Digital TV & Converter Boxes

[OakLeaf]

It's as good an assumption as the other. No, you can't ever count on any information being available, but we've lived here for 11 years and never lost phone ONCE. (Granted we're on REC power, so electrical outages of more than a couple of hours are rare - our recent outage of 2-1/2 days with Hurricane Ike was the longest ever, before that the longest was 18 hours.) But in all that time we've NEVER lost phone. There was the ONE time this year that we lost DSL for a few hours due to a substation outage that serviced the phone company switching station, but we still had one of our phone lines. (Some cellular service went out also, but not ours.) DH rode out Hurricane Jeanne in '04 and never lost landline phone, even when electric and cellular went out for a couple of days.

And you have to conserve power when the grid is down, whether or not it's renewable - it's just like living off-grid full time. In tornado or ice storm weather your solar panels aren't getting a whole lot of input - you don't want to drain your batteries and risk not having water the next day. (At least in ice storm weather you shouldn't have to power your refr )

[Zen]

Radio.
Batteries.
Oil lamps.
Sterno or other camp style cooking.
Many layers of clothing.

[Tuckervill]

For breaking news, I find the broadcast news to be much more on the spot than their internet sites in my area. During serious events (tornadoes hit Arkansas hard this year), the newscasters were on 24/7 and were able to give more information. The internet was not updated until the day after or later.

But, for the finer details--the interviews, the pictures, the death toll , the internet was better--after a few days.

I'm with Zen. We don't have a fireplace in the house, but we have a big woodstove in our shop. If it's still standing after an ice storm (lots of trees around it), we'd just move out there and heat that place up and get into the camping equipment. Tornadoes don't usually happen when it's freezing cold, though, so we'd just move out in the yard.

Karen