If The Grid Fails Tomorrow, Every Electrician's Home Already Has These 7 Things

One man on a dark street has a $1,600 power station he's afraid to switch on, and an electrician 3 doors down has a lit house that cost almost nothing by comparison. This one walks through the 7 cheap, boring, unglamorous things that were already in the electrician's home before the storm: a real CAT-rated meter, a whole-house surge device, a listed generator connection, a generator actually sized to the well pump, a serviceable battery instead of a sealed box, stabilized fuel and a monthly load test, and a plan written on paper. The document at the center of it is the one that turns the whole list into an accusation: a 3-sentence code section that finally made the surge device mandatory, and only for the house that hasn't been built yet. Behind a ~$200 box sits tens of thousands of dollars of electronics the code protected for your neighbor's new build and specifically did not require for you.