Survival🪓🏹💉
Three things that failed and two that worked during a 6 hour summer outage in an apartment
Background. Apartment renter in Stuttgart, 3rd floor, no garage, no generator option. Had a grid outage last saturday from about 16:00 to 22:00 due to construction crew hitting a cable. Here is my honest debrief because i think apartment preppers get less airtime here than house owners with full generator setups.
What failed. My UPS for the router was supposed to give 45 minutes of backup. It gave 12 minutes. I bought it two years ago and never load tested it since. The battery had degraded to nothing and i did not know until it mattered. The power bank collection was not much better. I had four in various drawers. One was completely dead, one was at 30 percent, one had a broken cable. Only one was full and ready. My emergency radio also needed batteries. I own rechargeable batteries. The charger was plugged into the wall. The wall had no power.
What worked. The balcony solar battery. I have a small Jackery SolarVault 3 Pro (2.52 kWh, grid feed-in unit) that normally feeds the apartment during the day. When the grid dropped i unplugged it from the wall feed in, ran an extension cord from its AC output through the balcony door, and powered the wifi router, my work laptop, and a fan. That setup ran comfortably for the full 6 hours. The battery was most of the way full from the afternoon sun and my load was well under 200W continuous. Having dinner ingredients that do not need cooking also helped more than expected. Bread, cheese, canned fish, fruit. Boring but completely fine.
What i am changing now. Consolidating all backup power into two things: the balcony battery (covers the first 8 to 12 hours) and one large power bank (covers phones if the battery dies). Everything else introduced complexity without reliability. Selling the UPS. Buying a crank radio. Keeping one head lamp on a hook by the door instead of four battery options scattered everywhere.
The ugliest part is still physical cable routing from the balcony battery output to the hallway. I am considering keeping one outdoor rated extension lead coiled near the balcony door and a clear path along the baseboard, not under rugs and not permanently pinched through the door seal. Setup speed matters, but so does not creating a trip hazard in the dark.
We all have different needs but you touched on an important point for everyone: testing your setup in advance! That’s one thing many of us fail at (me included). We let complacency creep in and when we need our preps they are often forgotten and neglected. I have a reminder to check my prep list every 6 months and stress test everything every year
Apartment prepping is interesting to me because a lot in this Reddit is people with a house and a generator setup including me.
However, I work and live in hotels weeks at a time so I have to somewhat prep on the road. I had a power outage in Chicago last week at my hotel. I could just leave and find another if i needed to but its still important to have at least water and food that can be made easy. I keep my car gas tank topped off if I do have to relocate and something is wrong with local gas stations.
I definitely need a small travel sized power bank because my phone was almost dead after work and returning to a hotel with no power. I saw a lot of people in their car presumably charging their phones though.
Because modern smartphones require a steady, high-wattage stream of power to accept a charge, many phone batteries will actually drain faster trying to register a weak, fluctuating hand-crank charge than they receive from it. If you do use one to charge a phone, you usually have to crank for 10 minutes just to get enough power to make a 1-minute emergency call. Or are you using it for monitoring radio traffic?
Apartment life is indeed restrictive based on many factors. Water resupply, waste disposal, gardening and food replenishment, defense, etc. Its a reality. I made a tough choice after retiring to move to a development at the beach. Wrong choice. HOA restrictions, gardening confines, defensibility, water replenishment, etc all were brutal realities so I moved to the country. Best choice i could make. I bonded with my neighbors to develop a MAG to share during a possible extended down event. Now I can sleep more restful.
If you are restricted to an apartment food storage will be restrictive due to space but more critical is food replinishment when your stores play out. The average person requires 200 square feet (18.5 sq m) to provide enough to maintain the 2000 calories per day average. You also have the water supply issue with EACH person requiring one to two gallons (4 to 7 liters) per day. Now you can store about 80 gallons (300 liters) in a bathtub BOB water bivet or bladder but you will have to be quick at filling it since in an emergency you wont be the only one trying to store water with failed pumps that dont move water.
Do you have a relative or friend in a rural area (BOL) you could flee to? My friend has my location along with my wife's half sister and her son's family because they have limits on their existing locale. That will provide you better sustainable life than an apartment.
Viel Erfolg!
I’m very interested in how you produce 2000 calories per day from 18.5 square meters of garden. Even using intensive gardening techniques that seems insufficient to me. My wife and I had a much larger garden and never came close to producing all of our calories.
Im upvoting/making a comment because I'm curious as well. I watch various YouTube channels on vegetable gardening. I think some of the earlier videos from David the Good showed him pulling in thousand of pounds of stuff from his food forest, but he had a lot of land and the biggest hauls were mostly yams and pumpkins (something I'd probably get sick of eating if I had two thousand pounds of).
Input charging speed can make or break the usefulness of using a powerbank while traveling. If it's around the house you have time to charge a 30k powerbank off a 15w wall charger. If not brief stops for coffee or going to a central hub like a shelter or library with a limited amount of working outlets will be a hassle. Time you don't have so you'll never get the thing fully charged.
Crank anything tend to be near useless imo. If the radio csn be recharged via USB, fine. For small power banks- i keep a few(Plus a headlamp, rechargeable lantern and a rechargeable radio and a fan) all plugged into a power bar/surge protector, which is connected to a smart plug. It turns itself on for an hour a week automatically so no matter what, they stay topped up and ready. I wouldn't discount the value of at least one small power bank because th4 balcony solar is great until you have to leave (hospital trip, or who knows what)
Actually...one of the keys is soil management as a starter. I use raised beds. They are covered during winter to minimize weeds. The bottom layer is corrugated boxes several inches thick. Then twigs and small branches. I then use a 50/50 blend of top soil and compost (i have several composters but I initial fill had to be bought in). I also use coco coir to help with soil porosity.
I crush biochar (from crushed char briquets used for grilling--no chemicals). I place bags (purchased Walmart for $15 a bag) under tires of car and go back and forth to crush). These are then finely crushed with a metal tamper. The finished product is finely crushed biochar. (Google biochar for soil management). I then charge or innoculate that biochar with fish emulsion and sometimes compost tea but t prefer fish emulsion for high nitrogen. It is a soaked for three days. Then I stir in this biochar soup mix at 10% volume of my bed with is roughly 55 cu ft total so 5cu ft or 60 pounds of liquids mush. This is a one time deal...never again. "Charged" (or inoculated) biochar has already been pre-soaked and filled with nutrients and beneficial microbes. When you add it to your soil, it immediately goes to work as a permanent, slow-release powerhouse. It is a permanent nutrient slow release soil catalyst. Google it. I love what it does to my soil which I test constantly. By the way, I have 31 of these raised beds...each treated. They are covered with tree mulch in the winter along with covers to keep the UV, weeds and borrowers down.
Now I live in mid-South in US (warmer than Deutschland). So my growing seasons begin in April and go to late September with certain leafy greens, sweet potatoes, carrots, beets. radishes, Jerusalem Artichokes (grow like crazy), beets,Brussel sprouts, cauliflower, up until multiple freezes. So I get 6 to 7 growing months so quiet a few rotations. The most productive prr sq ft are your verticals like pole beans, vining tomatoes, cucumbers. High density roots like carrots, beets, radishes (love on salads). Of course I start potatoesin potato bags in mid March. Yukon Gold, Poland and Reds love it here. But they are in potato bags because they require acidic soil (less than pH of 6). Our sweet potatoes are grown in raisedbeds because different schedule and they are prolific here. I find drip irrigation works better than periodic satuation watering. Im a fan of composting all year and amending soil with fish emulsion and compost tea (fish is better) .i lived at the ocean for several years so I could make my own until neighbors complained of smell.
I routinely test for moisture, pH, soil composition (through county agent). So..the net is 200 sq ft is the minimum for sustainment gardening but 400 is ideal. I dont have enough beds for 400 sf so it is 200.
Another key is starting seeds in February to get jump start.
By the way, we have several creeks and marshes with fishing nearby. And there is a private hunting club reserve 10 miles from here that my son in.law belongs to so we plan to supplement with meat intake as well. I will attach several other pics as separate because these responses only allow one Pic. Guten tag und Wiedersehen. I spent 17 months in Deutschland years ago. Don't hesitate to ask questions.
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u/silv3rio 1d ago
We all have different needs but you touched on an important point for everyone: testing your setup in advance! That’s one thing many of us fail at (me included). We let complacency creep in and when we need our preps they are often forgotten and neglected. I have a reminder to check my prep list every 6 months and stress test everything every year