- How much power do you need for a wildfire safety shutoff?
- 4,488 Wh of delivered energy over 2 days, drawing 263 W if every device runs at once. Refrigerator (full-size) alone is 67% of that energy, so it is the load worth measuring first — the rest of the manifest barely moves the answer.
- What decides whether a station can start this setup?
- Refrigerator (full-size). Its sourced 1,200 W startup demand, arriving while the other devices keep running, sets a worst-case moment of 1,283 W — well above the 263 W running total. A station sized only to the running figure will carry this plan right up until that device restarts.
- Why is every load on this plan running through the inverter?
- None of the devices in this manifest has a manufacturer-supported DC input, so each one pays the DC-to-AC conversion cost. Where a device does offer a native 12 V cord — camping fridges especially — using it is the cheapest runtime you can buy.
- Does knowing the shutoff is coming change what I should buy?
- It changes how much you need to store. The cut is announced, so the plan begins at a full charge with pre-chilled cabinets instead of wherever the battery happened to sit, and the notice period is time spent charging from a grid you still have. With the 400 W array covering 1,120 Wh — about half the day — the 4,488 Wh two-day headline behaves more like 1,124 Wh a night, provided the sun cooperates.
- Is this page telling me my medication will be safe?
- No, and it cannot. What this plan models is electrical: a 64 W cabinet drawing power 19% of the time, and how much of that a station can supply. Whether a specific medicine stays inside its labelled range is a question for that product's instructions, the pharmacy that supplied it, and the public guidance the FDA and CDC publish for refrigerated medicines during an outage. We have no medical background and should not be the source you rely on for it.
- Is 432 Wh of Wi-Fi justified during a fire?
- It is 19% of the day and the line most worth thinking hard about, because it depends on equipment you do not own. Your router reaches the internet only if the provider's street-side hardware is still powered, and inside a shutoff zone that is not a safe assumption. Test it during the notice period: if it works, budget it, and if it does not, that 432 Wh moves straight into refrigeration while the emergency radio carries the alerts for almost nothing.