About Backup Power Home

Three hours in the driveway is where this site actually started. During the second outage, our neighbor Cheryl knocked on the door asking if we had spare ice, and we ended up sitting out there comparing notes on what had failed at each of our houses and what hadn't. She'd lost a chest freezer full of meat. We'd learned the hard way that a portable power station rated for eight hours barely makes it through four in Houston humidity. Neither of us had known any of that about the other until the power went out twice in one year.

That conversation is the reason this site exists. Two doors apart, same storm, same grid, completely different setups and completely different mistakes. The Texas grid runs almost entirely on its own, separate from the rest of the country's power network, so when a storm takes down transmission lines here, there's no quiet import of electricity from a neighboring state to bail anyone out. Everyone in this part of the Gulf Coast is on their own generator, their own solar panels, their own math. We started writing down what we tested so the next family wouldn't have to guess the way we did.

This site is run by Lauren Hayes and her husband Mike, a couple in Pearland who took backup power seriously after two extended outages hit their house in the same year, one of them with a child's insulin on the line. Nothing gets written up until it's been run on the concrete pad behind our garage, through an actual Houston summer or an actual cold front, not just read off a spec sheet. Gas generators, portable solar stations, and yes, the DIY magnetic generator kits that show up in Facebook groups all get the same treatment. None of it replaces a licensed electrician for anything permanent or wired into your home's panel, and we say so plainly whenever a review calls for it.

Some of our readers have a garage and a driveway to work with. Some are three floors up in an apartment complex with nowhere to run a generator at all. Some are managing a family member's medical equipment and need numbers, not reassurance. We try to write for all three, and we say plainly when a product only makes sense for one of them.

More on Lauren, Mike, and how the reviews actually get run: author page.

Some links on this site are affiliate links, and we earn a small commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. We only recommend backup power solutions our family has actually tested during real outages or extended simulations.