Simplest method to check if the power outage is only your house, or the neighborhood, too:
Open the settings of your phone and check for available wifi networks. If it is empty, power is down elsewhere, too.
My country actually has a map that shows current outages. It’s usually my street, but once I saw entire city go dark.
Most houses in my neighborhood have Generacs, natural-gas powered generators that automatically start up when the power goes out. They’re quite noisy, so I can immediately tell if it’s a neighborhood-wide outage without even going outside.
At night I look out the window and see if most of the neighborhood is dark. Doesn’t really work in daytime though
A LOT of people have networks and systems on UPS’s, so that’ll tell you nothing much really.
I can still watch media on my tablets if the power goes out.
I wouldn’t say a lot, I’ve never met anyone else with an UPS, even in my most techy circles
A lot of people do, significantly more don’t. So if you see the fucking nerds house is the only one with access points available, you know its a wider power cut.
In a newly built Modern neighborhood the houses are all built to the same basic “set of standards”, that includes an ups or a battery with the solar installation.
A lot of people who say they are “techy” aren’t actually all that techy, they just have a laptop with a server and Linux. It’s pretty dang common to have ups or battery’s when actual modern tech is installed in a house.
Even infills in older neighbourhoods are frequent enough that there should be plenty.
Or try living in the suburbs where you gotta get gas trucked in, you’re gonna want backups.
I live in the UK, mains are reliable enough that very few people have any kind of UPS. I worked in a computer repair shop years ago and it was almost never mentioned. Most people didn’t even know what one was. Though I did meet an interesting chap with one on a boat.
Here, a power outage is a rather rare occasion (three times in over 50 years ), so UPSs are things you see in companies, but not private houses.
door bells here are just literal bells mounted to the door. modern problems require modern solutions.
Don’t you mean modern problems require old school solutions? Because that’s been the solution since like forever. However I was going to say that my doorbell is rechargeable and it doesn’t matter whether or not powers on. You push it it’ll ring.
My brother once asked why the new hoover (vacuum cleaner) had a light on it and was told “so you can still see what you’re hoovering in a powercut”
Also displays all the dog hair you thought you just picked up
Try turning the lights out and vacuuming using only that light. Probably doesn’t make much of a difference on carpet, though.
Coding recently and wanted to change the title of the window to cwd… debugging why it didn’t change from the project name to the name of the folder. Of the project. That I was working on. Yeah.
I was going to say just look out the window and see if the lights in the neighborhood are on, but then I remembered that sometimes blackouts happened during the day. I would feel stupid if 99% of blackouts near me happened in the evening or night.
