About
Held in Reserve publishes practical preparedness guidance for households: power outages, water failures, food disruption, severe weather, home security and communications. The aim is narrow and unglamorous — work out what actually happens, what it actually costs, and what actually helps.
What the name means
Reserve capacity is the margin you have not spent: the watt-hours still in the battery, the gallons still in the tank, the headroom between what a system can deliver and what it is being asked for. Preparedness is the practice of keeping some. It is not a doomsday hobby and it does not require believing that society is about to end — a three-day outage is an ordinary event, and the same margin covers it.
That is also why this site does not look like most preparedness sites. There are no countdown timers, no popups, no black-and-red tactical styling and no manufactured urgency. Fear is an effective way to sell equipment and a poor way to decide what to buy.
Where the numbers come from
The figures on this site come from published sources: government and regulator data, engineering standards, utility and grid-operator reports, incident post-mortems, and manufacturer specifications. Where a calculation is made, the assumptions behind it are printed next to the result so you can disagree with any of them and watch the answer move.
To be explicit about the limit of that: Held in Reserve does not operate a test lab. We do not run generators for a week, and no article here should be read as a hands-on product test. What we do is check claims against the arithmetic and against the published record — which, surprisingly often, is enough to show that a marketing figure cannot be right.
Articles carry a "figures last verified" date rather than only a publication date, because on a page whose value is its numbers, the age of the numbers is what matters.
How this site is funded
Some links on this site are affiliate links, meaning we may earn a commission if you buy through them at no additional cost to you. Where a page contains one, a disclosure appears above the first such link on that page — not buried in a footer, and not after you have already clicked.
Two consequences of that arrangement are worth stating plainly. First, we do not publish star ratings or aggregate-rating markup on pages that earn commission from the product being rated, because a rating that pays the person issuing it is not a rating. Second, some vendors' affiliate terms forbid publishing anything less than positive about their product; where we have written about such a product anyway, the article carries no verdict at all and says so, rather than pretending the absence of criticism was our own editorial judgement.
We also cover how those contractual restrictions work, and the gap between sticker prices and real costs, because readers deserve to know how the coverage they read elsewhere is shaped.
Where to start
- Start here — the foundations, in reading order.
- Prepare by problem — guides grouped by the event rather than the subject.
- Tools and calculators — run the numbers for your own household.
- All guides — the complete catalogue.