By Lou Dolinar
Updated Feb. 14, 2006

I've coped with a few regional blackouts, going back to 1977, when I lived through a riot in Brooklyn, to more recent ones out here on Fire Island, where I've mostly worried about keeping my Internet connection alive.

Blackouts make for interesting benchmarks in the development of technology. Back in 1977, we took precautions to have light. Now it's cell phones, computers and Internet. There are also a number of new technologies and products that can help bail us out.

Take my new Pelican flashlight, for example, a tiny gem that dangles from my keychain. A product of the semiconductor revolution, it uses an ultra efficient LED (Light Emitting Diode) bulb, still relatively rare, that lasts practically forever and will run over 100 hours on four 1.5-volt LR44 alkaline button cells. Cost? 16 bucks, a tad pricey for an ordinary flashlight, but I imagine there were a few folks trapped in subways who would have gladly paid ten times that. You definitely want one for your purse or pocket, and you'll find reviews of your options at Equipped to Survive , a non-nutty emergency preparedness site. If cost is no object, look at models that can use lithium ion batteries--not only do these last longer than alkaline models, they can be stored for a decade with almost no loss of power.

As with most nacent tech phenomena, LEDs have their own charming web site at the LED Museum. The efficiency of LEDs, by most accounts, make them The Next Big Thing and the odds-on favorite to replace many other forms of lighting, assuming that costs come down and production ramps up.

How about that cell phone? As many of us have discovered, communications is second only to light as a high-value commodity during blackouts. As with my LED flashlight, I had another little technical trick up my sleeve: An oversize aftermarket battery pack. These can double or even triple the life of your cell phone with little penalty, and are widely available via Internet discounters for substantially less than you'd pay at the store that sold you your cell phone. For popular phones like my Motorola T720, you'll usually find both OEM batteries and somewhat cheaper models from other companies. Here are some examples from Cellphone Battery Warehouse, where I bought my last set: Standard OEM battery, rated at 500 milliamp hours (mAh), a measure of longevity, $23.95; Extended OEM battery, 1100 mAh, $52.95; non-OEM, 1400 mAh, $36.95. The oversize batteries usually bulge out a tad from the body of the phone. Some cell phones will also accept bulky piggyback units that allow for two batteries to be used simultaneously. Oh, and while you're battery shopping take a look at your options in chargers, too, you'll often find non-OEM units that can charge two batteries at once.

Another trick: with a special connector, a laptop's USB port can recharge or directly power many cell phones and PDAs. Depending on the model, you may even be able to get software that lets you download your phone book to the phone, and back up entries you make on the road to your laptop. There's also software that will let you use your cell phone as a modem in a pinch. If you're looking to upgrade the capacity of your laptop, you might also take a look at the pricey ($300 and up) plate-style auxiliary batteries that fit beneath your computer and give you another 2 to five hours of computing time.

If you're relying on POTS (plain old telephone service) be very afraid. Time was, a blackout wouldn't knock it out. Every home had a corded phone that drew its power from phone lines; the wireless phone, which needs household current, was a convenient accessory. Today, most homes have gone completely wireless, which requires 24/7 AC, and have no service during a blackout. Trust me, you don’t want to go looking for an old corded phone in the attic in the dark; you should have at least one of these old timers plugged into a phone jack permanently.

Voice over IP, aka Internet telephony, is another potential “Oops!” This service--including the stuff provided by cable companies--will fail during a power outage, taking with it various ancillary services, including your cable modem, enhanced 911, security system hookups, and emergency medical alert systems. Even though conventional phone company service will still work (assuming it is of the wired variety), the DSL modems that run off the same lines are useless too.

So what are you supposed to do? In a pinch, improvise. Assuming you've got a laptop, power off your desktop systems and use the UPS to run a bare minimum of tech. Last time this happened, I had the batteries from three UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supplies) at my disposal. Now most UPS, contrary to their name, aren't designed to provide emergency power. Rather, they're supposed to be coupled with software that runs on your PC and that senses when the power's goes out. At that point, the software saves what you're doing, and gracefully shuts down the PC. You have, maybe, ten minutes with the typical UPS and desktop system. You'll do a little better with a flat-panel LCD display, which typically uses a little less than half the power of a CRT display.

On the other hand, if you're got a smaller load, you can stretch your backup battery time accordingly, and those batteries can operate cell phones and radios. Before I bought a stand-alone battery for emergencies, I was good for about two hours with my laptop battery, and I could operate my DSL modem at least that long on UPS power. You can do the same if you uplug your router, your wireless access point, your wireless PC card (a real battery killer), and connect the laptop directly to the DSL modem for minimal power consumption.

You may wonder, at this point, why a dedicated Fire Island survivalist hasn't invested in an emergency generator. Well, these things have their place, I suppose. But generators need regular maintenance and testing, or you can't count on them working when needed. Since my basement is a swamp--literally--I'm not real confident in how a four-cycle engine will fare there over a couple years.

Besides, I have all the light I need, thanks to the ultimate low-tech device I installed a couple of years back to cope with the presumed Y2K emergence: A built-in gas light, connected to my household propane system. I felt like an idiot when disaster did not materialize then, but its has served me well in other power outages by providing the equivalent of 75 watts that I can operate for a couple of weeks if necessary. As with everything else, you can find various models on the Internet, in this case at

http://www.gas-lights.com/

Here's some other places to add to your survivalist shopping:

--APC, American Power Conversion, industrial strength uninterruptible power supplies. I've been using their UPS systems for years. My favorite unit, which I still have stashed in the attic somewhere as a souvenir, saved my PC from a spectacular transformer fire a few years ago--although the innards of the poor little UPS melted to slag in the process. Their web site, repays careful reading with scads of details on how to set up a UPS, and what you can expect from it.

While you can improvise with a standard UPS, businesses are increasingly turning to long-runtime models that can keep mission-critical PCs going for 24 hours or more after the power fails. An extreme example is the APC Smart-UPS XL 750VA ($419) with three add-on battery packs ($2500) which can operate two PCs for roughly for 35 hours.

There are also less expensive options you can afford. The $299 Back UPS RS-1500 High Capacity will power a standard desktop PC, with CRT, for about three hours, and can operate as long as 6 hours with an optional $150 add on battery. If you take the path I did, and plug in your laptop after you shut down your desktop machine, you'll have enough juice for a full day's work, even if you also are running a broadband modem and charging your cell phone from the UPS.

"It's almost like having your own little generator," Patrick Donovan of APC's consumer unit says. If you're interested in creating a sophisticated setup like this for your home, or more likely, for a small business, there are scads of charts on the APC website that list capacity and runtime for various models and loads.

(As an aside here, these more expensive UPS units are better at dealing with another kind of chronic power problem, brownouts, which are prolonged periods of low voltage. Cheap UPS, which can be had for as little as $35, switches you to battery backup in a brownout. As with a blackout, you have time to save your work and shut down the computer, but you're not going to be able to keep working because the battery discharges quickly. For long term use in a brownout, you need a UPS that incorporates voltage regulation--basically it steps up voltage to a computer-friendly level without getting the battery involved. These kinds of UPS can keep you going through a day-long brownout, which are generally more of a problem than surges and spikes.)

The other nice thing about UPS-based backup electricity is that you can set it up and forget about it, with your only worry being to change the batteries every three to five years (the better units tell you when). But for the real power freak, there are less pricey, more powerful solutions.

Enter Xantrex, which specializes in more generic battery backup for all kinds of 120 volt AC equipment. These units don't have the sophisticated protection and power management functions you need in a computer UPS, but do offer longer run times, more power, and lower prices. The Powerpack 300, at $99, is portable, can be used to restart a car or operate a laptop for about 6 hours, or a small fluorescent lamp for 10 hours. You can charge it from a wall outlet, or from your car, running at idle. Their top of the line unit, the Powerpack 1500, $369, is a little wheeled gadget that has enough kick to run a microwave or power a refrigerator. (How long you can operate a refrigerators is tricky to calculate. If you rarely open the door, you can probably keep food cold enough, or frozen for 8 to 12 without any power. A unit like the Powerpack 1500 can probably stretch that to a day or so.) In a pinch, you can use jumper cables to connect it to an aftermarket battery and double or triple its capacity.

The serious survivalist--or the prudent small businessman--might take a further look at the Xantrex.com site for more elaborate solutions. According to Lawrence Neill; director of sales for consumer products, a fair number of their customers use their hardware to build custom systems that combine high-capacity inverters and banks of deep-cycle marine batteries, with solar cells or generators to charge whole shebang. These systems allow you to live completely off the grid for days at a time.