Lauren Hayes

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The second outage lasted six days, and somewhere around day three I stopped worrying about the WiFi or the dead fridge and started worrying about a cooler. Our youngest needs refrigerated insulin, and Mike spent those three days rotating ice packs and checking a thermometer taped to the inside of the lid instead of coaching his little league team like he was supposed to that week. I was losing client deadlines two rooms over in what we now call my office, a converted back bedroom with two monitors and a UPS that kept blinking a battery percentage neither of us trusted.

Miriam Chu, a longtime client of mine who became a friend somewhere along the way, is a pharmacist in Sugar Land, and she was the first person I called about the insulin. She walked me through the actual numbers: unopened insulin needs to stay between 36 and 46 degrees Fahrenheit, and once it's been opened or left unrefrigerated, most types are still fine at room temperature for up to 28 days, as long as it never freezes; freezing ruins it completely. That call is the reason our cooler setup now includes a thermometer we actually check instead of a hand pressed against the side of the lid.

Mike's assistant coach on that same little league team, Brock Fuentes, is a licensed plumber who has an opinion about every system in a house, generators included. He's the one who first walked us through why a refrigerator's spec sheet is misleading: the running wattage might say 100 to 400 watts, but the compressor can surge to 1,000 or 2,000 watts for a few seconds every time it kicks on, and any generator or power station that can't handle that surge will trip or stall right when you need it most. Four years in, that's the kind of number we check before we check the price.

These days Mike handles the installation and the hands-on testing on the concrete pad behind our garage, fuel cans and extension cords and a digital weather station bolted to the back fence logging conditions year round. I handle the research, the budget tracking, and the writing. Every generator we test sits at least twenty feet from any window, door, or vent, because carbon monoxide from these things can reach fatal levels inside a garage in minutes, even with the door open, and we've watched our own detector chirp during a test run in a way that was more than enough of a warning. Anything that means cutting into a breaker panel or wiring a transfer switch permanently, we hand straight to a licensed electrician. That line doesn't move for us.

Posts by Lauren Hayes

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