Here’s the short version: I spent 20 years keeping other people’s buildings running. Turns out my own house couldn’t survive six days without the grid.
The long version is more embarrassing, so of course I’m going to tell you the whole thing.
I’m Ray. I’m 51, I live in the suburbs of Fort Worth, Texas, with my wife Karen, our two teenagers, and a lab mix named Biscuit who has never once contributed to household readiness. For most of my career I’ve been a facilities manager — commercial buildings, and for a good stretch, a hospital. If you’ve ever wondered who worries about the backup generator, the transfer switch, the boiler, and the emergency plan so that nobody else has to: that was me. At work, I had redundancy for everything. Two of anything that mattered. Test schedules. Logs.
At home? A flashlight with dead batteries in the junk drawer and half a case of water in the garage.
I knew better. That’s the part that stings. I just never brought the job home, because home was where things worked.
Then February 2021 happened
If you were in Texas for Winter Storm Uri, you already know. If you weren’t: the grid went down and, for millions of us, stayed down. Our house went dark on a Monday.
Day one was almost fun. Camping indoors, the kids thought it was hilarious.
Day two, the inside of my house hit 41°F and nobody was laughing.
Day four, a pipe burst over the living room. I was on a ladder at 2 a.m. cutting soaked drywall out of my own ceiling by the light of that junk-drawer flashlight — running on batteries we pulled out of my daughter’s Xbox controller, because those were the only AAs in the house. Karen held the light. Neither of us said much.
We melted snow on the gas stove to flush toilets. The grocery store three miles away had bare shelves and a line around the building. My neighbors — who knew what I did for a living — assumed our house was the ready one. One of them actually said it: “You do this for a living.”
Fair. That one landed.
What I did about it
When the power came back, I did what a facilities guy does after a failure: I wrote up the incident. What failed, why, what it cost, what would have prevented it. Then I fixed it — methodically, on a normal-family budget, over about a year. Water storage that doesn’t take over the garage. A 14-day pantry built from food my kids actually eat. Backup power sized to what we truly need, not what the ads sell. A binder Karen can grab in ninety seconds.
And I started testing everything, because gear you don’t test is gear you don’t have. I learned that one professionally a long time ago. Twice a year we run an outage drill at the house — main breaker off, phones away, let’s see what breaks. The kids hate it. I consider that a feature.
The Ready Home is the write-up of all of it: the plan, the gear that earned its place on my shelf, the gear that went back, and the honest numbers either way. When I say a power station ran our fridge for 31 hours, it’s because I stood in my garage with a notebook while it did.
What this site is — and isn’t
I don’t prep for the apocalypse. I prep for Tuesday.
Tuesday is when the power goes out. Tuesday is the boil-water notice, the ice storm, the hurricane three states away that empties your gas stations anyway. Tuesday actually happens — FEMA’s own numbers say most American households aren’t ready for it, and I was one of them.
So you won’t find bunkers here, or politics, or anybody yelling about the end of the world. You won’t find weapons content either; plenty of other sites cover that. What you’ll find is what a guy who did this professionally for 20 years actually does at home, explained so a normal, mildly skeptical family can do it too — starting under $100, because I know what a month costs.
Two promises. First: when officials say evacuate, you evacuate — nothing on this site outranks FEMA, the National Weather Service, or your local emergency management, and I’ll always point you to them on life-safety calls. Second: some links here are affiliate links. If you buy through them I earn a commission, it costs you nothing, and it pays for the gear testing. But I don’t recommend anything I wouldn’t put in my own garage.
Do one thing tonight
Go check your flashlight. Not “I think it’s in the drawer” — go click it on. I’ll wait.
If it’s dead, congratulations: you just found out on a good day, which is the entire point of this website. Start with the Power Outage Guide — it’s the article I wish someone had handed me the Monday before Uri.
— Ray
The information on this site is for general preparedness education and doesn’t replace guidance from emergency officials. In any emergency, follow instructions from local authorities first.