Island electricity is excellent until it isn't

There is a particular rhythm to working from an island. The ferry timetable shapes your week, the weather shapes your plans, and the electricity supply, most of the time, simply works. Until a gust takes out a line on the hill, a submarine cable faults, or a lightning strike trips the whole network and you find yourself sitting in the dark wondering whether that client call at four o'clock is still happening.

Island grids are often fed by a single cable or a small number of overhead lines strung across exposed ground. Faults can take longer to fix because the engineers, the parts and sometimes the weather window all have to arrive by boat. That means an outage that would be a ten-minute inconvenience in a city can stretch to several hours, or in the worst cases, a day or more. Planning for that is not paranoia, it is just good housekeeping.

Know what actually damages your equipment

Most people assume the danger is the power going off. In practice, the power going off is merely annoying. The damage tends to come from what happens around it.

• Surges and spikes: a sudden jump in voltage, often caused by lightning or by switching on the network. This is what quietly cooks routers, chargers and laptop power bricks.
• Sags and brownouts: voltage dipping below normal without cutting out entirely. Motors struggle, power supplies overheat, and electronics can behave strangely or fail over time.
• Restoration surges: the moment the supply returns is frequently the most dangerous of the whole event. Everything connected gets a jolt at once.
• Hard shutdowns: an abrupt loss of power mid-write can corrupt files, damage drive partitions and cost you an afternoon's work.

Start with surge protection, the cheap layer

Before spending serious money, put a decent surge-protecting extension lead between the wall socket and your desk. Look for one with a stated joule rating and a clamping voltage, not the cheapest four-way block from a discount shop. Anything claiming protection without a number on it is decoration.

Plug your router, your monitor and your desk lamp into it. Understand two limits, though: a surge protector does nothing to keep you online during a cut, and it is sacrificial. After a significant strike it may have absorbed its last hit and will quietly stop protecting anything. If your area takes regular lightning, treat them as consumables and replace them every few years, or after any event where something nearby was damaged.

A small UPS keeps the router alive

An uninterruptible power supply is a battery box that sits between the wall and your equipment. Sized sensibly, it will carry a router, an optical network terminal and a small network switch for half an hour or more, which is usually enough to finish a call, send an email or ride out a brief trip.

A few practical points. Add up the wattage of what you plan to connect and stay well inside the unit's rating; routers and modems draw surprisingly little, maybe ten to twenty watts each. Never put a printer, heater or kettle on a UPS, they will flatten it in seconds. Test it every few months by pulling the plug and timing how long everything stays up. Batteries in these units typically last three to four years, and a UPS with a dead battery is just an expensive extension lead.

Laptop habits that buy you hours

Your laptop already contains a battery, which makes it the most resilient piece of kit on the desk. Treat it that way.

• Keep it between roughly 40 and 80 per cent charge during the day, then top it up when a storm is forecast. A full battery is a free two to six hours of work.
• During thunder and lightning, unplug the charger and run on battery. The mains cable is the path the surge would use to reach the machine.
• Dim the screen, switch off keyboard backlighting and close browser tabs you are not reading. Each one buys you minutes.
• Invest in a USB-C power bank with enough output to charge a laptop. A good one will give a low-power ultrabook a further full charge, and will keep your phone alive for days.
• Charge in priority order: laptop, phone, power bank, then everything else. Doing this deliberately rather than plugging in whatever is nearest makes a real difference over a long evening.

The boring routine that saves your work

The most common casualty of island outages is not hardware, it is unsaved work. Turn on autosave everywhere it exists, sync your documents to a cloud folder, and keep an offline copy of anything critical on an external drive that lives in a drawer rather than on your desk.

Keep a small box of essentials: a head torch, a battery lantern, a charged power bank, spare batteries for the mouse and keyboard, and a printed list of the numbers you would need if the internet stayed down. A mobile hotspot on your phone is a reasonable broadband backup if you have signal, so check what your own coverage is like before you rely on it.

Finally, plan for the moment the lights come back. If you know a cut is coming, unplug sensitive equipment rather than leaving it to face the restoration surge. When power returns, wait a minute or two, then bring the router up first and give it time to settle before waking the laptop. It is a small ritual, but on an island it is the one that keeps you working.