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Homeland
Emergency Power For Your Home by Alan Dixon, N3HOE / WPUC72Ø / KST8678 |
 The APC 650 Battery Backup system. (Photo courtesy of American Power Conversion Corp.) |
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Possibly our biggest single vulnerability in a disaster situation is loss of commercial electric power service. As long as the current continues to be delivered to our homes, many aspects of our daily household lives will remain in order. The roof might blow off of your house, but if the electricity manages to stay connected, your food will still be safe in your refrigerator. You could still park your face in front of a fan to stay cool, or an electric space heater to keep warm, regardless to the catastrophic damage to your home if you still happen, however unlikely, to have electricity. But lose power for more than 24 hours, even with nothing else amiss, then your whole world becomes turned upside-down. Perishable food spoils and ice melts. Suddenly we have little control over climate-related comfort—we’re literally left in the cold and dark. Most of us wouldn’t know what time to wake up. We wouldn’t be watching TV and even our handheld cell phone would miss its daily charge. In a number of ways, when the lights go out, we’re finished. That’s why this month we’re considering emergency power for your home radio communications equipment setup and even for your mobile station. Being Prepared! It doesn’t have to be this way, however. There are certain preparations we can make, some extensive and, therefore, expensive; others more modest, affordable, and quite effective. We really need to consider the more cost-conservative means before we indulge our full imaginations and devise whole-hog solutions to protect and provide for our entire households. With that in mind, and considering our primary scope—communications—we’ll see what we need to keep our emergency communications functioning during typical power outages. This article is intended to give you general ideas for coming up with your own backup power configurations. It is not intended to be comprehensive by any means. An entire book could be written on this subject alone, and still would cover only major points!
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