Winter Grid-Down Playbook · PDF, 43 pages · $27 CAD

For the night the power does not come back on Tuesday.

An ice storm takes the grid down for three days in February. The house is at 9 °C, the well pump is dead, the road is closed and the generator is in the shed. This book is what you do, in what order, with the numbers — written for rural Ontario, not a Texan summer.

What it is

A 43-page PDF for the fifty to two hundred hours between the transformer arcing on the concession road and the crew arriving from the utility. It is a logistics problem with numbers attached, and it is built to be worked rather than read.

Threat order, not topic order. Alphabetical-by-subject preparedness puts candles next to can openers and tells you nothing about what actually kills people. This book is ordered by what takes you out first: heat, water, food, sanitation, power, medical, comms, security, recovery. If you read one chapter, read Heat First.

Every chapter has the same four parts: the problem and the physics behind it, the numbers (volumes, watts, litres, dollars, hours), the build (what to buy and do, in order), and a drill — a pass/fail test you run before you need it.

What is inside

Chapter	What it covers	The drill it ends with
1 · Heat First	Why cold outranks everything, heat sources ranked by grid dependence, what heat costs to run, the codes that come with the fuel, and the carbon-monoxide rule with no exceptions	One night on one room
2 · Water	The well is not the problem, the pump is. Storage and rotation, treating water you are unsure about, what boiling costs in fuel, getting water out of a well with no power, frozen plumbing	48 hours of water with no tap
3 · Food	Calories rather than comfort, what to eat first, cooking with no power, fridge and freezer salvage after the outage starts	Cook three days of food with no grid power
4 · Sanitation	The failure everybody underestimates: the toilet, greywater and hygiene, garbage over a two-week outage	72 hours of full sanitation with no running water
5 · Power	Watts against watt-hours, generator sizing against your real loads, the one legal way to connect, fuel that keeps and for how long, batteries and inverters in the cold	Run the house on backup power for 24 hours
6 · Medical	Medication continuity, hypothermia and frostbite, trauma and infection, bleeding control as a summary and not training, free naloxone in Ontario, and when to evacuate	Medical readiness audit
7 · Communications	The candid chapter: what Alert Ready still delivers, why 511 and 811 die with the carrier network, and the tools ranked by what they actually do	72 hours of communication on battery power only
8 · Security and Light Discipline	What the actual threat is, light discipline, why candles are a bad idea, the generator and the dark road, and the legal note on defence	24 hours of light discipline and accident control
9 · Recovery	The thaw does the damage: the insurance claim, water damage and mould, food loss in practice, what the province does and does not do	A documented dry-run claim
The 72-Hour Drill	The master sheet that runs every chapter at once, with the thresholds below	20 tests, scored
Cost-Tiered Build Plan	Three tiers, itemised with CAD estimates, plus the life-safety set and the drilled-well / oil-heat swap	—
Shopping List	Every item with an estimated price, and four things not to buy	—
What This Book Does Not Cover	The boundary of the work, stated in plain terms, one page	—

The rule with no exceptions

The numbers you pass or fail on

Not “stay warm” and not “keep enough water”. These are the thresholds in the master sheet, measured rather than felt:

Test	Pass	Fail
Warm-room temperature, minimum at any hour	≥ 16 °C, never below 15 °C	Below 12 °C at any point
Cold-zone sleeping area and bathroom	≥ 10 °C	Below 5 °C
Water consumed	≤ 5 L per person per day	Over 8 L per person per day
Power budget for essentials	≤ 12 kWh per 24 hours	Over 20 kWh per 24 hours
Generator fuel, 24 hours	≤ 20 L gasoline or 11 kg propane	Over 30 L per 24 hours
Well pump start	Starts first try, refills the pressure tank	Fails to start at all
Carbon monoxide alarm	No activations	Any activation
Rechargeable devices	All at ≥ 80 % at the end	Any device at 0 %

You pass the drill if the warm-room temperature, water-consumption, bucket-toilet, CO-alarm, rechargeable and no-catastrophic-event tests all pass and at least twelve of the remaining fourteen also pass. Score under that and you have a shopping list and a practice schedule rather than a failure — the count of fails tells you exactly what to fix, and in what order. The book’s own chapter drills include a night in one room, a 48-hour water drill and the 24-hour backup-power run, each with its own thresholds.

The build plan, in three tiers

Every tier is itemised, priced in CAD, and cumulative. The three numbers that never move are $250, $750 and $2,500.

Tier	What it is	Items	Cumulative
Tier 1 — core	Water containers, power bank, headlamps, radio, CO alarm, bucket toilet, propane, bleach, batteries	9	$250
Tier 1 — complete	The core plus the life-safety set: smoke alarms, a second CO alarm, two 2.5 kg ABC extinguishers, ice cleats, a reflective vest ($212)	14	$462
Tier 2	500 Wh power station, camp stove, 9 kg propane tank, 0.1 µm water filter	+4	$750
Tier 3	3,500 W inverter generator, interlock kit installed by a licensed electrician with the ESA permit, fuel cans and stabiliser, heat tape, pipe insulation, pump-house heater	+9	$2,500

The life-safety set sits outside the ladder — buy it with whichever tier you build, because three of the book’s own pass/fail tests are unwinnable without it. The core kit contains no food, and the book says so. On a drilled well the generator is the swap that matters: a 3,500 W set cannot start a 1.5 hp submersible (about 2,200 W running, 7,000 W and up to start), so a 7,500 W dual-fuel unit replaces it for about $600 more, which lands Tier 3 near $3,100 or defers two fuel items back to $2,500.

What it does not cover

The rest of the line