I love in a rural area where losing power also means losing access to water, and being snowed in means being cut off from help. When combined with the need to stay warm, these challenges make winter storms particularly scary—but at my house, we face them with confidence using batteries as our only source of emergency power. Let me tell you how.
Keep small electric appliances on hand
They are much easier to power than an electric cooktop
With batteries, even big batteries, it’s vital to be frugal with your electricity. Gas generators will run out of fuel after a set number of hours regardless of whether you’re only charging a phone and powering a few lights. With batteries, your runtime varies much more depending on what you’re trying to power.
Even if you have a giant portable power station like the Anker SOLIX F3800 Plus that can plug into your breaker panel and power major appliances, it won’t run for very long if you do. My advice for sizing a battery to weather a hurricane also applies here. And if you are looking to buy a battery, make sure the label says LiFePo4.
Regardless of which battery you settle on, when the power’s out, small appliances turn from conveniences into essentials. The electric kettle that we use for tea becomes what we use to warm water for bathing and washing dishes. A hot plate allows us to cook and can be powered from a mid-sized power station like the Anker SOLIX C1000.
An Instant Pot is a relatively energy efficient way to cook a meal. All of these appliances help us reduce how much strain we place on one battery and allow us to use some batteries while others may be outside charging.
- Dimensions
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15.12 × 8.19 × 9.61 inches
- Weight
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24.9 pounds
- AC Output ports
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5
- AC Input rating
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1,600W
- DC Output ports
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1
- Solar input rating
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600W
The Anker Solix C1000 Gen 2 is a small, compact, and lightweight portable power station. With a fast 49-minute recharge time and up to 2,000W of output power, you’ll find that this compact system has everything you need. With five 120V AC ports, three USB-C (two of which can do 140W), USB-A, and a DC car port, you can use this portable power station to recharge all of your gear off-grid or when the grid goes down.
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- Brand
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Anker
- Dimensions
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27.6×10.3×15.6
- Weight
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136.7lb/62kg
- AC Output ports
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One NEMA TT-30R, One NEMA L14-30R, Six NEMA 5-20R
- AC Input rating
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1800W
- DC Output ports
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120W, 12V/10A
The Anker F3800 Plus is an updated version of Anker’s F3800 solar generator, offering the same 3.84kWh capacity and 6000W output. This model comes with improved charging, with a new max solar input of 3200W and 165V, along with support for 240V from a gas generator.
Portable solar panels can still come in handy
Your recharging window is shorter, but don’t let it go to waste
If a storm only knocks power out for a few hours, we easily get by simply by pulling out our batteries and plugging everything in. If power goes out for a few days, even a large Tesla Powerwall can quite quickly run out of juice. It’s vital to have a plan for recharging.
Our primary source consists of portable solar panels. While there are fewer hours of sun in the winter, that doesn’t stop these panels from still being essential. Portable panels can be placed on top of snow at times when fixed solar arrays, like the ones on my roof, may still be buried. We have enough portable solar panels on hand that we can recharge several batteries during a few hours of good sun in the middle of the day.
Have an alternate heating source
Electric heat uses more power than you think
One of the first questions people ask me about backup batteries is what kind of heaters they can run, and my answer is usually the same—don’t bother. An electric heater will require more power than smaller batteries can provide and even a tiny space heater running on high can quickly drain a giant battery. Electric heating is simply too energy intensive to attempt on battery power alone.
This is why we have a wood stove. Ours is freestanding, the kind that can be installed in a home regardless of whether you have a preexisting brick chimney. There’s a giant black pipe running from the wood stove up to the ceiling in our living room.
A freestanding wood stove does double-duty for us during an outage. Not only does it put out enough heat to keep our living area warm, but we can also put pans on top to cook food and boil water. This greatly reduces how quickly we drain our batteries and how often we need to put them out in the sun to charge. We live on several acres of land and the woods provide us with plenty of potential firewood without needing to chop down trees. I bought a new lightweight chainsaw right before our most recent winter storm in order to make sure I had at least a week’s worth of wood on hand.
Have a backup for cloudy days
You may have an overcast week ahead
As much as I love solar power, the sky isn’t always sunny—especially in the winter. To stay safe, we need to have a backup plan.
This is a time when it could be practical to have a portable gas generator on hand. A tank of gas can last much longer when a generator only needs to run a few hours to recharge portable power stations instead of needing to supply continuous power.
We don’t have a gas generator, but we do have two EVs. While neither of our cars come with the ability to power our home or contain AC ports for us to power appliances, I’ve purchased a 1000W Renology pure sine wave inverter we can hook directly to our 12V car batteries under the hood. This allows us to transfer power from the giant batteries in our cars to our portable power stations.
EV batteries are so much longer that we could feasibly sustain an entire week of cloudy days by relying on our cars as giant tanks of backup energy. After all, one Anker SOLIX F3800 Plus has a capacity of 3.84kWh, whereas my Kia Niro EV has a 64.8kWh battery. Even if half of the energy is lost due to inefficiencies and conversion, that’s likely still enough to recharge my power station once a day for over seven days. The battery in our other car is even larger.
Since we can charge at home, even if we were to drain one car down to a tiny amount of charge remaining, unlike gas-powered cars, we don’t have to move it in order to refuel once the power comes back on. That said, this remains a viable option for gas-powered cars as well. You just have to balance electricity generation against the amount of gas remaining in the tank.
Batteries are safe to use indoors and, unlike alternative energy sources, can be refueled in any number of ways. This makes them such practical sources of emergency power, not only when the sun is shining in the summer, but when the house is in the dark due to sleet and snow. Yet as with any major storm, it’s vital that you make preparations ahead of time.
