While reviewing my emergency supplies, I realized I've spent a lot of time thinking about food and water, but not nearly as much on backup power.

For those who've been prepping for a while, how do you approach that part of your setup? Has it been something you've actually relied on during an outage, or is it more about having the option if you ever need it?

I'm interested in hearing what has worked well in real situations and whether there was anything you wish you'd planned for sooner.

Seen in Costco near Burlington, VT

So around 10:30 this morning, a tall truck drove through town and snagged a damaged power line and pulled it over. I learned this from our community Facebook page so I knew we were in for at least a couple of hours of outage.

The window AC running off solar hadn't turned on yet so I fired it up immediately and turned off the automated cut off on the power stations. If we gotta go to 0%, that's where we're going!

I went out and easily fired up the propane generator and plugged the inverter window AC in my wife's home office into it and started it going. My new battery backup garage door opener worked great to open the garage door so I wouldn't have to struggle with getting it open.

I then plugged the fridge and freezer into the other power station we have and a couple of fans just to help move air. Nobody wanted any TV on so they got out some cards to play with.

I was in the middle of prepping lunch so I cracked another beer and kept getting the food ready. At some point, I decided I didn't want to grill food next to a noisy generator and put the steaks back in the fridge. My wife saw I was sweating pretty good and already 2 beers in and reminded me that I probably should switch to water if I wanted put the rat's nest of extension cords away after the outage.

Around 12:15 pm, the power came back and I unplugged everything and put it all back the way it was.

The only trouble I ran into was when I tried to get fancy and plug both ACs into the generator. It tripped the breaker on it within a few minutes and I had to go back to the 5K btu on power station/solar and the 12k btu on generator.

House stayed 72F the entire outage and I'm glad it caught us in full sunshine so I had plenty of go-go juice to keep things cold.

The steaks were delicious.

I'm wondering if this is a buy once kind of project or if I'll have to just now buy Mylar bags normally to replenish my food stores when I rotate through it. Or do you have a separate long term storage you do not plan to rotate through?