Where To Begin
Start Here
If your house has never gone more than a few hours without power, this is the route. Six steps, in the order a house actually fails.
Most people work on this backwards. They buy a generator first, then find out on the second cold night that it will not start the well pump, and only then go looking for what “starting watts” means. The route below runs in the order a house comes apart: first you measure what yours draws, then you keep electricity available, then water, then heat, then food, and finally the part nobody enjoys planning.
Why the order matters more than the gear
A house with a well and a septic tank is a chain of dependencies, and almost every link runs on electricity. The well pump needs it. The gas furnace needs it, because the blower and the control board draw current even though the fuel is propane or natural gas. The septic pump, if you have one, needs it. Lose power and you have not lost one system; you have lost five, in a sequence that starts within minutes and gets worse over days.
That is why every step here depends on the one before it. Buying a battery station before you know your refrigerator’s daily watt-hours is guessing. Storing 200 gallons of water before you know whether your pipes will freeze is solving the wrong problem. Work through the six steps in order and each purchase is sized by the one that came before.
The six-step route
1. Audit your loads
Buy a plug-in energy meter for around $25 at the time of writing and spend a week measuring. You want two numbers per appliance: running watts and daily watt-hours. Then find the plate on your well pump and your furnace. A modern refrigerator runs at roughly 100-200 W and uses about 1-2 kWh per day; a 1/2 HP submersible well pump can demand 2,000-3,000 W for a second or two at startup even though it runs on far less. Those surge numbers decide what you can and cannot buy later. Everything downstream is arithmetic once you have this list.
2. Power
Now you can choose honestly between a battery station, a portable inverter generator, and a standby unit on a transfer switch. The audit tells you whether you are covering a refrigerator and some lights or trying to run the whole house including the well. Do this before water, because in most of these houses water is an electrical problem. Start at Power & Backup.
3. Water
With the power question settled, decide what happens when you cannot or do not want to run the pump. That means stored water for the first days, a way to lift water from the well without the grid, and filtration for anything that comes off a roof or out of a creek. Storage is cheap and boring and it is the single best value in this whole list. See Water.
4. Heat
In a cold climate this step outranks food. A house that drops below freezing does not just make you uncomfortable, it splits supply lines and ruins drywall, and the repair bill dwarfs anything else on this page. Work out how to keep one room habitable and the plumbing above freezing, and read the carbon monoxide rules before you buy any combustion heater. See Heat & Cold.
5. Food
A full freezer holds safe temperature for roughly 48 hours unopened, about 24 hours if it is half empty (USDA). After that you are into shelf-stable storage, and the honest question is not how many buckets you own but whether you eat the food you store. Build the pantry you actually cook from first, then extend it. See Food Storage, and if you want to produce some of it yourself, Grow Your Own.
6. Sanitation
Last on the list, first to become unpleasant. If your septic tank has a pump, or if you have no water to flush with, you need a plan by day two. It is inexpensive to solve and almost universally ignored. See Sanitation.
What a sensible first year costs
These are rough ranges at the time of writing, for a single-family house with a well. They are meant to set expectations, not to be a shopping list.
| Step | Typical spend | What it buys you |
|---|---|---|
| Load audit | around $25-50 | Real numbers instead of guesses |
| Power | $300-$1,500 (portable) · $4,000-$12,000 installed (standby) | Hours to days of critical loads |
| Water | $100-$400 (storage + filter) · $1,000-$2,500 (deep-well hand pump) | 1-2 weeks of drinking and washing |
| Heat | $150-$600 (space heat + CO alarms) | One warm room, pipes intact |
| Food | $200-$800 | 2-4 weeks of food you already eat |
| Sanitation | $50-$1,200 | A usable toilet with no running water |
Three mistakes that cost the most
- Buying by running watts. Motors — well pumps, freezers, furnace blowers — draw several times their running load for a moment at startup. A generator sized on running watts will trip and you will blame the generator.
- Backfeeding through an extension cord or a dryer plug. It energizes the utility line outside your house and it kills line workers. Use an interlock kit or a transfer switch, installed by an electrician.
- Running combustion indoors. Camp stoves, charcoal, and unvented generators produce carbon monoxide that you cannot smell. Only heaters rated for indoor use, and working alarms on every level.
Once the six steps are covered, the useful next questions are structural rather than tactical: which parts of your specific house fail first, covered in The House, and how the plan changes for a two-week ice storm versus a wildfire evacuation, covered in By Scenario. If you want the gear conclusions without the theory, the Reviews section has them, and Health & Safety covers the injuries that actually happen during outages.
Latest in this section
- Start Here: The First Five Things to Fix
What to do first, in order of return: carbon monoxide detectors, stored water, a load audit, backup heat and a bucket toilet. Under $200 and one weekend. - Emergency Preparedness for a House With Land
Emergency preparedness for a house with land: your well, septic and propane change the whole plan. Where to start, in order, and what to skip until later.