A couple years ago we decided to give our parents small Bluetti "solar generators" for xmas. At the time I'm not sure they really saw the value in it. We said "just leave it plugged-in and if the power goes out you can use it to charge your phone and run some lights".
The motivation for these gifts came from talking to my cousins who live in North Carolina about their experience during a hurricane. They live in the mountains and were not terribly impacted directly by the storm, but their power was out as well as any land-based communications. They wanted to keep in touch to let people know they were OK, and stay abreast of developments with the recovery efforts in the valley. Their phones worked, but because modern phones suck, they ran out of battery power within 24 hours.
They were also without electric light and heat, but most of these folks have candles and wood stoves so that wasn't the problem it otherwise might have been.
So people like them in the mountains drove down into the valley to charge their phones and see what was going on and in the process go caught-up in the disaster.
Hearing these stories I realized that while these small "solar generators" would not provide complete standby power for a household, they could easily provide power to keep phones running for days (some weeks) as well as provide electricity for other niceties like lights, tools and other things.
In my cousin's case, this would have made a huge difference.
So we decided to get some of these units for our folks, the smallest unit Bluetti made at the time (we chose Bluetti because we have some and are familiar with how to use them) and figured worst case they wouldn't need it, but if they liked them they could always add more capacity, or add solar panels, etc.
Two or so years passed and I more or less forgot about all this, but then I got a text from my mom this morning with a photo of the little unit with an electric blanket and her phone plugged into it. She said that she was so excited because the power went out and she got a chance to try this thing out.
Bear in mind that this morning it is -18F here, and loosing power under these condition would normally be terrifying, but here she is appreciating it because it gave her a chance to appreciate a gift from years ago.
You might expect this story to have a point, and maybe it does, but I don't have a specific one in mind. It just made me really happy to see that this made her happy, kept her a little safer and turned something that might have been scary into something fun. I think there are ways to make scary things fun, and a little preparedness is often a part of that.
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026