October 2026

On October 15, the first Santa Ana wind of the season arrived, and it was strong enough to trigger SCE to shut off our power under a Public Safety Power Shutoff, or PSPS. The day had already started strangely. At 10 a.m., when the power went down, our solar and batteries should have kept us going, but they didn’t. We got only a flicker of power, on and off. Every time it dropped, our appliances beeped, then beeped again 30 seconds later, then 40 seconds after that. The solar system had run normally until then, so this was not promising.

I started our fire drill routine and set up the backups to the backup. Next in line was our 5 kW Jackery, which helped us during construction and through past PSPS events. Last was a dual fuel generator, which we have only used to charge the Jackery and Anker batteries. In the worst case, it could power the fire suppression system.

Luckily, Ruben, our electrician, was here that morning finishing up for our final building inspection. He called our solar installer on FaceTime, and together they found a slipped circuit breaker. We assume we were still running construction equipment and my espresso machine when the PSPS hit, and that may have tripped it. The breaker could also have been bad. Ruben replaced it, and at 11:45 I finally had my espresso.

But that didn’t mean all was well. That afternoon, at 4:41 p.m., the Bryson fire started about 1.5 miles from us. LA County Fire held it under 200 acres in high winds and stopped it from crossing Encinal Canyon Road. Otherwise it would have burned down toward the beach.

Our crew respected our strong requests to not leave anything combustible within sight of our house’s exterior. No stray gloves, no food wrappers, no bits of paper or cardboard boxes. “Think like a match” was our mantra, and everyone was extremely supportive, understanding that this time we weren’t just being picky about cleanliness. All the pressure we put them through to get the backup system and portable generator up and running earlier that day made very real sense as we all watched Bryson and hoped for the best. There was comfort in knowing we’d prepared for the worst.

Our Solar – Battery backup worked fine.
For the next few mornings the batteries were still at 20%, more than enough for my espresso.