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ZDNET’s key takeaways

• Blackouts strike with zero warning, so plan ahead.
• Be aware that heat can throttle your power station.
• Think about how to get the power to where you’ll need it.

I have 11 kWh of battery power sitting in my house — enough to run a small home for days. It weighs almost 300 pounds. I call it the Tower of Power (a Bluetti Apex 300 and three expansion batteries). And when a real blackout hit, it still wasn’t enough to stop me from wasting power, cooking a battery in the heat, and losing my fridge.

So, what happened?

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It turns out I had three issues working against me, along with the fact that I’ve not finished my build yet.

1. Power outages don’t give you any warning

They just happen. One minute, everything is powered up, the next it isn’t.

And it’s happening a lot. Just this month, almost 400,000 DTE customers lost power due to storms, with some having to wait five days before the power came back, and PJM, the largest grid operator in the US, was forced to cut electricity consumption because of generator outages, overloads on its transmission lines, and a huge surge in air conditioning use resulting from the heat.

I’ve tested and planned for this sort of thing a lot, but a real blackout highlighted some weaknesses in my planning.

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The first weakness was uncovered by the fact that it happened while I was away from home, so I wasn’t there to push buttons and pull levers to make things work. The problem was that the power outage also killed the internet. No, not my router, because that was connected to the backup power, but because the outage briefly took down the local fiber and cellular infrastructure.

The infrastructure kicked back into life quickly, it seems, but not before my router had some kind of brain freeze and decided it didn’t want to connect to the outside world.

This left me unable to manage anything on my network remotely. This meant that power was wasted running things that could have been turned off (I didn’t need to be charging power tool batteries, for example) and other things didn’t get power (I’d deprioritized my refrigerator and freezer, so as soon as the power went out, the clock started ticking — four hours for an unopened refrigerator and 24 to 48 hours for a freezer, according to the USDA).

It took me about eight hours to get back, and because of the heat wave and the fact that I probably need a new refrigerator, I ended up binning quite a lot of its contents because it was above 47°F/8°C.

The best solution I have to the loss of internet connectivity is to rely on Starlink. It is not the best solution, but the satellites aren’t going to fall from the sky due to a localized power outage.

Alternatively, a more robust router or cellular modem might be an option. I’m also considering something like the iSocket Plug-n-Go that has its own internal SIM card. This would allow me to both monitor and access the plug remotely without relying on local Wi-Fi.

The Bluetti app does have an “Extreme Weather Alert” that will automatically top off the batteries ahead of a storm, so the unit has maximum power when the grid goes down, but none of this was applicable in this situation.

2. Heat is a problem

It’s easy to think that power outages are a winter thing.

Nope.

They happen in summer, too. Winter storms rack up more outage events by raw count, but a peer-reviewed study found the longest, most dangerous outages actually happen in summer (and power outages are on the rise across the board).

And it can get beyond the operating temperature of your power station. While the worst thing that you can do to your power station is charge the unit when temperatures are below 32°F/0°C, heat is also a potential problem.

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Power stations have an upper temperature limit for charging and discharging. My Apex 300 caps out at 104°F/40°C for both charging and discharging — though as the table below shows, that’s actually the more conservative end: Jackery’s and EcoFlow’s flagship units are rated 5°C/9°F higher.

Here in the UK, we’ve had outdoor temperatures come close to this, but if you stick a working power station in an already hot room, the ambient temperature can exceed this limit, at which point the power station will throttle output or even shut down.

It’s not until I was in the midst of the power outage that I realized that the room I had the Tower of Power in got too hot, and this was causing the power station to become cautious, throttle its output, and turn off charging. I didn’t run out of power, but it could have been a problem if the power outage — and the heat wave — had lasted longer.

I need to think about the placement of my Tower of Power.

If you’re looking for power stations, here are some temperature-related figures for a few different units on the market:

3. Getting power to where it’s needed

The Tower of Power is an impressive bit of kit in more ways than one. But it weighs close to 300 pounds in total. While I try to make sure I eat a hearty breakfast every day, that’s not the sort of weight I want to be manhandling about the place. And that’s a problem when it comes to getting the power to where it’s needed.

Extension cords are an option, but regular readers will know I’m not a fan because they have their downsides. There is a gap in manufacturers’ documentation because I’ve never seen a manufacturer publish explicit guidance on whether or how to use extension cords with its units. It’s not that there’s anything about power stations specifically that makes extension cords unsafe; it’s that they introduce a weakness into the electrical system.

I’ve written quite a bit about the safety issues around extension cords, so I’ll leave this link here for you.

Also: Why leaving extension cords plugged in permanently is riskier than you realize

Bottom line: They’re not something that I want to leave trailing about the place all the time because they simultaneously introduce trip, fire, and electrocution hazards. I’m happy to use extension cords temporarily, but that means I must be on hand to run them to where they’re needed.

Having the Bluetti Elite 400, a power station that’s kitted out with wheels and a pull-along suitcase-style handle, is great, but at 86 pounds, it, too, is a hefty lump to get to some places.

Plug-in solar — a system where your solar and battery power goes into a microinverter and is then fed into the AC system via an outlet — might very well be the answer to this issue.