Three days without power: what keeps running inside a Caribbean home
8:47 p.m. The air conditioning stops mid-cycle, the fan slows down, and the living room light drops out. Outside, it is not just your house: the whole street is black. Here, nobody is really surprised. A tree on a line, a tired transformer, a plant that trips, and life stops until further notice. This time it stopped for three days.
In the Caribbean, an outage is not a rare incident. It is a season. Between the heat, the rain that arrives all at once, the September storms and the houses we leave empty for months, the grid is a guest whose schedule nobody knows. So the real question is not when the power will come back. It is what, inside your home, will keep working while it is gone.
What stops in the same second
Let us be honest: without power, the AC stops, the cistern pump stops, gate and shutter motors stop, and the internet box goes down. Immediate comfort goes first, and it only returns with the line.
It is also the moment when the wrong voltage costs real money. On the French side of Saint Martin, the supply is 220-230 V / 50 Hz. On the Dutch side of Sint Maarten, and across the English-speaking islands such as Anguilla, Antigua or Barbados, it is 110-120 V / 60 Hz. A device ordered in the wrong version will not work slightly worse: it will not plug in, or it will burn. You check that at purchase, not the day before a storm.
The door, at least, does not lock you out
There is one detail that comes to mind at 2 a.m., when you get home and everything is dark: the front door. A Tedee smart lock runs on its own battery, not on the mains. The Tedee PRO, the smallest motorised lock on the market, carries a rechargeable battery that lasts up to 6 months. The Tedee GO, easier to fit yourself, lasts 6 to 8 months on three CR123A batteries.
The result: during an outage, the door still opens and closes normally. Whoever is on site unlocks from their phone over Bluetooth, with no internet and no power. And when the electricity comes back, the entry history is still there. We covered it in detail in the key you lost in the sand, and the official Tedee documentation details every model.
Cameras that ask nothing of the grid
Then there is the question every owner asks: who is watching the house in the meantime? On a property at the end of a track, on a plot with no cabling, on a building site or in a home used a few weeks a year, running power out to the camera is often a project in itself.
Hikvision’s AOV SolarVu™ series answers exactly that case: cameras powered 100% by solar energy, with wireless transmission, designed to be deployed where there is no cable and no socket. ColorVu 3.0 keeps the image in colour even at night, and Guanlan AI models cut the false alerts that drive a distant owner mad. You open your phone and you see the gate, the driveway, the entrance. The power can be out, the house is not blind, as long as mobile coverage holds, which on our islands it almost always does.
Water: the cistern becomes your reserve again
When the grid drops, many islands also lose water pressure, because desalination plants and pumping stations stop with it. In those hours, the cistern stops being a piece of equipment and becomes what it always was: your reserve. That is the whole point of our article on the dry cistern and the garden that knew.
The heat does not apologise
Three days without power is also three nights looking for air. Manual shutters stay your best ally: closed during the day, open as soon as the breeze comes up. And when the power returns, the AC restarts on a house that has been baking all day, which helps neither comfort nor the bill. Cooling room by room instead of the whole property is another story: we explain it in air conditioning in the Caribbean.
A home that holds up without power is decided before the outage.
What you prepare before, never during
September is the peak of hurricane season, and the right moment to sort things out: which device runs on batteries, which one depends on the grid, which one has to be ordered in the right voltage, and what you want to be able to check from your phone when everything is dark. An [ART]IST installer trained by Nexus Carib can answer those questions on site and design the whole installation, device by device.
The power comes back, the question stays
The next outage will not warn you any more than the last one. Between a house that suffers and a property that keeps watch, the difference is not decided during the outage: it is decided now. Battery locks, solar cameras, remote management, devices at the right voltage. Nothing spectacular, just a home that does not stop at the same time as the island.
Write to us to talk it through, or come and see us at the Marigot showroom: we will look together at what, in your home, can keep running the day everything goes dark.