Fully Charged: Are your gadgets ready?

A hurricane is bearing down on your town, it’s been upgraded to a CAT 5 in the last few hours and is expected to make landfall in under 24 hours.  Your bugout strategy has been in activated and you are getting the heck out of town before this storm potentially levels your home and everything in it.  Even though you rehearsed your bugout strategy the process is still taking a bit longer than expected, but now you are 10 minutes from leaving.  You will lead the convoy in your truck and your wife and kids will be following in the minivan.  Last minute check on everything involves grabbing the two way radios which you kept stashed away in an old microwave, you’ll need those for communication during the trip.  But wait…you haven’t charged them in over 2 years.  Well that’s sort of inconvenient now isn’t it?

Even if you don’t live in the path of hurricanes I think you get the point.  Be it a wildfire, tornado or some other natural disaster there could be a time when you need to access those gadgets that you have laying around for a SHTF type event.  Many of these gadgets do not have replaceable (alkaline) batteries or only run on rechargeable batteries, will they be ready if called upon?

My gadget collection includes a solar NOAA weather radio, 2 way radios and a little “burner” cell phone.  Yet those items would be just about useless if I did not keep them on a steady charging schedule so that if called upon they would be ready to perform their assigned mission.  Granted the solar radio would still be able to function in a diminished capacity but it doesn’t hurt to keep it plugged in from time to time.

The point here should be obvious:  set a charging schedule and adhere to it.  Mine is once a month, I pull the stuff out and plug it into the wall overnight.  Obviously these are not devices which could be relied upon in a long term, grid down, TEOTWAWKI type event.  However for most short term catastrophes they just might come in handy.  Don’t let your gadgets become nothing more than paper weights because you were too lazy to keep them fully charged and ready to go.