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Building Your Own Redundancy first ran on Wednesday 28 January 2026, landing in 242 inboxes. A hundred and thirty of you opened it. It was about power: solar, batteries, and whether the arithmetic worked. The arithmetic did work, and three weeks ago we came back to say we had undersold it.

We also said, at the end of that January piece, that water and internet were coming next week. The storms beat us to it and Part 2 ran that Friday instead. So the record is fine. What we never did was put the three of them on one page, or ask the question that matters more than any of the arithmetic.

Here is the correction. January asked what an outage costs your working day. It opened by talking about the client call you cancelled and the deadline you missed, and it described a grid that "wasn't designed for households where income depends on uptime." That was true. It was also the wrong axis. Nothing that has gone wrong on this Costa this year went wrong at 10am on a Tuesday to somebody with a client call.

Three weeks ago we told you Spain's new self-consumption deduction was 20%. The law says 10.

The basic rate is 10% of what you spend. Twenty is a second, narrower case, for owners of a dwelling in a building of predominantly residential use. Which one you fall into is less clear than we made it sound, and on the equivalent wording in an older deduction the record runs both ways, so it is a gestor question rather than ours. We are not one.

The rest is worth having straight. Maximum base €5,000 a year, so up to €500 back at the basic rate and up to €1,000 at the higher one, with no carry-forward. The installation has to be finished in 2026, not merely paid for, and it needs its Certificado de Instalaciones Eléctricas — electrical installation certificate. Pay by card or transfer; cash counts for nothing. Any grant comes off the base first. And it reduces income tax, so it reaches you only if you are tax resident here.

The 112 service publishes a flood guide with a section headed PREPARA TU PROPIO SIMULACRO — prepare your own drill. Three steps: rehearse a plan with your family, teach everyone to dial 1-1-2, and fix a meeting point for the times you are not all home.

That is the whole of the official ask, and almost nobody has done it. What follows is that drill with the numbers filled in. Almost all of it comes straight out of what the Junta and Protección Civil already publish. The parts that do not, we have marked.

Nothing here says a flood is coming. It says we are already inside the stretch of the year when one becomes possible: cold air arriving high up while the sea still holds the summer's heat, which a serving AEMET director describes as the most dangerous set-up there is, from late summer onward. There was a DANA over the southwest of the peninsula on 17 August with Málaga under a yellow warning. So this is not a countdown to September. It is a reason to spend the ninety minutes now rather than later.

Your phones, five minutes. ES-Alert is the government message that goes to every handset in an affected area. There is no app and nothing to sign up for. On an iPhone: Ajustes > Notificaciones, scroll to the very bottom, and turn on everything under Alertas gubernamentales. On Android: Ajustes > Notificaciones > Alertas de emergencia inalámbricas, though some phones file it under Seguridad y emergencia and a Samsung buries it under Ajustes Avanzados. You need Android 11 or later, or iOS 15.6. An Android 8 phone receives nothing at all, which is the one line on this page worth acting on today. The top level cannot be switched off and sounds at full volume even on silent. Two catches. The message can go out in English, but the English only reaches phones set to a language other than Spanish, so a handset running in Spanish may get only the Spanish. And there is no way to test any of it: no dial code, no monthly test. The check above is the whole drill. Our guide to the phone setup has the screens.

The weather, five minutes. The official app is Aemet: tiempo y radar España, free, from the state meteorological agency. Add your town as a favourite and leave notifications on. You pick a municipality but AEMET issues warnings by zone, and Málaga province has four: Antequera, Ronda, Sol y Guadalhorce, and Axarquía. West of Málaga on the Costa you are in Sol y Guadalhorce; east of it, Axarquía. There are three warning levels and no green one. Amarillo means the danger is low and the instruction is to stay alert. Naranja means it is important, so be ready. Rojo means extraordinary, with very serious or catastrophic impacts possible, and the instruction is to do what the authorities tell you.

Six numbers, five minutes. 112, which the Junta calls a free public service answering permanently across Andalucía in Spanish, English, French, German and Arabic. Salud Responde on 955 54 50 60, staffed round the clock every day, for appointments and health advice, with a translation service; it is an ordinary geographic number, so not free to call. For power, the company that fixes the line is your distributor rather than whoever bills you: across the province that is e-distribución on 900 878 212, answered in Spanish, Catalan and English, with a live outage map. Water is municipal, so Málaga city is Emasa on 900 777 420 and the western Costa is Acosol on 952 773 189. If neither is yours, take the number off your last bill tonight. Then one person outside the province, which is ours, not the Junta's.

The house, thirty minutes. Find out whether you are on ground that floods: where the nearest rambla — dry watercourse runs, where the higher ground is, which underpass on your route goes first. Move documents and anything hazardous high, passports and residency papers and deeds in something waterproof. Clear the roof, gutters and terrace drains. Assemble what Andalucía actually asks for, which is shorter than the lists online: documentación, un pequeño botiquín, alimentos, ropa de abrigo, linterna y radio de pilas secas. Find the electricity, gas and water shut-offs and check whoever is home can reach them. On food the Junta says three days needing no refrigeration and no cooking. On water it names bottled water and sets no quantity, so borrow Catalonia's planning figure of a litre and a half per person per day, and note Catalonia calls that a minimum. The Junta did not say it; we are telling you where it came from.

Two sentences said out loud, five minutes. Nobody goes down to the garage or the sótano — basement once water is coming in. Andalucía's own guide is blunter than anything you will read in English about this: no entres en casa si la planta baja está anegada, no bajes al sótano. And the car rule: you abandon it when the water is over the wheel axles or up to your knee, and if the doors will not open you go out of the window. The traffic authority puts numbers on the same thing, and they agree. At 20 centimetres you are already struggling to steer. At 30 you are being carried, not driving.

The question nobody asks, five minutes. This one is ours and no official body publishes it. Email your administrador de fincas — building manager one question: what does this building actually do in an extended power cut or a flood. Is there a generator or not, what happens if someone is in the lift, is there a water pump, how does the garage gate open with no power, and who holds the keys. Most residents find out the answer while it is happening.

One ask. That last question is the one we cannot answer for you, because nobody publishes it and every building is different. So if you send it, tell us what came back. Generator or none, who holds the keys, what happens to the lift. We will put the answers together and print what the buildings on this Costa actually have, which is a thing no official page anywhere will tell you.

Simulacro — drill, or rehearsal. The word the Junta uses for what it is asking you to do: "prepara tu propio simulacro."

Aviso naranja — orange warning. The middle of AEMET's three levels. It means the danger is important and the instruction is to be ready, not to wait and see.

The state has done the instruction-writing. It publishes the drill, asks households to run it, and puts the numbers where anyone can find them, in Spanish, on pages nobody reads until the week they need them. What it has never done is write it for a household that reads English, does not know which of the four Málaga zones it lives in, and has never asked what its own building does when the power goes. That last gap is not the state's to close. Ninety minutes, and almost none of it costs anything.

Start with the phones, because it is five minutes and an old handset gets nothing at all: our guide to setting up ES-Alert walks the screens on both platforms.

Nearly there — A. and the WaypointSur team, torches tested, radio hissing gently in the hall.