Yesterday evening (5/5/2026), I was feeding the cats their dinner of canned food and the lights flickered. Then there was a distinct power out for a couple of seconds. Then another flicker, then everything went totally out. I grabbed an EF camping light off the shelf about 3 steps away and used that while feeding the cats. When I opened the fridge to place the remainder of the can in there, the fridge's interior light startled me for a second.

Oh yeah, I've been running the fridge off of solar charged power stations for the last couple of weeks. Of course it is still running.

Then I checked my town's FB page and found that there was a wide area outage that affected my town, surrounding towns, and towns up to 15 miles away. I also noticed that I still had wifi. Well, that makes sense becuase I also run my computer/modem/router off of solar charged battery stations this time of year.

I sat on the couch with the camping light on the coffee table scrolliing thru all the outage reports. I was just waiting to see a couple of things:
1) How long the outage would be

2) The reason for the outage

If the outage would be a while, I would either turn on a DP and set up my MTS to supply a few lights (turning off the breaker box of course), or grab the Bazooka light and use it. But, after 7 minutes, the power came back on in my area, so I was all set. The cause was several transformers blowing along the town's main street (and starting a brush fire to add insult to injury). Those closer to the transformers were out for longer that I was - the estimate was for up to 3.5 hours for them, although it turned out to be closer to 1.5 hours.

This was the first time I've experienced a power outage over about 30 seconds since I've been collecting EF stations. It was interesting that I was so matter of fact about it - I didn't even hesitate about grabbing the camping light.

No ROI needed - can't beat that peace of mind!