Last updated: September 3, 2026
Twenty years of facilities work taught me one thing before anything else: gear you haven’t tested is a guess with a price tag. A spec sheet tells you what a product is supposed to do. It doesn’t tell you what happens when your garage is 98°F in July, or your hands are cold and clumsy at 2 a.m. during an actual outage. So here’s exactly how something ends up recommended on this site — and where I’m honest about the stuff I haven’t run through a real outage yet.
The notebook
Every product that comes through here gets a page in a physical notebook before it gets a page on this site — date it arrived, what it claims, what it actually did. I still don’t fully trust a runtime number I didn’t write down myself. A power station box says “runs a fridge for 36 hours.” My notebook says what my fridge, on my kitchen circuit, actually got out of it. Those two numbers are not always the same number, and the gap is usually the most useful thing in the review.
Where testing happens
Mostly the garage workbench and the kitchen, because that’s where this gear actually lives during a real outage — not a lab, not a warehouse. Bigger gear (generators, whole-home surge protection) gets tested outside, at a safe distance from the house, the same way I’d tell you to run it. Water filters get run against the actual tap water and rain runoff available to a Fort Worth suburb, not a sanitized test rig.
The Tuesday Drill
Twice a year, Karen, Tyler, Emma, and I kill the main breaker on a random weeknight and live off whatever’s in the readiness plan for the evening — no warning, no exceptions, phones on airplane mode unless something’s actually charging off a power station. The kids hate it, which is its own kind of proof that it’s working: if two teenagers can get through a fake outage without a full-blown mutiny, the plan holds up. Gear that survives a Tuesday Drill with three skeptical family members and a dog is gear I trust enough to put in front of you.
What I measure
Numbers over adjectives, always:
| Power stations / generators | Actual runtime against a named load (fridge, CPAP, sump pump), recharge time, noise in decibels at 10 feet, real-world price against the claimed price |
| Water filters / purification | Flow rate under real use, taste, how many gallons before a filter change, cost per gallon over a year |
| Food kits | Taste test with the actual family (Tyler is the harshest critic in the house), calories per day delivered, real shelf life vs. claimed shelf life |
| Radios, lanterns, small gear | Battery life under continuous use, how it performs in the cold (Texas winters are short but they happen), how it holds up dropped on a garage floor — because it will be |
When something hasn’t been tested yet
I don’t own every product worth knowing about, and I’m not going to pretend I do. When a review says “my testing,” it means the item went through the process above in my own house. When it hasn’t, the article says so plainly near the top and works instead from the manufacturer’s specs plus verified owner reports — forum threads, retailer reviews with photos, other testers whose methodology I can actually see. That distinction stays in every review, on purpose. Blurring “I tested this” and “here’s what the specs say” is exactly the kind of thing that makes a site untrustworthy, and I’d rather lose a sale than lose that.
What disqualifies a product before testing even starts
Some categories don’t make it to the workbench regardless of commission: weapons and ammunition, and anything marketed as “EMP-proof” or similarly miracle-grade with no real engineering behind the claim. If a product’s marketing leans on fear instead of performance, that’s a red flag before I’ve even opened the box.
What testing doesn’t decide
Testing tells me what a product does. It doesn’t decide whether it makes it into a review favorably — a product that disappoints in testing gets written up as disappointing, including ones I have an affiliate relationship with. See the Editorial & Affiliate Policy for how the money side stays separate from the verdict.
All the gear reviews built this way are collected in Gear Reviews. If you’ve tested something in this category yourself and my numbers don’t match yours, I want to hear about it — email hello@readyhomereport.com.
General preparedness education, not a substitute for official guidance. In any emergency, follow instructions from local authorities first.