[abakker]

And, for a refrigerator and a lot of loads, being down for 2 days straight is way worse than a few hours a year. losing 48 hours of supply a year if broken into 2 hour chunks is not nearly as bad as losing 48 consecutive hours.

[matthewfcarlson]

I get your point, but I personally would be grumpy if I lost power for two hours twice a month. I realize that is rich considering this article is about people who are lucky to get any amount of power reliably

[jaggederest]

When I lived in a city proper, the grid was doing well to maintain 98% uptime. Multiple day long outages were the rule, not uncommon to lose power 3-5 days in a row.

Now I live in a rural area and it's uncommon to avoid outages more than a month. We have an automatic transfer switch and fuel generator from previous owners and it saves hundreds of dollars in frozen food.

This is in the US by the way. If you're investing in a transfer switch and generator now, the cost is going to quickly approach a modest solar + battery set up with a whole house inverter, and of course, you save money all year that way, not just in outages.