Nobody made much noise about it. There was no single storm with a name everyone remembers, no week the whole country watched the same city go dark. And yet, by the middle of 2025, something close to half of American households had sat through at least one power outage — forty-five percent, according to J.D. Power, which has been asking people this same question for over twenty years.
That number didn't come from one disaster. It came from a hundred smaller ones. A line of thunderstorms in the Northeast. A heat wave that pushed the grid past what it was built for. Wind, ice, an old transformer that finally gave out on an ordinary Tuesday. Preparedness tends to get sold as a response to the catastrophe on the news. But the thing that actually reaches your house is usually smaller, quieter, and far more likely.
Here is what changed, though, and it's worth sitting with. The outages didn't just happen more often — they lasted longer. The average longest outage a household reported stretched to nearly thirteen hours, up from around eight just three years earlier. In the South, it was over eighteen. That's not a flicker and a reset. That's a full day. A day without light after dark, without a way to charge a phone, without a refrigerator doing its job, without heat or cooling depending on the season.
Thirteen hours is an interesting length of time. It's long enough to matter and short enough that almost nobody prepares for it. We plan, vaguely, for the big one — the storm of the century, the grid collapse. We don't plan for the perfectly ordinary evening when the power goes out at six and doesn't come back until morning. And that ordinary evening is the one that keeps showing up.
The difference between those two evenings — the hard one and the manageable one — is rarely dramatic. It's not a bunker or a year of freeze-dried food. It's a light you can find in the dark without using your phone's battery. It's enough water set aside that you're not improvising. It's a way to keep a phone alive so you can check when the power's coming back, or call someone if it isn't. Small, unglamorous things, mostly bought once and forgotten until the night they quietly earn their place.
That's really the whole idea. Not to be afraid of the dark, but to be unbothered by it. To have the ordinary evening stay ordinary.
If you've been meaning to sort this out and haven't known where to begin, that's exactly what Start is for →