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An apartment blackout kit
What to put aside in an apartment before the power fails, without a generator indoors and without pretending one power station fits every unit.
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An apartment blackout is mostly a problem of light, information, cold food, and a phone battery. It is a poor place for a fuel generator. Ready.gov says to use a generator only outdoors and away from windows, and the CDC says not to run one inside a home, basement, or garage, or less than 20 feet from a window, door, or vent. A typical balcony sits next to those openings. If the distance is not there, the generator does not belong there. The generator and carbon monoxide guide has the agency wording.
What the kit is for
Ready.gov’s power-outage page says an outage can disrupt communications, water, and transportation, close stores and ATMs, spoil food, and stop medical devices that need power. The kit below is a short list for staying in place for a day or two when leaving is not required. If local officials say to leave, their order beats the kit.
This page does not name a “best” power bank or station. The model catalog records cited specs and leaves unknown fields unknown. Use it to see what a page actually claimed, then size any battery with the calculator and your own appliance labels.
Light
Keep a flashlight or lantern that does not depend on the building’s wiring, plus the batteries or the charge it actually uses. A lantern page on this site quotes lumens and runtime only when the manufacturer stated them for a named setting. A marketing sentence that skips the setting is not copied in as a single runtime.
Put the light where you can find it without crossing the apartment in the dark. A phone light spends the battery you may need for a message.
Information
Ready.gov describes NOAA Weather Radio All Hazards as a 24-hour broadcast of warnings and forecasts from a nearby National Weather Service office, and notes that it also carries some non-weather alerts through the Emergency Alert System. A receiver has to be tuned to the local transmitter. Models with SAME, Specific Area Message Encoding, can be set for particular counties. That is a filter, not a guarantee you will hear every siren in the region.
Wireless Emergency Alerts and a local text list are the other paths Ready.gov points to. They need a working phone or a radio that is already powered. Charge the phone before a forecast storm, and keep a power bank charged. On this site, bank capacity stays in milliamp-hours when that is all the page stated. Do not treat “20K” in a product name as a measured capacity unless the spec line says so. The Anker 525 record is the example: the support page lists ports and weight, and the milliamp-hour field is unknown.
Hand-crank and solar radios are useful as a backup way to listen. They are not automatically a full recharge of a modern phone. Midland’s own ER310 FAQ says solar is not meant to fully charge that radio and will not start a dead pack by itself. That sentence is about the ER310, not every crank radio. Read the model page, especially where the brand’s pages disagree on battery size. The ER310 leaves milliamp-hours unknown for that reason.
Water, food, and medicine
Set aside drinking water and food that does not need a stove. Ready.gov says not to use a gas stove or oven to heat the home. That warning is about carbon monoxide, fire, burns, and damage to the appliance.
If a medicine needs refrigeration or a device needs power, Ready.gov says to have an alternate plan. This site cannot tell you what that plan is. Ask the clinician or pharmacist before the outage, and do not use the calculator’s placeholder watts as a medical instruction. The fridge and freezer guide covers the food-temperature windows FDA publishes. Those windows are about food safety, not about whether a station can run the fridge.
Paper and cash
Copy IDs and any medical or lease papers you would need if you had to leave, and keep a little cash. Card readers and ATMs fail when the neighborhood power fails. Ready.gov’s hurricane page makes the same point about documents before a coastal storm. It applies in an apartment inland as well.
What not to add
Do not store generator fuel in a living space as a casual extra. Do not plan to backfeed the building by plugging a generator into a wall outlet. Connecting anything to house wiring is work for a licensed electrician and, in a rental, for the landlord. This site does not publish wiring steps.
A portable power station is optional. If you buy one, match the continuous watts and the surge to the appliance nameplate, and treat depth of discharge and inverter efficiency in the calculator as assumptions unless the manufacturer page actually states them. The catalog does not invent those two numbers.
Sources
- Ready.gov, Power outages, retrieved 7 November 2026.
- Ready.gov, Emergency alerts, including the NOAA Weather Radio description, retrieved 7 November 2026.
- CDC, What to do to protect yourself during a power outage, retrieved 7 November 2026.
- Midland, ER310 FAQs, on solar charging for that model, retrieved 7 November 2026.