What is a power down? It is a time to escape the noise that constantly surrounds us. It’s a time to live without power or first world luxuries of electricity and running water. It’s a time to “rough it” in your own home. Read on to see how our family survived our first power down. A whole 24 hours without power. Spoiler: it didn’t go as planned.
Fail to plan and you plan to fail
Half of the battle is figuring out a time to do a power down. You can’t simply turn off the main breaker and go about living. There’s water to think about, food storage in refrigerators and freezers. You’ve got to prepare lighting. You’ll want to think about the temperature outside and inside the house.
You cannot go into a power down without a plan or you will fail.
Why go through the trouble of a power down?
We live in a very loud world. I mean that figuratively and literally. From the time our eyes open, the HVAC is running and so is the fridge, the coffee maker is brewing. Depending on your lifestyle, you may opt to turn on the television immediately in the morning to see what happened overnight.
Even if you don’t intentionally pay attention to many of those background noises, there are other “loud” things that grab our attention first every day. Our phones being very high on that list.
Many of us today use our alarms on your phones to wake. We use it to see the time, to check the weather, to communicate in a variety of ways with our people, find recipes, check in on people’s lives, check sports scores, watch the news, and loads more.
We are prisoners of our own devices, quite literally.
How would just one day of not needing to check your phone sound?
To some, like a nightmare because we, me included, have become addicted to our little lifelines. A power down is a way to enjoy your home, your family, your life without technology.
Is it tough to live without power? Oh yeah.
I’d like to pause to give a shout out to the Gather & Grow Ministries that encouraged us to do this after reading their newsletter. You can check them out on Instagram The Grovestead.
And here’s how our one 24 hour spell went.
Our Power Down almost didn’t happen…
We knew all week long we’d do it from Friday at 5pm until Saturday at 5pm on that weekend but as life goes, the week gets ahead and away from you before you know it. We didn’t plan well.
Our daughter already had a day planned with grandparents for Saturday. Our son had a ministry for church Friday night which caused us to start after 5pm as we had to get him to his practice. I couldn’t turn my phone off the ENTIRE time. Not with my children being away from me! I had to keep turning it back on to see if I had missed any calls or important messages.
Those worries alone took up space in my brain that so desperately wanted this break.
And then, I had forgotten on Saturday morning a standing appointment with a customer to pick up her products at a designated place and remembered two hours too late. Embarrassed, disappointed, ashamed. So many emotions as a business owner who failed a new customer, to boot! By the grace of our loving Lord, she was able to forgive me.
Try explaining all this above to a new customer as to why you had forgotten your appointment! She probably thinks I’m a whole fruit loop now. So again, there I was turning on my phone again.
What went RIGHT with the power down?
Okay now the woes are out of the way. The power down actually went really well under the circumstances. The first few hours were glorious.
We all had showers before power down because, well, we aren’t heathens. Except maybe my son. He really wanted to rough it and decided against the shower but would take a bird bath instead. Eye roll.
We filled the bathtubs with water for flushing. Listen, this was our first time and we just weren’t ready to give up EVERY first world luxury. We needed the toilets, okay? And while I’m admitting our cheats, we also left the refrigerator running, to my dismay. The husband didn’t want the added chore of moving all that food for one night. So we were able to leave that breaker on in the kitchen; however, we chose not to use the fridge for anything we needed. I was most excited about not hearing THAT thing run since I’m home with it every day as it is. Maybe next power down I can convince him to turn it off too.
I had prepared steaks to marinate all day along with some potatoes to grill. So we enjoyed a beautiful fall evening outside in our jammies grilling steaks and listening to the woodland creature noises. That’s the kind of noise I really enjoy most.
It was a full moon too or would be Saturday so Cece was super interested in how large the moon was that night which prompted a whole unit study the next week on moon phases that we all enjoyed.
After dinner by candlelight we retired to bed with books and magazines to read by candle and by flashlights until I got the text that it was time to come get Kellen from his practice.
Time is ticking but we wouldn’t know…
Speaking of time, another enjoyable part of power down is not being tied to a clock. We woke with the sun and went to bed with it too. We ate when we were hungry and we made the most of our daylight by working in the yard.
Uninterrupted yard work
Mostly uninterrupted, anyway.
We got a late start due to taking our daughter where she needed to be Saturday morning then we got to work on moving rocks to our front flower beds. We had been saying for years we wanted to stop mulching the beds each year and do rocks instead. Four springs of no mulch had our beds looking very rough.
Earlier in the week, our friend’s landscaping company dropped off our rock load and gave me a nice wheelbarrow to use that hooked up to the lawnmower. So earlier in the week when this project began, it was easy to shovel and move rocks. Then came Saturday when our lawnmower decided not to work anymore.
The lawnmower really took Power Down Day seriously, I guess.
Shoveling and pulling around a solid ton of rock in one afternoon was all the excuse we both needed not to work out the following week. But the beds are done and they look beautiful!
After the beds were completed, I set out to winterize my garden beds. Pull weeds, dead plants, clean them up a bit, then mulch them with a nice blanket of wood chips for the winter. I was a bit ambitious with my weekend list of flower beds, garden beds, mulching the chicken run, cleaning up the greenhouse, and doing a few things inside the house like organizing.
A woman’s brain is like a browser with 3,000 open tabs at once
Speaking of organizing, I do not know if you can relate to this but there were two things I put on my to-do list that weekend. Two things that took less than 5 minutes a piece to do but have been sitting in my view every day for the last 5 months, I kid you not.
One task was to remove an old strand of broken outdoor twinkle lights in my screened in porch and hang the new solar ones I bought in MAY! (It’s November at the time of this writing.)
The other task was to clean off my plant stand turned herb drying-ferment holding- seed saving rack of dead and forgotten propagation projects and sort long ago dried herbs into air tight packages.
Less than 5 minutes a piece and it took me almost 5 months to actually do them. How?
The way my brain works and how noisy it is inside of it daily causes me to make excuses for why I cannot simply set aside 5 minutes to go string these lights that have been sitting on my dining room table for months! There are simply too many other things to do, so my brain says. Another reason I looked forward to this power down was to be able to easily tell my brain, “well, honey, we have no water to wash dishes or clothes, and no electricity to run the vacuum or bake, so looks like you’re gonna need to go string those solar lights now”.
Should you need a weekend of no power in your home to organize little things like this? No but then again, you aren’t me and I’m not you. But this 24 hour spell of intentional roughing it (mostly) was just what my 3,000 open browser tabs needed. Power down equals brain browser tab shut down. And it was glorious!
Couldn’t you just go camping in the woods?
Absolutely yes and it would have been more authentically powered down too!
But it was also kind of nice that we didn’t need to pack anything up and haul it off for one night or a weekend. We had all we needed and could easily make a different way to do something with all the provisions we already had readily available in our home and shop to make it work without power.
Plus, your own bed to sleep in. 10/10 recommend camping in your own home.
What was our highlight of power down?
Quiet time together for sure.
The reading by flashlight Friday night was nice with the silence. However, we all agreed (except our son who slept through breakfast) that breakfast of leftover steak and fresh eggs from the coop in a cast iron skillet with instant coffee boiled on the wood stove while we read our Bibles and had prayer time in the cool, autumn morning was the best.
Is a power down worth it?
That’ll depend on what your values are.
If you could use the getaway but can’t afford it or whatever other reason holds you back, getaway in your own home.
Make it a staycation instead of a power down. Turn off phones maybe after letting at least one contact know what’s up. Commit to zero electronics including television and radio. Camp out in your own home. Try it for 24 hours and see how you like not needing to know what’s happening all around you, outside your four walls every second of every day.
Disconnect. Enjoy your family. Appreciate what our Creator (our Lord God) has made for you outside. Get quiet. Be still.
In a world that is constantly trying to tell you and me that louder is better, that busy is productive, that home is boring, that family sucks, that God isn’t real. Call a liar what it is and spend some time focusing on what’s most important in this one life we have on earth…
God first.
Family second.
And everything else last.
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If you enjoyed this article, check out why I think you need a kitchen garden and also how our family has worked to reduce our grocery budget.
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