Lights Off, Still Online: A PSPS Done Right

When the power goes out for a planned shutoff, a lot of rural households lose more than the lights. They lose the cameras at the gate, the way they get fire alerts, and the calm of knowing what is going on. The internet quietly goes dark right when it matters most.

A family on a Geyserville hillside decided they did not want that to be their fall anymore. They called us before fire season, not during it.

The challenge

Their home sat up a road that has seen its share of Public Safety Power Shutoffs — the planned outages the utility calls when fire risk is high. A shutoff there can last a couple of days.

Their internet itself was reliable. The catch is the part people forget: fixed wireless, like everything else, needs power on your end. The antenna and the router both run on house electricity. When the grid goes off, so do they — even though the network is still up.

That meant that during exactly the days they most wanted to watch conditions, check the cameras, and stay reachable, they were cut off. They had been running their phones on cellular until the towers got congested, then sitting in the dark hoping for news.

What we did

The fix here is not dramatic, and that is the point. Fire prep should be boring and ready, not frantic.

• We sized the power, not oversold it. The antenna and router together draw very little — far less than people expect. We worked out how long they wanted to ride through an outage and picked a battery power station that comfortably covers it, with room to spare. No giant generator required.
• We put the right things on backup. The network gear, the home Wi-Fi, and the gate cameras all went on the backup power. The space heater and the hot tub did not. Backup power lasts when it only carries what matters.
• We set up a fallback. A phone hotspot stayed configured as a second line of defense, so if anything on the main path ever struggled, they could roll over without scrambling.
• We checked our own end. Our relay sites are backed up on our side, so the network stays up when the grid does not. The household’s job was just to keep their own gear powered — and now they could.

“We made coffee on the camp stove, the cameras were still up, and we actually knew what was happening. Last time we just sat in the dark.”

The result

The next shutoff lasted two days. Their internet never went down.

The cameras at the gate kept recording. They watched conditions and county alerts on a real connection instead of a flickering bar of cell signal. When a neighbor called to ask what they were seeing, they could actually answer.

No drama, no scramble, no guessing. Just a modest battery, a sensible plan, and a quiet weekend with the lights off and the network on.

If you live where the power gets shut off when the wind comes up, you can be ready for it well before it happens. Start at /check-my-address/, and ask us about sizing backup power for your setup. We will help you put together something boring, reliable, and ready — the good kind of fire prep.