The Free Offline Readiness Field Guide: Real Numbers, Zero Doom

What the Offline Readiness Field Guide actually is

It is a free printable field guide across six sections: Power, Water and food, Comms, Offline AI, Navigation and documents, and Body and first-aid. Each section answers one question well. When the grid or the internet goes down, what do you actually do, and what do the real numbers say?

Every quantitative and safety claim is fact-checked against a primary authority: the CDC, EPA, USDA, FEMA, FCC, NOAA and the National Weather Service, NIST, GPS.gov, and CISA. Not a blog quoting a blog. The agencies that write the standards.

It lives at /field-guide behind a single email field. One box, your email, done. You get the printable PDF and the full on-page version. No account, no credit card, no phone number.

• Six sections: power, water and food, comms, offline AI, navigation and documents, and first-aid.
• Every number and safety rule sourced to a primary authority.
• A clean printable PDF with the math shown, not asserted.
• One email field to get it. Nothing else.

Why it is different from every other prep guide

No doom. We do not open with a countdown to collapse. Outages are ordinary. Heat waves, winter storms, and downed towers cause most of them, and the guide treats them that way. Calm beats panic when the lights are actually off.

No hype. When a spec does not hold up, we say so. Half of this guide is myth-busting the numbers you have been repeating without checking: power bank capacity, solar output, fridge draw, battery care.

Real numbers in a clean printable layout. The math is shown, not asserted, so you can redo it for your own gear. Print it, fold it, drop it in a go-bag. It works on paper because paper works when nothing else does.

The Power section will change how you buy batteries

Here is the fact that surprises almost everyone. That 20,000mAh power bank does not hold 20,000 units of anything useful to your phone. Convert it honestly and it is about 74 Wh of raw cell capacity, and roughly 30 to 40 percent of that is lost to voltage conversion and heat, so only about 45 to 59 Wh actually reaches your device. That is around 2.5 to 4 phone charges, not the five-plus on the box.

The guide teaches one formula so you never get fooled again: watt-hours equals mAh times volts divided by 1,000, and runtime equals usable watt-hours divided by device watts. Learn that and you can size any battery for any device in your head.

Two more myths get corrected on the same pages. A 500W fridge does not pull 500 watts around the clock. Its compressor cycles roughly a third of the time, so average draw is closer to 150 to 167 watts, per EnergySage. And a 100W solar panel realistically yields about 300 to 600 Wh per day, not 1,200, because there are only about three to six hours of usable peak sun, per NREL's PVWatts model. Plan around real output and you will not be caught short.

Water and Comms: the two mistakes that cost people

Water first, because the myth here is dangerous. Boiling water for one minute kills bacteria, viruses, Giardia, and Cryptosporidium, per the CDC. But household bleach does not reliably kill Cryptosporidium, and nothing on the basic list removes chemicals or heavy metals. Only a specialized filter does that, per the EPA. If you are chemically treating clear water, the rough dose is about eight drops of unscented bleach per gallon, then wait 30 minutes. The guide lays out when each method works and, just as important, when it does not.

Comms is where instinct fails you. In a blackout, text, do not call. SMS is low-bandwidth and store-and-forward, so it keeps retrying until it lands even when voice networks are jammed, per the FCC and FEMA. Wireless Emergency Alerts still broadcast when cellular is congested. A NOAA Weather Radio and a plain AM radio keep working when towers go dark, and AM skywave can reach hundreds of miles at night, per the NWS. Your GPS also works in airplane mode. It is receive-only from satellites, so pre-download your maps while you still have signal, per GPS.gov.

Offline AI, storage math, and the lithium rule you have had backwards

The Offline AI section does the storage math out loud. On a 128 GB USB stick, a capable 4-bit Llama 3.1 8B model is about 4.9 GB, and a text-only copy of Wikipedia is about 57 GB, per Hugging Face and Kiwix. A full offline AI plus a reference library is roughly 62 GB, about half the stick. A working brain and a library in your pocket, no signal required.

That is the exact job PortableMind was built for. It is a plug-and-run offline AI USB: from $49 for CORE (Windows chat), $79 for v1.5 (adds voice and vision), a MAX-SPEED build for power users, and a $199 PRO Navigator that adds offline GPS. One-time price, no subscription, 100 percent local. It runs on laptop battery with Wi-Fi off, which is useful exactly when the grid or internet is down. The guide stands on its own, but if you want the AI half of it live in your hand, that is the product.

And the myth that ends the guide: stop fully draining your lithium batteries. Full discharges shorten their life. Shallow, roughly 40-percent depth-of-discharge cycles last three to six times longer than 100-percent cycles, and you should store cells cool and around 40 to 80 percent, per Battery University BU-808. Drain it all the way is a leftover rule from old nickel-cadmium packs. Following it on modern gear quietly kills the exact batteries you are counting on.

How to get it

Go to /field-guide and enter your email. That is the whole gate. You get the printable PDF and the full on-page guide immediately: Power, Water and food, Comms, Offline AI, Navigation and documents, and Body and first-aid, every claim sourced.

It is genuinely free and genuinely useful whether or not you ever buy anything from us. Print it, share it, keep a copy in the glovebox and one in the go-bag. Readiness that lives on paper is readiness that survives a dead phone.