Home battery and backup power questions, answered

EnergySage says resiliency, backup power in an outage, is the main reason people install home storage, and that most batteries cannot back up a whole home, so you choose the circuits.

If you mainly want the fridge, lights, internet and a medical device through an outage, a plug-in power station is far cheaper: the 2 kWh Bluetti Elite 200 V2 was listed at $899 when we checked on October 19, 2026, and you plug appliances straight into it. See the next questions for run times.

To size your own: add up the daily kWh of what you want to keep running, multiply by the days of backup you want, and check the battery's continuous power rating covers everything that runs at once. The average US home's fridges use 839 kWh a year (EIA), about 2.3 kWh a day.

For scale: 6,000 full cycles is one a day for about 16 years, and 60 MWh is 4,000 full charges of a 15 kWh battery.

Read the warranty for the exact terms: what counts as a cycle, the capacity it guarantees and whether it transfers if you sell the house.

Ready.gov also says a full freezer holds its temperature for about 48 hours, and to throw out food that has reached 40 degrees or higher. Our fridge calculator lets you enter your own fridge's yearly kWh instead of the average.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission says most generator incidents reported to it involve carbon monoxide from generators used indoors or in partly enclosed spaces, and to never run one in a home, garage, basement, crawlspace or shed, even with fans or open doors and windows. Ready.gov and the CPSC both say to install battery-backed carbon monoxide alarms.

Whichever you pick, power appliances by plugging them into the unit with suitable cords, never by connecting it to a wall outlet (next question).

OSHA warns that a generator attached to a building without a properly installed transfer switch can energize wiring for great distances. Some larger power stations are built to connect to home circuits through the maker's own panel: EcoFlow, for example, says its DELTA Pro Ultra needs its Smart Home Panel 2, installed by an electrician.

Run time is the station's capacity, less about 15% for inverter losses, divided by the heater's watts.