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Seventeen Days Without Power Near Asheville. One Day's Plan Included Sitting Outside A Library To Email Their Parents. Here Is One Way To Keep A Phone Alive Long Enough To Send That Message.

If someone you love is somewhere other than your house when the power goes out, read this before the next storm. Below: what one prepared household wrote down, the federal count of how long the towers stayed down, and what an iPhone 14 or later can still do with no tower.

Updated October 2026 Estimated 3 Minute Read

Sources: FCC disaster reports for Hurricane Helene (28 September, 6 October and 15 October 2024), FOX TV Digital Team (29 September 2024), Apple Support, Ready.gov, posts on r/preppers, a one star Walmart review of a competitor's unit, the unit's own label and manual, the manufacturer's Amazon listing, and the Anker and Goal Zero support pages.

Illustration: an older person standing on a dark porch at night, checking a lit phone, the street behind them unlit. — Illustration.

"Days turned into missions."

That is how someone living just outside Asheville described the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, in a post on r/preppers. Then they gave three examples, word for word:

"Today we're going out to look for water refills..."

"Today we're getting groceries and ice...."

"Today we're going to go check on Julie and then go sit outside the library where they say there's wifi signal so we can email our parents and let them know we're OK."

The writer calls their preps "medium level". They garden, hunt for game meat, and can meals and vegetables. They had a couple of chest freezers, a few shelves of canned food and dry beans, a packed go-bag, wilderness first aid training and water filtration gear. They kept the freezers closed and had a temperature probe. The freezers took about three or four days to go from five below zero to thirty two degrees.

The power went out on a Wednesday night. It came back on seventeen days later.

"Cell service was gone for almost that long, which I think no one predicted."

The writer had no battery powered radio before the event, so for the daily briefing they sat in the car. A generator came after about a week, when the food began to spoil.

Seventeen days, in one household.

A charged power bank works on day one. The question is day four.

The federal count of the towers is next.

FCC daily reports. The first two bars are all 21 counties in the FCC's disaster area. The 15 October report lists only nine, so day 19 is shown for two of them. Sites out of sites served: 1,079 of 1,452, 244 of 1,448, 62 of 348, 9 of 22. The towers were not the fast part, and while they were down the thing that still worked was overhead.

Nobody plans for the real number

The government's own checklist, on Ready.gov, says you "may need to survive on your own for several days." The household above needed seventeen.

Here is the FCC's own count from the last time a large piece of America lost its grid.

On 28 September 2024, thirty four hours after Hurricane Helene came ashore, 1,079 of the 1,452 cell sites in the twenty one western North Carolina counties the FCC was tracking were out of service. Seventy four percent.

Ten days after landfall it was still 16.9%. Nineteen days after landfall, the FCC's daily report still listed 17.8% of Buncombe County's sites out and 40.9% of Yancey County's.

Another writer, five days into a different blackout, listed their mistakes. Number two:

"Mistake #2 was not having a backup for cell/data service. Cell towers were either knocked out or totally overwhelmed for the first 2 days of the outage. I couldn't contact my wife (who was at work) immediately after the storm at all. Zero service for the first 24 hours, very spotty service for the next 2-3 days."
r/preppers, five days into a blackout

So when towers go down, they can stay down for weeks. Here is something that changes what "no towers" actually means.

Why the phone is worth keeping alive at all

One thing worth knowing about the phone you already own.

An iPhone 14 or later on iOS 18 sends and receives ordinary texts, to ordinary contacts, over iMessage and SMS, with no cell tower involved at all. Apple calls it Messages via satellite. It shipped on 16 September 2024, ten days before Helene made landfall.

The limits are strict and worth having straight. You have to be outside with a clear view of the sky and the horizon. It is a text, not a call, to one person. In ideal conditions a message might take thirty seconds; under light foliage, over a minute; under heavy cover, not at all. It is free for two years from the day the phone was activated. The iMessage half works on any carrier, the SMS half depends on yours. It works in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Japan.

Seen from behind, a person alone in an open yard at dusk holding a phone up toward a clear sky. — Outside, with a clear view of the sky and the horizon. Not a metaphor, it is Apple's own condition for the message to go out at all.

Apple's own footnote says it should not be used in emergencies, and points you to Emergency SOS via satellite instead. That is not a contradiction. There are two features on the same phone. One texts emergency services, one texts your wife. Both need open sky, and both need a phone that is still on.

Which is the point. The hard part is already in your pocket. The part that runs out is the battery.

Why the obvious fixes run out

Both writers above reached for a generator. The Asheville writer waited about a week, until the food began to spoil, then ran it "a few hours at a time twice a day to cool the fridge and recharge phones and headlamp batteries." The day-five writer bought theirs in the middle of the outage, from a Home Depot that got an emergency shipment, and settled for "whatever brand was available that I could physically move in and out of my small hatchback."

That works at home. It does not come with you. One writer in California, after almost four days without power, found it most important that they could take their phones and a charger with them when they left the house: "We couldn't take our generator with us."

A power bank goes anywhere. The worry is how long it lasts. One writer, in a 24 hour drill with cell signal still up, wrote: "I tried not to use my phone. I became hyper-aware of battery life drain. I have a portable [...] power bank but that would be depleted fast."

The wall socket refills a power bank in a few hours, and it is the one thing an outage takes away.

So the list is short:

A battery that is already charged on day one.
Small enough to go where the signal is.
A way to put a little back without a socket or fuel.

The third line is where the number is smaller than you want, and the next section gives it.

The Rivanta power bank from both sides: solar panel on the face, wireless charging pad and twin LED torches on the back, with the compass carabiner. — Nine point six ounces. The solar panel is on the face, and the torch and the wireless pad are on the back.

1.15W

the panel, off its own label

5%

of a phone, per hour of sun

2

charges before any bank is flat

So here is what the panel actually does, with the real number

This is where everybody in this category lies, so we are going to do the opposite and give you the arithmetic to check.

The panel on the face of this thing is rated 1.15 watts. That is not a typo and it is not marketing. It is off the unit's own label: 5 volts, 0.23 amps.

One hour in real, direct, overhead sun puts back roughly five percent of an ordinary phone.

The power bank lying panel-up in direct sunlight on a wooden bench. — One point one five watts. In direct sun that is about five percent of a phone an hour, which is useless as a charger and decisive on day twelve.

Five. Percent.

If you came here expecting to read that the sun refills it, that is the number that should tell you otherwise. Nobody selling one of these prints that number. We just did.

Buyers in this category have already worked this out and they are not gentle about it:

"It is not practical to charge this thing for 4-5 days via solar so that you can charge one phone one time."
A one star review of a competitor's unit, written after Helene

The reviewer is right. If you are buying any of these as a charger that runs on sunlight, do not buy it. You will be disappointed on exactly the schedule they describe, and you will be right to be.

Illustration of the arithmetic on this page, not a measurement. The scale is percent of a full bank, which holds about two phone charges. A clear day of sun adds about eight points, the fifteen or twenty percent of a phone described below. By day three both are all but empty, and only one stays off zero for the sixteen days after.

Stop thinking of it as a charger

Stop thinking of the panel as a way of filling the battery. It is not one, and it never will be.

Think of it as the thing that stops the number reaching zero.

Everybody's power bank is at zero by day three. Yours is at zero by day three as well. The difference is what happens on day four.

Every other power bank on that street stays at zero for the next sixteen days. Yours goes out on the windowsill, or clipped to a bag, and comes back that evening with fifteen or twenty percent of a phone in it. Lying flat it will not catch the sun square, so call it three or four useful hours out of a clear day rather than eight.

That is not a charge. You are not watching Netflix. What it is:

One message that goes through, every day, to the person who needs to know you are alive.
A torch at night.
Enough to switch the phone on, check, and switch it off again.

Indefinitely. Without asking anybody, without queuing anywhere, without fuel.

Under one woman's post on X about the parents she could not reach, other commenters offered hope and said that they had begun getting texts from their loved ones after hours of no communication (FOX TV Digital Team, 29 September 2024).

Day one, every power bank on the street is equal. From day four it is the only one that is still a power bank at all.

SEE THE POWER BANK →

The honest limits, because you are going to think of them anyway

Heavy cloud kills it. Close to nothing goes in. And yes, the weather that caused the outage is usually the weather that blocks the sun, and pretending otherwise would be a lie.

But read the dates again. The storm was one day. The outage was nineteen. There is sun in those nineteen days, and the panel only has to find a few hours of it to do the one job described above.

It is about nine times slower than a wall socket. The unit takes 10.5 watts off a charger and 1.15 off the sun. If your power is back, charge it from the wall. If your car runs and has fuel, the car is better and it is free. This is for the part of the week when neither of those is true.

It is a trickle, not a generator. It will not run a fridge, a furnace or a CPAP, and nothing this size will.

And it needs looking after. Lithium leaks whether you use it or not. The manual says charge it from a wall outlet at least every six months. Anker and Goal Zero say three to four. A power bank that has sat in a drawer untouched for two years is flat on the day you need it, and that is the most common way this entire category fails.

Three other things the reviews complain about, and what this one's label says

Go and read the one star reviews on any power bank in this category. Past the solar, the same three complaints come up over and over. All three are checkable before you buy anything, on this or on whatever else you are looking at.

"It lies about the mAh." About one in seven of the bad reviews say some version of this. Ten thousand milliamp hours at three point seven volts is thirty seven watt hours, and thirty seven watt hours is what the cell holds. The advertised number and the real number are the same one. Roughly two full charges of an ordinary phone, which is the figure worth checking against whatever else you are looking at.

"It swelled up." Or got hot, or melted. This one is tested to UN38.3 and UL 2056, and the label carries PSE, CE, FCC and RoHS. That is the dull part and it is the part we would defend hardest, because one of these is going to sit in a hot car for two years. It is also the thing almost nobody in this category bothers to tell you, so it is worth asking about anything you buy.

The power bank's printed spec label beside a phone showing a full charge. — The label on the back, legible: PN-W05, the real capacity, the solar input at 25,000 lux, and the PSE, CE, FCC and RoHS marks. Worth checking on anything you buy in this category.

"It says waterproof and it is not." This one says IPX4, which is a number rather than a word: rain and spills fine, submersion no. Worth knowing that the manufacturer's own Amazon listing claims IPX5 while its own manual says IPX4. The lower figure is the true one.

Capacity

37 watt hoursabout two full charges of an ordinary phone

Weight

9.6 ozgoes in a coat pocket and walks outside with you

Outputs

three at onceUSB-C, USB-A, wireless pad

Water rating

IPX4rain and spills fine, submersion is not

Light

dual LEDSOS and strobe modes

Tested to

UL 2056, UN38.3plus PSE, CE, FCC and RoHS

What it is

Thirty seven watt hours, nine point six ounces, and it goes in a coat pocket. Charges three things at once over USB-C, USB-A and the pad on the back. A dual LED torch with SOS and strobe in one end, and a compass carabiner in the box.

And a 1.15 watt panel on the face that will not fill it, and is not there to.

So

If the power in your area has never been off for longer than a day, buy the cheapest brick you can find. It will do everything you need.

If you have sat through three days of it, you already know what happens on day four. You are not buying five percent an hour because the number is impressive. You are buying the version of day four where your phone still turns on, and the one message that matters still goes out.

SEE THE POWER BANK →

30-day returnsCarry-on legalTested to UL 2056

Thirty days from the day it arrives to ask for a return. Email before you send anything back.