At 6:40 a.m. the property manager closes the office floor after a fire panel fault. The plan says staff work from home. By 9:00 one analyst's breaker has tripped twice, another is on a phone because the router shares a circuit with a space heater, and a third has lost power in a wind storm.
The plan named a recovery site but no owner, standard or test for its electrical side. When that site is a spare bedroom, the person who checks whether the home can carry the load is a residential electrician Colorado Springs households can call, not the company's facilities team. This insight sets out how to turn the home office into a control with an owner, evidence and a test date.
The recovery site nobody inspected
Exposure. In continuity terms, a work-area recovery site is the place people go to keep critical work running when the normal office cannot be used. Many organizations have quietly made employees' homes that site. The business impact analysis, the exercise that ranks processes by how long they can be down, assumes those homes have power, connectivity and a usable desk. Nobody has checked.
Impact. When the office closes, the critical processes move onto home circuits that were never assessed. If those homes fail, the recovery time objective, the agreed limit on how long a process can be unavailable, is missed without anyone having made a decision to miss it.
Control. Treat each critical role's home office as a site in the plan. Give it an owner, normally the employee, with a simple standard: the desk, network equipment and lighting must keep working through a normal day under load. Where an employee is unsure their home can meet it, an assessment by a licensed residential electrician is the evidence. The company sets the standard; the professional confirms the home meets it.
Test. Ask each person in a critical role to work a full day from home on a scheduled date, using the equipment they would use in a real event. Collect a short note afterward: what tripped, flickered or ran out. That note is the audit trail.
Circuits that carry more than they were built for
Exposure. Home offices grow by addition: a second monitor, a printer, a docking station, a space heater for winter mornings, a fan for summer afternoons. Often they all share one circuit with a bedroom or a kitchen appliance. Older homes may have fewer circuits than modern use expects, and a panel with no room to add more.
Impact. Repeated tripping is more than an annoyance. Each trip drops the network, interrupts calls and risks unsaved work. Warm outlets, flickering lights or a burning smell are warning signs that need a professional immediately, not a reset.
Control. Do not rearrange wiring or add circuits yourself, and do not run equipment through chains of power strips. Have a licensed electrician look at how the office is supplied, whether the panel can handle the demand, and whether a dedicated circuit or a panel upgrade makes sense. If the household is also adding a home EV charger, raise it in the same conversation, because it changes what the panel has to carry.
Test. List every device in the office and what else shares its outlets. Share that list with the electrician during the assessment. Afterward, run the full-day test again and compare the notes.
Single point of failure: in most home offices it is the one circuit feeding the router, the computer and the monitors together. When it trips or the panel cannot carry it, every channel to the business goes down at once, which is why it belongs in the electrician's assessment before the next event.
Storms, surges and outages
Exposure. Thunderstorms, high wind and heavy snow all affect home power. Lightning nearby and the moment the grid comes back can both send surges through a home's wiring. Outages may last minutes or much longer.
Impact. A surge can damage a router, a laptop charger or a monitor in an instant, and replacements take time to arrive. A longer outage simply ends the working day for that person unless a fallback exists.
Control. Three layers, each owned by someone:
- Equipment level: a small battery backup for the router and modem so a short flicker does not drop calls. The employee owns this.
- Home level: surge protection and, where justified, standby power. These are installations for a licensed electrician only; portable generators must never be connected to home wiring by anyone else.
- Plan level: a fallback location for anyone whose home loses power for long. The continuity lead owns this.
Test. Once a quarter, unplug the router's battery backup from the wall during a quiet hour and see how long the connection lasts. Record the result.
Lighting for long days and dark mornings
Exposure. Spare rooms are often lit for sleeping, not for eight hours of reading screens and paper. Winter mornings and storm days are dark. If the main light is the only light, one failed fixture leaves the desk in shadow.
Impact. Poor lighting does not stop work, but it slows it and tires people over a long recovery period, which is exactly when they need to perform.
Control. Plan task and room lighting as part of the home office standard. A desk lamp and an overhead light on different circuits mean one failure does not leave the room dark. Keep a battery lantern in the office for outages, so the person can shut down equipment safely and find their way out. Any new fixtures or switches should be installed by a licensed electrician.
Test. Work one early winter morning with the curtains closed. If you reach for a lamp from another room, add lighting to the electrician's list.
When something fails during a real event
Exposure. Most plans describe what happens when the office closes. Few describe what happens when the recovery site fails halfway through the same day. The employee is alone, the continuity lead is busy, and nobody is sure who should decide what.
Impact. Without a clear path, people improvise. They reset a breaker that keeps tripping, plug the router into an extension cord across the hallway, or simply go quiet while the team assumes they are working. Each of those choices adds risk or hides a gap.
Control. Write a short escalation path and make sure every remote role has it:
- The employee reports the failure to the continuity lead within the hour, with a one-line description.
- If a breaker trips more than once, or anything is warm, sparking or smells of burning, the employee stops using that circuit and calls a licensed electrician. Nobody resets it repeatedly.
- The continuity lead decides whether the person moves to the fallback location or hands work to a colleague.
- After the event, the failure is logged and the home office goes back on the assessment list.
Test. Include a recovery-site failure in your next tabletop exercise, a discussion-based walk-through of a scenario around a table. Ask who is called, in what order, and how long the handover takes.
Owners and dates
| Control | Owner | Do now | Before storm season | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home office standard | Continuity lead | Write and circulate | Confirm critical roles | Review |
| Circuit and panel assessment | Employee, with a licensed electrician | Book for critical roles | Complete | After any change |
| Battery backup for router | Employee | Buy and connect | Quarterly runtime test | Replace as needed |
| Fallback location | Continuity lead | Identify | Confirm access | Test |
What to do this quarter
- List every role that relies on working from home in your recovery plan and name an owner for each home office.
- Run a scheduled full-day test and collect what tripped, flickered or failed.
- Book electrical assessments for the homes that reported problems, starting with the most critical roles.
A recovery site that has never been tested is a hope with an address.
