Batteries are Cheap, Backup power is expensive

This morning around 9 AM my time my home lost all power.  We are in SC but weather outside is a lovely summer morning, no wind or rain, scattered clouds.  I may have mentioned this before, but we have such incidents around 2x a month, and we are not in the boonies!! I’m 30 minutes from Hilton Head and an hour from Charleston.  Anyway, point is, those of you who are in areas where your surge protections is your power plug, you frighten me.  

My two big needs during the day is my internet hardware + computers.  First runs around 50 Watts, second around 160 to 350 depending on how heavy I’m using them.   

Both of these stacks as it were are fed by a UPS capable of keeping them running for about 30 minutes each.  I successfully transferred power over to my Ecoflow for my PCs and my homegrown battery stack for the networking gear without losing power.  Not nearly as nice as having an outdoor generator which kicks in after 20 seconds.... but for my budget I have 2 days of electronics + CPAP capabilities in the future.  Hurrah. 

To be clear, the way this worked is that I unplugged the UPS from wall power and plugged the UPS into my batteries.  Now it’s battery packs --> UPS --> Electronics.  A little inefficient since the batteries are now charging the UPS also, but it means I could transfer over with no interruption.   

Seems like good setup.  Of course it requires your manual involvement for switching, but your need would be different if you were away from home and unavailable.

The batteries should be adequate so long as the power is back on before too long.  How long is your typical outage?

@jwei 

We have at least 2 power "incidents" a month.  Sometimes it’s just long enough to reset the power on the microwave and oven.  Othertimes I come back and my surge protectors have turned off and have registered an "Extreme Voltage Shutdown" situation were either a brown out or white out has occurred.  

In terms of long term battery needs, about 1 time every three months.  This is at least the third time this year, and once was due to a storm, and once... was some other random thing.  

The complete lack of predictability is why I keep everything on a surge protector, whether that ruins the imaging or tactile feeling of the music or not.  (it does not).  

I was in a hurricane in New Jersey once that knocked out power for more than a week -- so many downed wires from fallen trees for the crews to clear.  I had a roundabout route over cleared roads just to get to the gas station to keep my generator fueled.  Bad luck.

@jwei - That's why propane generators are so attractive to me.  Even when you get an inverter type with sine wave output, their cost is modest and you can keep the fuel around for years outside if stored properly.  You also don't have to lug gas cans or the generator.  Just swap a tank in.