to skip

Large gasoline generators, for most households. Expensive, require stored fuel that degrades, need maintenance, and are the leading cause of post-disaster carbon monoxide deaths. Justifiable for medical equipment or a well pump. Not a default or beginner purchase.

Freeze-dried survival buckets. Expensive per calorie, high in sodium, and most people never eat them. Regular groceries you rotate are cheaper and better. These often make sense when planning for long term outages, but there are cheaper and more effective ways to prepare your home.

Anything marketed as tactical. You need a can opener, not a knife with a compass in the handle.

The thing most kits are missing

Look at Tier 3 and notice what every item has in common: a consumable. Propane runs out, batteries deplete, and generators need fuel.

That's the structural weakness in almost every preparedness kit. Everything depends on something you had to buy in advance and that gets used up, often quietly, months before you need it. You forgot to refill the propane tank. The batteries went into a remote. The water was drunk during a hot week.

The most reliable items in any kit are the ones with nothing to consume. A hand-crank radio. A manual can opener. A pot cozy. Anything that can't be depleted can't be found empty.

That's the case for a fuel-free cooking method as part of a household plan. My Solar Oven has no fuel, no battery, and nothing to expire between events, reaching 350 to 400°F on clear summer days and 275 to 350°F in clear winter conditions. It costs more than most things on this page, but it's the only item that will still work on day fifteen and years down the road. See the specifications at MySolarOven.com.

Sources: USDA and FoodSafety.gov food safety guidance; CDC data on disaster-related carbon monoxide poisoning.

First photo by Alice Kotlyarenko on Unsplash

Second photo by Антон Дмитриев on Unsplash