Young: I can’t live without power

It’s a good thing I was born when I was, and that I live in the era that I do, because I don’t think I could have survived before electricity. 

We lost power at home for a little over 24 hours after the severe thunderstorms went through early Thursday morning. It was not pleasant. 

Firstly, I’m 40 years old. I’m currently living in the second house I’ve owned. I lived in three houses growing up, and my wife and I have rented two other places. I’ve paid my dues living in homes without central air conditioning, and I now own a home that has it. Yes, I am now spoiled, but darn it, when it’s hot out, I want to be able to come into my house and set the thermostat to “refrigerator” and be happy. 

Fortunately the storm didn’t knock out power a day earlier, when temperatures approached 100 degrees. But it was warm enough, to the point that last night I went to bed with a miniature USB fan plugged into a spare power bank so I could at least cool off slightly. 

And that, right there, should tell you all you need to know about how I function without electricity. I have a lot of gadgets, and those gadgets run on electricity. Without it, I have to either conserve power, or live without, and that is not something I want to do. 

I’m one of those people who is paranoid about running out of power when there aren’t outages. My phone never goes below 50%. I plug things in whenever possible, because my worst nightmare is going to use one of my devices and finding out it’s dead (OK, that’s a little extreme, but not entirely inaccurate). 

I used to have a bunch of power banks, which were all kept fully charged and ready to go if needed. But over the years, the battery technology has gotten a lot better, to the point that I can just charge everything at night. Which I do, every night. I literally have a charging table right next to my bed, and I plug my phone and my iPad and my Apple Watch in before I go to sleep very single night. 

So because everything holds its charge all day long, I don’t have an abundance of battery packs and power banks laying around anymore. So when the power goes out, I go into a slight panic. 

What I usually end up doing is going into ultra-conserve mode, in which I hardly use anything because I’m afraid of running it out of battery. However, Thursday I had to work, so I had to use my computer and also my phone as a hotspot. Neither dropped below 70% battery, but as soon as I knew the power wasn’t going to come back on during the workday, I took a trip to the library and recharged everything. 

My wife, whose devices die constantly because she never charges them, thinks I’m crazy. 

Several years ago, when we purchased our first home, it came with a generator that was supposed to power the entire house. 

We had a really bad ice storm that knocked out power to the entire town. After fighting with the generator for a couple of hours to get it working, I discovered that it had some issue and would not power the entire house. So that left us having to run extension cords to the things that were important enough for us to keep running. 

My first extension cord ran to the Wi-Fi router. Once that was working properly, I ran a second cord to a portable heater so we could keep warm. 

My wife thought my priorities were flawed. This was more than 10 years ago, and she still brings it up. I guess the truth is I’d rather be connected than warm. 

So this time around, I told my wife that ironically enough, the day before our power went out, I had seen a YouTube review about a giant portable power station, which is basically a giant battery that acts as a generator but without the generator part. I’ve been thinking about getting one, and if we were a camping family I probably would have one, but the need for a massive amount of portable power isn’t that great for us. 

As I was explaining the power station’s capacity, I said it could charge a laptop 15 times without dying. 

“You’re priorities are messed up,” she said, adding that for us with the power out in the middle of summer, it would be more important to power, say, the refrigerator than my laptop. 

“I wasn’t saying I’d charge my laptop first,” I lied. “I was just using that as an example of the capacity.”

She, of course, did not believe me, and she’s not wrong. 

I may have a problem. 

Eric Young is the editor of the Huron Daily Tribune. He can be reached at eric.young@hearstnp.com.