The Blackout Buyers Guide

How To Survive The Nationwide Blackout has a rule it keeps for all 86 chapters: no brand names. Describe the specification instead, so the book is still right in ten years.

That is the right call, and it leaves you with a precise problem. You finish Chapter 29 knowing you need a pure sine wave power station sized to your Tier 1–2 watt-hours, and you still have no idea which one to put in a cart.

This is the companion the book refuses to be.

Twenty-three buying categories, in the book's own Cheap / Better / Best tiers — water storage and filters, food packing, stoves, power stations, solar, generators, lighting, warmth, sanitation, medical, radios, tools, and the rest. Every entry names the model, gives a dated price band, cites the chapter whose specification it satisfies, says why that one and not the alternatives, and — the part most buying guides leave out — says what it does not do.

Where the book warns about something, the warning is repeated on every affected product rather than said once and forgotten. Hollow fiber filters die in a single freeze, and this guide says so on every hollow fiber filter it lists.

It also includes a free column, because the book's audience has budgets and six of the highest-value things in it cost nothing.

No affiliate links in this edition. Nothing here earns a commission, and no entry was chosen or ranked for commercial reasons.

• 23 categories, tiered Cheap / Better / Best, with a free option throughout
• Every entry cites the chapter it satisfies
• Dated price bands — 2026 edition, prices checked August 2026
• What each product does not do, stated plainly
• The buying order — 13 items, cheapest first, that cover water, sanitation, medicine, light, food, heat, and power
• 62-page PDF · free updates for life