I just go to my electric provider’s app on my phone and click on the green rectangle that says “Report an outage”. A few seconds later a map pops up and I can watch the outage area grow as others report the outage. Within 15 minutes information will be added such as the cause of the outage and an estimated time power will be restored.
I seem to remember that I could hook up my mom’s oxygen machine to an outlet, or in the case of an outage, an outlet port from a portable battery. The kind you use to jump-start dead car batteries.
We generally wait five minutes before calling, where we leave a voice message with the address. When the power goes out, the computers and internet connection tends to die as well. I suppose I could try using my smartphone, but it doesn’t work so well browsing websites.
~Max
We do. We live out in the country (kinda halfway), and it helps the power company to know how big an area is affected. Of course, now there’s also an app for that.