[tnjm]

Very true. An alternative is to install a lower-spec off-the-shelf charger/inverter for closer to £1k though, and instead have a handful of sockets with backup power. Being able to charge your phone and laptop, keep the fridge/freezer running and have at least some light is still magical.

[Chris_Newton]

Anything like that is better than nothing, for sure. Personally, we already have various critical equipment on UPS.

Having to work out what is protected and for how long gets old pretty quickly, though. So do alarms going off in one room or another if the mains supply cuts out in the middle of the night, when everyone is (was) probably sleeping anyway. Or occasionally annoyances like waking up to find a big job scheduled to run overnight hasn’t actually run because the system that should have run it executed a controlled power-down after an earlier power outage instead.

In contrast, a relatively large but domestic-scale battery system can easily store 10kWh or more of usable energy these days and provide it to anywhere in the building. That’s enough to run most of our house for 24h, as long as we avoid using very high consumption devices for extended periods or running too many of them at once with peak consumption levels higher than the equipment supports — a huge upgrade compared to the small-scale alternatives.

[thehappypm]

I used to trigger my fuses in my apartment a lot, so I got a UPS power strip. I connected it to my router so the internet would stay on in case I was on a work call or something.

Maybe that’s the simplest solution. Every important appliance has its own UPS. Small UPS’s like that require no setup or permits and just kinda work.

I wonder if you could use one to power a fridge..