🔌 The Utility That Goes Out With the Lights
A man who has got himself ready for a storm can generally tell you the whole of it. So many gallons of water. Batteries, and the right sizes. Fuel in the truck and fuel in the cans. A can opener that does not need a wall socket, which is a small thing he is rightly pleased with, because most people have not thought of it.
Ask him what time it is on the third morning.
Time comes into a house the way the water and the heat do — from somewhere else, along a line, without anybody giving it a thought. There is a clock in the stove. There is one in the microwave, and one in the cable box, and one on the thermostat, and one in the coffee maker that blinks at you every spring when the hour changes. Every last one of them is fed off the same wire that runs in from the pole. So is the telephone, in the end, because the telephone is charged from the wall.
When the power goes, all of it goes. Every clock in the house, in every room, at the same instant.
And it goes quietly, which is the whole trouble. Nobody stands in a dark kitchen and announces that he no longer knows what time it is. Of course he knows. He was awake five minutes ago. He goes on knowing, near enough, all that day and most of the next one, and it is somewhere out past the second night that the knowing quietly stops being true — and by then there is nothing left in the house to check it against.
For the ordinary outage, none of this matters and this page is not for you. Most interruptions are over before supper. The Energy Information Administration puts the average American customer at about eleven hours without power across the whole of 2024 — and that was a bad year, nearly double the average of the ten before it, with roughly nine of those hours coming from major storms and eighty percent of them from just three hurricanes.
Take the storms out and the ordinary run of outages comes to about two hours a year. Two hours does not require a plan.
This page is about the other kind. Helene alone took the power away from 5.9 million customers across ten states, and some of them counted the days on their fingers.
🥩 Every Rule You Are Given Is Measured in Hours
Let me show you why this is a real problem and not a curiosity, and I will do it with your refrigerator, because everybody has one and everybody has been told the rule.
It is good advice, and it is the same advice from three separate agencies — the Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration, and the CDC. A refrigerator with the door kept shut holds food safe for about four hours. A full freezer holds for about forty-eight hours, and a half-full one for about twenty-four. Anything that still has ice crystals in it, or reads forty degrees or below, may be safely refrozen.
Now read it again and count what kind of thing each of those is.
Four hours. Forty-eight hours. Twenty-four hours. There is not one word in there about how a thing looks or how it smells. In fact the same agencies tell you plainly never to taste food to find out whether it is safe, because it will not tell you — a chicken thigh that will put you in the hospital tastes exactly like a chicken thigh.
Every one of those rules is a stopwatch. It started running the moment the lights went out.
And you were not looking at a clock when that happened, because nobody ever is.
It gets narrower once the food is out on the counter. The FDA puts perishable food left standing at room temperature at two hours — and one hour if it is above ninety degrees. After a Gulf storm in August it is above ninety by nine in the morning. So the difference between something you eat and something you carry out to the bin is a single hour, on a day when the clock on the stove is blank and the phone is dead in a drawer.
The same shape turns up in the medicine cabinet, and there it is a good deal more serious than a chicken thigh. Twice a day. Every eight hours. Every twelve. Those intervals are not approximate and they were not chosen for tidiness.
Nothing on this page is medical advice and none of it tells you what to do about your own prescriptions. That is a conversation for the pharmacist who filled them or the doctor who wrote them, and it is worth having before a storm rather than during one. Do not skip, double, guess at or re-time any medication on the strength of a website.
The only point being made here is a plain one: every eight hours is an instruction that cannot be followed by a household that does not know what hour it is.
The rest of the list is the same story. A generator has a run time and a refuelling interval. A battery has an hour count. A cooler with ice in it is a countdown, and dry ice is fifty pounds for about two days in an eighteen-cubic-foot freezer. Every number a person is handed in an emergency is a duration, and a duration is useless to somebody who did not write down when it started.
The cheapest thing on this whole page is a pencil. When the lights go out, write the time on a scrap of paper and stick it to the refrigerator door. That single line turns the four-hour rule from a guess into arithmetic, and it costs nothing, and almost nobody does it.
Our food spoilage timer does the arithmetic for you once you have the hour — but it cannot invent the hour, and neither can anything else.
📅 The Hour Goes First. The Day Goes Further.
By the third or fourth morning most people have made a rough peace with the hour. The sun does that much for you. It is up, so it is morning; it is overhead, so it is the middle of the day; the light is going, so it is getting on for evening. It is not accurate, but it is honest, and for a good many purposes it is enough.
Nothing in the sky tells you it is a Thursday.
The days in a long outage are identical to one another in a way that ordinary days never are. Nobody goes to work. There is no post. The television does not come on to tell you what night it is. Every morning has the same job in it as the last one — water, ice, the generator, the neighbours, food, dark by seven — and after four or five of those in a row, an entire street will disagree about what day it is and every one of them will be certain.
I have no figure for that and I am not going to invent one. Nobody counts it. But ask anybody who has been through a bad week and they will tell you the same thing, usually laughing, because it sounds foolish afterwards and it did not feel foolish at all at the time.
Here is what is hanging on it. The pharmacy reopens on a particular day. Dialysis is three mornings a week and the mornings are not negotiable. A son is driving down on Saturday. The bank opens Monday, and the FEMA people are at the church on Wednesday, and the specialist appointment that took four months to get is on the eleventh, and the woman who made it is now not entirely sure whether the eleventh has already gone by.
The fix costs about two dollars and it does not have a battery in it.
Hang a paper wall calendar in the kitchen and tie a pencil to it on a string. Cross off each morning when you get up, the same as you would water the dog.
A calendar does not do anything. That is the whole recommendation. You cross off a morning, and the next morning you cross off another one, and on the ninth day you are the only person on your street who can say for certain that it is a Thursday.
🚗 What Is Still Running in the House
Before anybody buys anything, it is worth taking stock, because a house that has lost every clock has usually not lost every clock.
🚗 The truck in the driveway
There is a clock on the dashboard and it does not care about the pole outside. There is also a radio, and radio stations announce the time. This is the best single answer in the first hour and most people walk straight past it.
📻 A battery radio
The one already in the go-bag. Stations give the time on the hour and most give it a good deal more often than that. It is also how you will hear everything else you need to hear.
⌚ Anybody's wristwatch
A quartz watch runs for years on one cell and does not know there is a storm on. If one person in the house wears a watch, the house has the time.
🏠 A neighbour
Somebody on the street has a watch, a car, or a radio. Knocking on a door is not a failure of preparation. It is how a street gets through a week.
What is not on that list is your telephone, and it belongs off the list for a reason. It is the best clock in the house right up until it is nothing at all, and the change happens on the second day, and after that it is a brick that used to know everything.
📻 The Hour Comes Out of the Air, Free, From Colorado
There is a radio station near Fort Collins, Colorado, whose entire job is to tell you what time it is. It has no music, no advertising and no opinions. It has been at it, in one form or another, since 1920, which makes it the longest continuously broadcasting station in the country.
It is called WWV, and it is run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology — the outfit that keeps the nation's atomic clocks.
WWV broadcasts on 2.5, 5, 10, 15 and 20 megahertz, twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year. Once a minute a voice reads out the time. A man's voice, from Colorado. Its sister station in Hawaii, WWVH, uses a woman's voice, so that a listener who can hear both knows which one he has got. Any general-coverage shortwave receiver picks it up.
That is the exact time, read off the national standard, arriving at your kitchen table with no wire attached to it and no bill at the end of the month.
Now the part that matters more, because most people do not own a shortwave set and are not going to buy one.
From that same site NIST runs a second transmitter, WWVB, at sixty kilohertz. There is nothing to listen to on WWVB — it is not a voice, it is a code, one pulse a second, carrying the hour, the minute, the day of the year and whether daylight saving is on. You cannot hear it and you are not meant to. What it does is set clocks, and by NIST's own reckoning it sets tens of millions of them, right across the continental United States.
Those are the ones sold in every hardware store as atomic wall clocks. They cost about twenty dollars. They run better than a year on a pair of AA batteries. And they do not merely keep time — they check themselves against an atomic clock in Colorado, generally in the small hours when the signal comes in best, and correct any drift while the house is asleep.
You do not set it. That is the entire point of it. There is no knob on the back that a man has to remember the trick of, no blinking twelve o'clock, and no argument on the second morning about whether it is quarter past eight or half past.
It is the answer to this whole page, it costs about twenty dollars, and it will sit on your kitchen wall doing nothing visible for eleven years before the week it earns its keep.
Two honest cautions, because they are the two things that trip people up.
Reception. A sixty-kilohertz signal is long-wave, and it likes a window and dislikes metal. A radio-controlled clock in a basement, a steel building or behind a foil-backed wall may never manage to sync at all. Put it on an outside wall, give it a night, and if it has not found itself by morning move it. NIST publishes a whole troubleshooting booklet on exactly this, which tells you how common the problem is.
It depends on a federal broadcast staying on the air. These stations were put up for elimination in a budget request once already, in 2019, and Congress kept the money in. If they ever did go dark, your clock would not stop — it would go on running as a perfectly good battery clock, and simply stop correcting itself, and you would be back to setting it by hand twice a year like everybody else. That is a reason to know, not a reason to skip it.
🔔 The Clock That Does Not Plug Into Anything
Now the wind-up alarm clock, which is where most people's minds go first and which deserves a fair hearing and an honest one.
It is a fine object. It needs no battery, no cord and no signal from Colorado. It was the standard article in every bedroom in America for the better part of a century, and it can be had today for somewhere around thirteen dollars.
Two things about it that the box does not mention.
It is a thirty-hour movement. That is what the trade calls a one-day clock, and it means what it says — you wind it every morning, the same as you would let the dog out. There are two springs in there, one for the time and a separate shorter one for the bell, and both want winding. A clock that has been sitting in a plastic tote since the spring is not ready for anything. It is a paperweight until somebody winds it and sets it.
Which brings up the second thing, and it is the reason this is not the first purchase on the page. A wind-up clock has to be set from something. It has no idea what time it is and it never will. Wound up in a dark kitchen on the second night, with nothing in the house to set it by, it will confidently tell you a time that somebody guessed at.
So what is it actually for? One thing, and it does that one thing better than anything else you can buy.
It rings a bell. Not a beep — a bell, with a steel hammer, loud enough to bring an entire household up out of sleep from another room. If somebody has to be awake at five to start the generator before the heat comes, or to be at the church hall when the ice truck comes at seven, that bell is the tool for the job, and a wristwatch chirping under a blanket is not.
Buy it, then run it for a week before you trust it. The cheap ones are genuinely variable — the common complaints are an alarm that does not sound and a tick loud enough that a light sleeper cannot have it in the bedroom. At thirteen dollars the sensible thing is to open the box, wind it, and stand it on the dresser for a week in ordinary times. A dud found in October is thirteen dollars. A dud found on the fourth night of an outage is the reason somebody missed the truck.
👓 What Changes When the House Is Older
Everything above happens to everybody. Three things about it land differently in a house where the people are past seventy, and none of them are about being frail.
The alarm has to be heard, not merely sounded. A wristwatch alarm is a small high beep lasting about twenty seconds, and high notes are the first ones to go. There is a whole page on this site about that. The bell on a wind-up clock is a low, hard, mechanical racket that carries through a wall, and this is one of the rare cases where the older technology is not nostalgia, it is the correct engineering.
The clock has to be readable in a room with no lamp in it. Buy the wall clock with the biggest numerals on the face you can find, in plain black on white, and put it where the daylight from the window falls on it. The glow-in-the-dark hands on cheap clocks fade out inside an hour of the lamp going off, so do not plan around them; plan around a flashlight kept in the same place every single night.
The person who most needs to know the hour is the one least able to go and find it out. If getting up to look at a clock in another room in the dark is a fall risk — and after seventy it very often is — then the clock belongs in the bedroom, at arm's reach, and the whole question stops being about telling time and starts being about not going to the floor at three in the morning.
Which is the argument this entire site is built on, wearing a different set of clothes. The thing to buy is cheap, it is boring, and the moment you need it is the one moment you cannot go out and get it.
🧰 Four Things, and None of Them Are Gadgets
In the order they matter, and the whole lot comes to well under a hundred dollars.
1. A radio-controlled wall clock — about $20
The one that sets itself off WWVB. Big plain numerals, AA batteries, an outside wall. This is the item that actually solves the problem, because it is the only one that is right without anybody having to know the time first.
2. A cheap digital watch for each person — about $15–$20
A plain one with a daily alarm. Casio rate the old F-91W at roughly seven years on a single cell, keeping time to about half a minute a month. Buy three. They live in the drawer, the truck and the go-bag, and nobody has to remember to charge one.
3. A wind-up bell alarm clock — about $13
Not for knowing the time. For waking a house. Wind it, run it for a week, and then put it where the batteries are.
4. A paper calendar and a pencil — about $2
For the day of the week, which is the failure nobody sees coming. Hang it in the kitchen, tie the pencil on a string, cross off each morning.
And one habit that costs nothing at all: when the power goes out, write the time on the pad on the refrigerator. Everything else on this page is there to make sure that number is right.
❓ Questions People Ask
How do I tell what time it is if the power is out?
The quickest answer is the clock on your car dashboard, and the next quickest is any radio station, because they announce the time. A wristwatch on anybody in the house works too. For an outage lasting more than a day or two, the reliable answer is a battery wall clock that sets itself from the NIST radio signal, because it does not depend on anybody having known the correct time when it was last set.
Do atomic wall clocks work when the power is out?
Yes. They run on ordinary AA batteries and take their time from a radio signal, so a power cut does not affect them at all. The signal comes from NIST station WWVB at sixty kilohertz near Fort Collins, Colorado, which synchronises tens of millions of clocks across the continental United States. The clock usually checks itself overnight when reception is best. The one thing that stops it is a poor location — a basement, a metal building or a foil-backed wall — so put it on an outside wall near a window.
How long will a wind-up alarm clock run on one winding?
About thirty hours, which is why the trade calls it a one-day clock. It has two separate springs, one driving the time and a shorter one driving the alarm bell, and both need winding daily. That means a wind-up clock kept in an emergency box is not ready to use until somebody winds it and sets it — and setting it requires already knowing what time it is.
How long does food stay safe in the refrigerator without power?
About four hours with the door kept shut, according to the USDA, the FDA and the CDC. A full freezer holds a safe temperature for about forty-eight hours, and a half-full one about twenty-four. Food that still has ice crystals or reads 40°F or below can be safely refrozen. Perishable food left out at room temperature goes after two hours, or after one hour if it is above 90°F. Never taste food to decide whether it is safe.
What radio station gives the exact time?
NIST station WWV, on 2.5, 5, 10, 15 and 20 MHz, broadcasts a spoken time announcement once every minute, twenty-four hours a day. It transmits from near Fort Collins, Colorado, using a man's voice. Its sister station WWVH in Hawaii uses a woman's voice so listeners can tell the two apart. Any general-coverage shortwave receiver will pick them up.
Is a cheap digital watch good enough for this?
Yes for keeping time, and it is the cheapest insurance on this page — but its alarm is a small high beep, which is exactly the sound an older ear loses first. A plain digital watch runs for years on one battery and keeps time to within about half a minute a month. For waking a household, though, a mechanical bell alarm carries through a wall in a way a wristwatch never will. The sensible answer is both: the watch for the wrist, the bell for the house.
📋 Why This One Belongs on the List at Fifty
There is no skill to learn here and no installation to arrange. Nobody has to come out to the house. It is four cheap objects and one habit, and a person can be done with the whole subject in an afternoon and never think about it again.
Which is exactly what makes it the sort of thing that never gets done.
A grab bar at least looks like something. A generator makes a noise and takes up room in the garage and a man feels he has accomplished something. Twenty dollars of wall clock accomplishes nothing visible whatever. It hangs there being right, day after day, for years, while nothing happens — and a person could be forgiven for concluding he had wasted the twenty dollars, right up until the fourth morning of a week without power, when he is the only one on the street who can tell the ice truck what time it is due.
Buy it now, while it is a twenty-dollar decision made on an ordinary Tuesday. In fifteen years it will cost more, the store will be further away, and the afternoon you would have spent on it will be an afternoon you no longer have to spare.
And a clock, unlike almost everything else on this site, does not care in the slightest how old you are when you buy it.