Here’s Why You Should Have a Faraday Cage

Have you been thinking about a faraday cage but not sure when you’d ever need it? This article is about to go into all the reasons why you may want one and how to make it work best for you!

Why do you need a faraday cage:

First of all, you don’t NEED a faraday cage. You will only want to have a faraday cage around if you would like to protect important electronics. If you don’t care about any electronics, then I do also hope you’ve made plans to accommodate that lifestyle. 

However, you may not be able to protect electronics that you have out all the time, like your cell phone. Because an EMP is unpredictable, there’s no way of knowing when we’ll have to place all of our important electronics into a faraday cage at the exact right time to keep them protected. 

So instead of relying on your everyday electronics to be protected, have backups of important electronics. 

Such as:

  • A tablet with eBooks, pictures, documents and other important things on it.
  • An external harddrive with pictures, videos, eBooks, documents and other important things on it. 
  • Radios 
  • External battery chargers
  • Solar generators

I typically have the understanding that I will not have access to anything on my everyday phones or laptops because they are not protected day-to-day. So I do a backup as often as possible and keep that backup protected in the faraday cage. 

You can also use EMP Shield to protect your home, car, generators, solar systems, and more! 

What are the best faraday bags?

I made this trash can faraday cage and it works great. 

Mission Darkness also has some great bags that I have personally tested myself. I’m not a fan of their tablet or phone-sized ones, but their bigger bags are perfect to store my extra electronics in. 

We also use faraday fabric to protect solar generators or use it for wrapping inside of bins. 

The biggest aspect about any faraday cage device is that everything must be sealed. If you’ve ever heard people say ‘just put your phone in the microwave’ or ‘your microwave is a faraday cage’ to protect against EMPs, unfortunately, your microwave is NOT protected enough against an EMP because it’s not completely sealed.

If you want to turn your microwave into a completely sealed faraday cage, you’ll need to take it down from the wall and completely seal all of the cracks, holes, whatever else. It needs to be sealed with aluminum foil and tape at a minimum. 

Also, make sure that no electronics have any direct contact with the aluminum foil or any steel. If you’re using a trash can, make sure it’s lined with cardboard, as shown in the video above. 

In saying all of this, be sure to have as many hard copies as possible. Even though there have been tests of what an EMP could do to electronics, we won’t actually know for sure what will be affected or not. Some speculate cars will be perfectly fine, some say electronics will be perfectly fine. It also will greatly depend on your radius to the EMP event. 

We won’t know until something happens. 

Protect what is most important to you. Protect documents, images, videos, generators, radios, tablets, hard drives, thumb drives, and so on. 

Have some way to charge those devices. If the power is shut down because of an EMP, you may have those electronic devices safe in the faraday cage, but how will they be charged? Even the external battery charger or solar generators will need to be recharged at some point. 

Solar panels are great to have inside of the faraday cage because they could potentially be affected as well, and they’re an additional source of energy to charge those devices. 

Lastly, consider who is on the other end. For instance, if you want to use ham radio to speak with your cousins up north, will their radios also be in a faraday cage to ensure protection so they can use it after an EMP?

It’s good to be prepared. There’s no reason to simply dismiss modern technology just because an EMP could affect it. Our world is filled with technology, so unless you suddenly have every single thing in hard copy format (even videos??) then we can at least do our best to protect the precious data that we’d like to continue to have access to, EMP or no.

Morgan
Morgan is the founder of Rogue Preparedness. She has been a prepper for over a decade. She's a wife, mother of two daughters and is homesteading off grid. She teaches people how to be prepared for emergencies and disasters.

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