Sean Boal
Buying a generator has been on my list of things to do for years. Growing up, my uncle, who worked for the Los Angeles County Office of Emergency Management, often encouraged me to be prepared for emergencies. Back then, he warned that we were already a hundred years overdue for major movement on the San Andreas Fault, and we’ve only added more years since he first said that.
He believed every household should have enough resources to last at least three days without outside assistance. His reasoning was that, in a major disaster, emergency services would likely be overwhelmed, making three days a realistic estimate before help could arrive. Because of that, he recommended keeping enough food, water, medicine, and backup power on hand to get through those first critical days.
Our home has always been in good shape when it comes to food and water, but we were still lacking a backup power plan. That became especially clear recently when a nearby transformer failed, leaving our neighborhood without electricity for several hours. As we sat in the dark, I remembered all the conversations I’d had with my uncle over the years and decided it was finally time to come up with an immediate solution for our power needs during outages.
As I thought it through, I realized that every time we’ve lost power over the years, no matter where we’ve lived, the outage has never lasted more than 24 hours, thank God. Since the odds are much higher that future outages will also be relatively short, it made sense to prioritize a solution for those situations first. I still intend to purchase a gas generator for longer-term outages, but this setup will at least allow us to charge our phones and tablets multiple times, which has always been the first problem we’ve encountered during a power outage.
If you’re a CPAP user, this setup could also get you through a couple of nights until power is restored, especially if you have the DC power adapter for your machine.
Of course, you could simply go out and buy a ready-made portable power station with similar capabilities for anywhere between $300 and $500, but what fun is that?
Instead, I used a Harbor Freight battery I already had, ordered about $30 worth of parts from Amazon, picked up a couple of bus bars from Harbor Freight, and housed everything in an old ammo box I had emptied during a recent garage cleanup. Factoring in the battery and estimating the value of the parts I already had on hand, I figure I spent around $150 total. Had I not already owned the battery, I probably would have gone with a lithium battery instead, and the total cost would have been only slightly higher.
I charge it with an inexpensive trickle charger from Harbor Freight through a weatherproof SAE port. It’s heavy, but still easily portable. A lithium battery would reduce the weight considerably. I do plan to build another version using a lithium battery for road trips, but this one will stay in the same place, connected to the trickle charger and ready for the next power outage. It won’t need to be moved often, if ever.
This was also the first time I used a heat gun instead of a lighter on heat-shrink tubing. I will not be using a lighter anymore, the heat gun was much easier to use and gave far more consistent results.
Maybe it was growing up with a dad who was an electrical contractor, but I found this project to be incredibly satisfying and a lot of fun. There’s something rewarding about building a practical solution with your own hands, especially one that could come in handy when you need it most.
Anyway, this is what I came up with to meet my needs. Are you currently prepared for a power outage? How are you doing on food and water? Or are you still waiting for the disaster schedule to be published?
I hope my realization that I needed a better emergency plan encourages you to take another look at yours. And if it inspires you to take action, I hope it also sparks your inner DIY builder to head out to the garage and create something cool of your own.
