Backup Power Guides
The research everyone does before buying backup power, done for you — which type fits your outages, how many watts you actually need, whether batteries are ready to replace gas, and the safety rules that aren't optional.
Standby vs Portable vs Battery: Which Type of Backup Power Do You Need?
Backup power comes in three fundamentally different flavors, and picking the wrong one is the most expensive mistake in this hobby. The right answer depends less on specs than on what your outages actually look like: how long they last, what you genuinely need to keep running, and whether anyone will be home to start a machine.
What Size Generator Do I Need? A Wattage Sizing Walkthrough
Generator sizing looks like a physics exam from the outside, but it reduces to two additions: add up the running watts of everything you want on at the same time, then add the single biggest starting surge on top. Get those two numbers and the right generator class falls out automatically.
Can a Battery Replace a Gas Generator? The Honest Tradeoffs
It's the question all over r/Generator and r/preppers since LiFePO4 prices fell: why put up with engines, gas cans, and carbon monoxide at all? For a growing set of households the battery really is the better answer — but the physics of energy storage still draws a hard line, and it's worth knowing exactly where that line sits before you spend.
Generator Safety: CO, Transfer Switches, and Backfeeding
Generators are involved in more storm-related deaths in the US than the storms themselves, and nearly all of those deaths follow one of two mistakes: running the engine somewhere its exhaust can reach people, or connecting it to the house in a way that was never safe. Both are completely preventable. This is the guide we wish came stapled to every generator box.
The Outage Week Playbook: Fuel, Rain, Run Shifts, and the Hardwired Loads
Buying the generator is the easy half. The week the grid is actually down runs on logistics: how much fuel you really have, what happens when it rains on day two, whether to run around the clock or in shifts, and the discovery that your furnace and well pump don't have plugs. Here's the playbook the manual assumes you already know, tuned for hurricane season because that's when everyone learns it.
Generator Maintenance: Why It Won't Start After Sitting, and the 30-Minute Fix
The most common generator failure isn't a failure at all — it's a machine that sat for ten months with gasoline turning to varnish in a carburetor passage the width of a pencil lead. 'Ran fine last year, won't start today' has one overwhelming cause and a maintenance list short enough to actually do. Here's the escalation path when it won't start, and the twenty annual minutes that mean it always does.