Power Outage Preparedness: Hurricane Season Edition

Hurricane season is officially underway in Florida, which means it’s time to revisit your home safety plan and make sure you’re prepared if a storm comes your way. In this article, we’ll share what you should be doing now to help set yourself up for a safe storm season, as well as what to do in the moment if you lose power.

Prep For Losing Power Ahead of Time

Understand How to Conserve Power During a Storm

Next, let’s talk about what to do during a storm itself. If you’ve lost power in your home, your approach to using power should immediately change. If you have a home standby generator, it should automatically kick in to take over power to your home.

If not, take stock of any cell phones in the house to understand how much power the devices have left. It’s a good idea to turn phones off at this point to conserve their power until you need them to communicate or check in on the storm. Depending on your needs, you may choose to charge phones using your power banks right away or to keep phones off and save that option for later.

As you can probably tell, hurricane season is not the time to keep your cell phones or other critical devices on low battery. If you’re the type of person who only charges your phone when it’s about to shut off, consider making an effort to keep devices at 50% charge or above during the months between June and December. Any charge is better than no charge during an emergency!

Check Your Existing Home Standby Generators

Lastly, before storm season picks up, check any home power equipment to make sure it has been recently tested and is maintained properly. The last thing you need is for your equipment to fail when you need it most, so now is the time to check all your supplies and make any necessary fixes or replacements.

Note that the end of each hurricane season (think October-November) is often the best time to consider getting a new home backup generator. The installation process takes time, and there’s often increased demand in the months leading up to hurricane season. Set a note in your calendar to check your home generator and/or home surge protector towards the end of the year. When that day comes, you’ll have plenty of time to put a new system in place before you might need it again.