The Weekend Home Power-Cut Drill: A Practical Practice Guide for Households

# OFF-GRID ACADEMY FIELD MANUAL 12 ## The 48-Hour Black-Sky Tabletop Drill: A Printable Simulation Kit for Families & Directors ### 1. Why Unrehearsed Gear Fails Under Stress In Amanda Ripley's landmark disaster research (*The Unthinkable*), untrained individuals lose up to 70% of cognitive problem-solving bandwidth during the first 30 minutes of an acute crisis. If the first time you try to pair your phone to an 868MHz Meshtastic node or wire your boiler to a LiFePO4 inverter is at 19:00 on a freezing January night during a real grid blackout, you will make avoidable mistakes. ### 2. The Saturday 18:00 "Main Switch Off" Drill 1. **18:00 — Initiate Exercise:** Flip the main isolator switch on your consumer unit to `OFF` (or unplug router + silence smartphones into a Faraday bag). 2. **18:05 — Golden Hour Water & Light:** Deploy head-torches, verify residual water storage protocol, and bring your **GridVault 2048Wh LiFePO4 station** online. 3. **18:20 — PACE Comms Check:** Establish encrypted text contact on **868MHz Meshtastic Channel 1** and conduct a voice check on **PMR446 / VHF Simplex** with a partner 2km away. 4. **19:00 — Offline Knowledge Challenge:** Without touching the internet, use your **Project Alexandria Vault / Local LLM** to look up: - The exact sodium hypochlorite dosing ratio for 20 litres of turbid rainwater - The nearest hospital trauma centre route avoiding motorway river bridges - The pinout and fuse rating of your heating circulation pump 5. **Sunday 18:00 — Hot-Wash Audit:** Record battery % remaining, actual Wh consumed, and every single friction point discovered.