If you're not online, a pool will not help you. Not for real solo mining at least. It could for more evenly dispersing your reward payout of you have some down time but it's not really even helping then so much as just lowering your average reward to make up for your down time. Not helping, just smoothing out your payouts. Which could be useful depending on the payout methodology. And I could be missing something. I'm not expert but I do run miners (S9s) and I just don't get it (ckpool). Just gives me a scammy gut feeling is all.  

 Update: had three hours of downtime while I was at work because my miner and my node stopped cooperating for some reason lmao

There is a reason that Satoshi designed Bitcoin to work even if participants left and rejoined the network at irregular intervals. Managing uptime and latency is a full time job if you have real value on the line and cannot afford to be offline.

I will check my logs and press on though  

 Awesome to hear the update. In a pool, this would just mean lower rewards for the downtime.