The gadget bug out kit: Gadgets to support your home’s emergency kit

We lost power here one day, and what amazed me wasn’t the big stuff. It was the simple things. Having a proper backup battery, not just a drawer full of power banks, made a genuine difference to how that day went. It’s the kind of lesson you only learn when the lights go out, which is exactly why the Government’s new Be Emergency Ready booklet caught my eye.

The booklet is the Office of Emergency Planning’s new household guide to getting through storms, floods, power cuts and wider disruption. An Post started delivering roughly 2.2 million copies to every home in the country on 21 September. It boils preparedness down to three steps: be aware, make a plan and stay connected. It also includes a checklist covering water, food, light, medicine and documents, plus a contact card to fill in. The Department of Defence has pointed to Storm Éowyn as part of the motivation, and fair enough. That storm left 768,000 households without power in January 2025.

To be honest, the booklet is sensible and I’d encourage everyone to fill it in. That said, its tech advice is thin, and a few specific gadgets make a far bigger difference than the booklet lets on. I’ll get to the one that matters most, and costs the least, shortly.

Back up the router, not just the phone

The single most useful thing I did during our outage was keep the router running. Because a backup battery was powering it, the entire house still had Wi-Fi. The power banks then kept the other devices going, phones and laptops alike, and the day felt far less like being cut off from the world.

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This is the trick most emergency kit lists miss. A router doesn’t need much power to keep running, so even a modest battery keeps a whole household connected. Mine is a relatively small, lower-capacity Energizer unit. It’s grand for simple running like this, but it can’t handle anything more powerful. For keeping Wi-Fi alive, though, it did the job.

There is a catch, and I want to be upfront about it. Backing up your router only helps if the network beyond your front door is still working. In a local outage, where your street loses power but the wider network doesn’t, your broadband keeps flowing and a battery-backed router is class. In a storm on the scale of Éowyn, the network itself goes down. Eir reported around 900 mobile site outages and roughly 160,000 customers without broadband at one point. Vodafone said it lost about 10% of its mobile network. In that scenario your router is broadcasting Wi-Fi to nowhere, which is why the self-powered kit further down matters so much.

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Power banks have quietly become serious kit

The booklet tells you to have power banks ready for recharging phones. That’s solid advice, but it undersells how capable modern power banks have become. They’re no longer just for topping up a phone.

The Anker Prime 26K, which I’ve reviewed here, can charge two laptops at the same time. It puts out up to 300W in total and 140W from a single port. In a power cut, that means a work laptop and a second device can keep going together, rather than you rationing one battery across the whole house. Being totally transparent, Anker is a brand Goosed has a partnership with, so weigh that as you see fit. The point stands regardless of brand. A good high-output power bank covers far more than your phone.

The boring bit matters most here. A power bank is only useful if it’s charged when the power goes. If you’re keeping one for emergencies, top it up every so often, and definitely when a storm warning goes out.

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What a bigger backup battery could do

Portable power stations are the next step up, and I’m currently on the lookout for some to test. Watch this space for the likes of Anker and Jackery.

Where these get interesting for me is the home server. Running it from something like this would give me a few hours of access to my own files. I could also keep a full offline backup of Wikipedia and a collection of survival manuals on hand, all reachable over the home network even with the internet gone. It sounds like a very nerdy thing to prepare, and it absolutely is. But if your connection is down for days, the information you already have stored locally is the only information you’ve got.

Does every household need a power station? No. For most homes, a router battery and a couple of charged power banks will cover the common outage. The bigger units come into their own for longer cuts, or when there’s heavier kit you genuinely rely on.

Do you need a wind-up radio?

Yes, and I’d put a wind-up radio and a wind-up light above everything else in this piece. They’re the baseline essentials because they don’t depend on anything. No grid, no charged battery, no mast down the road. You crank them, and they work.

The booklet recommends a battery, wind-up or solar radio. The detail it leaves out is which kind of radio to buy. Ireland is an FM country. RTÉ switched off its DAB network in 2021, so a DAB-only set bought from a UK retailer isn’t what you want here. Get one with FM. Don’t count on your phone to fill the gap either. Many modern phones have no FM receiver at all, and streaming radio needs a data connection that may not be there. The booklet does rightly point out that your car radio works as a backup, as long as you’re sparing with the battery.

The same logic applies to light. A torch with spare batteries is on the booklet’s checklist, and it should be. But a wind-up or solar light carries on long after the spares run out, and plenty of units combine a radio, a torch and a USB port for a small phone top-up.

Better still, why not grab a wind-up radio that doubles as a wind-up torch. Genius stuff.

Can you text 112 in Ireland?

Yes. Anyone on an Irish mobile network can text 112 if they can’t make a voice call, and you don’t need to register first. The gov.ie guidance mentions texting, but not the details that matter when you’re actually doing it.

Your location isn’t sent with a text the way it is with a call, so you need to type it yourself. The 112 service asks for the emergency service you need, what’s happening, your county and the specific place, with a town and road if possible. A reply can take around two minutes, and a delivery report on your phone doesn’t mean the message has been received, so keep trying other options until you hear back. You also shouldn’t text 112 from your Irish phone while roaming, and that includes Northern Ireland. A voice call is always faster if you can make one.

Don’t wait for your phone to warn you

The UK has phones that blare an alert at you even on silent. Ireland doesn’t yet. The State has had an SMS-based public warning system since November 2023, but the cell broadcast version, which reaches every phone in an area regardless of network congestion, isn’t expected until 2027. Until then, that FM radio is your most reliable source of official updates when the power and the network are both struggling.

The Goosed verdict

The Be Emergency Ready booklet is good, plain advice, and I’d rather people had it than not. My own power cut taught me that preparation isn’t really about big, expensive kit. It’s about the handful of simple things that keep a house functioning. Start with a wind-up radio and a wind-up light, because they work when nothing else does. Then add a backup battery for the router and keep a couple of decent power banks charged. Get those right, and a day without power goes from stressful to manageable.

The booklet is available at gov.ie/BeEmergencyReady, and extra copies can be requested from oep@defence.ie.

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