I used to go camping pretty regularly (haven’t since Covid for… well, I dont really know why not) so we have lots of camping gear that can/does serve as backups as needed.
We have ready in the garage a very bright propane lantern, a Coleman propane stove, and all the requisite cooking gear (plus, of course, everything we have in the house). For a backup of that we have a little pocket rocket backpacking stove and a little pot that goes on it. It wouldn’t work for a big stock pot but a 2-quart saucepan should be fine. Certainly adequate for heating up some water for a Mountain House meal and a cup of tea.
If we need extra warmth for sleeping or if the power goes out we have military surplus 3-piece “sleep systems,” each basically a 3-layered sleeping bag, the outer layer being a bivy sack. I don’t know what they’re rated down to but I’ve tent camped at -5°f in them and was… well, not exactly comfortable but I wasn’t noticeably cold. Of course we have lots of extra blankets and pillows and a couple of inflatable air mattresses as well – handy for when we have company. As long as we have a roof and walls we should be mostly comfortable.
For power outages we have lots of candles and one kerosine lamp. We have multiple flashlights including a couple of big D-cell MagLites (the old ones with incandescent bulbs which I understand aren’t as bright as the new LED models but since those things are pretty indestructible and I see no reason to replace them).
We also have several rechargeable battery packs for charging cell phones in the event of a power outage. I got them for camping and man alive those things have came in handy so many times. I want to get a few more to have on hand fully charged just in case.
We have a fireplace that we have only used a couple of times and have now made the decision to permanently abstain from using idue to concerns about smoke coming through a defective heat exchange system in the chimney. But its not going to burn the house down and we still have ½ a cord or so of firewood out by the back fence (under cover even!) so we could, in a real emergency, have a fire for heat.
We have a oil-filled radiator space heater that’s been used maybe once in the last decade. If our furnace ever dies but we still have power that heater would make at least one bedroom comfortable.
I have a backup car. Considering my primary car is currently parked in the garage waiting to have some collision damage repaired I’m incredibly grateful to have that backup car available. It’s so thirsty you can almost hear the dead dinosaurs being sucked straight out of the ground and into the engine (not good on my 35 mile each way commute) and the stereo doesn’t work but its a clean and straight car that is perfectly capable and willing to be a reliable daily driver.
If Covid taught me anything (well, besides the fact that people can be irrationally stupid simply as part of their political identity) it’s that one can’t be too prepared. We had posters on this very board telling those of us who were concerend about the TP supply in early April 2020 that we were all a bunch of morons who were overreacting and that Amazon would always be an option when the local Safeway ran out.
Yeah. Ok. That certainly worked out well, didn’t it?
It was by pure luck that we didn’t run out of TP or cleaning supplies as I had just done my big shopping run a few days before the insanity started and had heard rumors of TP starting to get scarce so I picked up a couple of extra packages. My wife thought I was crazy. There had been no sign of a shortage when I picked it up so I was secretly wondering if she was right. Two weeks later she conceded I had actually been smart. I’m damn lucky I did err on the side of caution as it was probably 4 months before I could find it again. Now I will always, but always have a minimum 6 month supply on hand. Also we’ll have a few months worth of pretty much anything that I saw go scarce or missing during the pandemic: pasta and pasta sauces, yeast, canned beans and chili and soups, dried lentils, flour and sugar. Light bulbs and mouse traps and other little things that we seemed to have on the list for weeks or months before we could get the larder resupplied. And of course cleaning products: Lysol wipes, Clorox, Pine-sol, Windex, laundry soap. Dish and hand soap. We’re keeping a ~year supply of all this on hand and rotating through, using the oldest first. We made an effort to stock up slowly so we weren’t depriving other shoppers of whatever stock was on the shelf. Each bi-monthly grocery shopping trip, pick up another canister of Clorox wipes and a package of TP. A bit here and a bit there. It took a while but we’re pretty well provisioned now.
I dunno how much of that difts away from the concept of “backup” and into “prepper” territory but we felt that covid taught us the importance of food security as well as having a good backup supply of household consumables. I remember someone on the board – QtM maybe? ‐- had a tenant who they discovered had buried several years’ worth of dried goods in a basement or something similar and then abandoned/forgot them, only to be discovered by the landlord years later. We aren’t that crazy, not by a long shot but we do have a couple of months worth of the basics on hand if needed.