One List That Covers the Whole Dark Stretch

Person-days: the one number the whole plan hangs on

Multiply the people by the days and you have the true unit of outage planning. Water, food, lighting and patience are all consumed per person per day. Nothing on the list scales any other way.

Four people across five days is twenty person-days. At four litres of water each, that is eighty litres before anyone asks where it will be stored. At three meals, sixty ready dinners. The arithmetic is relentless and completely honest.

The number also shrinks kindly. Two people planning a weekend storm is six person-days, twenty-four litres, eighteen meals. A list that sounds heroic for a family is a supermarket trolley for a couple. Person-days is why the planner asks for two inputs before anything else.

Where the two calculators here overlap, this is the split. The backup power planner answers how long your batteries run your appliances. This tool answers what the household itself consumes, of which lighting is only one line. Electrons for machines on that side, provisions for people on this one.

• Every need in an outage is per person, per day. Scale honestly from person-days.
• Totals decide the shopping. Daily rates decide the living.
• Two inputs before anything else: who is there, and how long.

Water is the number that moves people to act

Three litres per person per day is the drinking floor from every serious guideline. It sounds generous until you watch a family of four go through twelve litres on a hot day where everyone also wants a shower's worth of reassurance.

The planner's default adds a fourth litre for cooking and basic washing. If your taps still run when the power is out, you can set the rate back to three and let the stored water cover drinking and the fragile days after.

Eighty litres for the five-day family plan is heavy, and that is information worth having before you buy. Bulk drums fill the volume cheaply. Cases of bottles solve the first two days and travel well. Most households need both roles filled.

And water is the line that punishes guessing worst. Meals can stretch, light can dim, but thirst has no negotiation phase. If the arithmetic produces a number that feels alarmingly large, the feeling is the tool working, not misfiring.

Meals that count, and meals that quietly do not

Only food that needs no cooking, no refrigeration and no clean-water sacrifice counts toward the plan's meal total. Tinned stews, ready grains, nut butters, dried fruit, the biscuits that buy goodwill with children. A cupboard of pantry staples is not an outage plan.

Three meals per person per day is the default, and two honestly works if snacks bridge the gaps. What matters is that the number you enter is the number you will actually face at one in the morning, not the number that photographs well.

Hot food has its own quiet budget. A camping stove needs fuel, and fuel needs ventilation, which rules out most apartments. If hot meals matter to your plan, count the stove and the canisters as gear, and let the meal total stay no-cook.

Fridge food is the exception that expires early. Everything in it belongs to the first two days after power loss, per the cold-food guidance in the blog here. Plan the sixty meals without it, and treat it as a bonus window, not a column of the list.

Lighting energy, the line everyone forgets to stock

Five lit hours a night at six watts is thirty watt-hours per evening. Across five nights that is one hundred and fifty watt-hours. It is a figure big enough to matter and small enough to solve with a single modest power bank or one charged station.

This is the only line on the list that is energy rather than consumables, which is why it gets missed. Water you can see. Meals you can count. The lighting budget lives in battery percentage, invisible until the lantern dims mid-sentence on night three.

The fix is behavioural as much as electrical. One lantern in the room people actually share, torches for movement, and a lit-hours agreement the household has genuinely made. Every hour you cut from the plan is watt-hours you keep.

Compare the total against what you own before the storm. If the one hundred and fifty watt-hours exceeds your charged capacity, the choice is a bigger bank, fewer lit hours, or the cheap brilliance of the headlamp. The planner keeps the score while you argue.

Living on the plan: pacing, revising, and staying honest

The daily rhythm is the coping mechanism. Sixteen litres, twelve meals and thirty watt-hours, per day, forever feels survivable. The same numbers as a single pile feel like a siege, and sieges cause the mistakes: drinking ahead, eating ahead, lighting the room like a stage.

Set the pace visibly. A marker on the water drums, a bag of the day's meals, one charge session per day for the lighting. Households that pace together run the plan; households that ration ad hoc invent resentments instead.

Revise the inputs when reality teaches you. A first night used six lit hours, not five. The kids ate the snack stock by evening two. Every real mini-outage is a calibration event. Put the honest numbers back in and the next plan is better than this one.

Finally, keep the plan beside the power tools rather than competing with them. This list sizes what people consume. The backup planner sizes what machines run. The food calculator goes deeper on the meals. Each answers a different question, and a household holding all three simply sleeps better.