A site about keeping the lights on at your house.

Written by June Alvarado · Updated August 26, 2026

We buy nothing on your behalf and take no payment for a good word. Prices carry the day we checked them.

We keep this site small on purpose: four categories, real questions, and nothing else. A young site has no business pretending to be an encyclopedia of solar, and honestly, you don’t need one at nine o’clock on a stormy night. If an installer is already measuring your roof, or you’re pricing a Powerwall, you’re in good hands somewhere else, and we’d rather say so on the first visit than waste your evening. (The masthead we’re building toward is thehomebackup.com.)

Most people find us the way you may have: the lights already flickered once, or the forecast turned, and you want one machine that “covers the house.” Here’s the kind truth most product pages skip: most houses aren’t one machine. The fridge and the Wi-Fi are a portable power station’s job. A 240-volt well pump wants a bigger battery that speaks both legs, or a generator on a pad. And a week of ice on the lines is a fuel question, not a handsome brick on the counter. So we always write the fork in the road first, and the shopping second.

What we write about

• Whole-house and standby generators: what they cost once installed, and when a portable on a cord is honestly enough. (No Generac affiliate arrangement exists here, and we don’t pretend one does.)
• Home batteries you can grow: expandable, transfer-switch-friendly cabinets, not installer-only quotes. The one we name that speaks 240 volts is the Anker SOLIX F3800.
• Portable power stations, with Jackery, BLUETTI, and Anker SOLIX as the featured families: the Explorer 2000 Plus, the AC200L, and the C2000 Gen 2.
• Portable solar panels that fold or briefcase into a station: the SolarSaga 200W, the SP200L, and the PS400. Driveway panels, not roof kits.

What you won’t find here

• Rooftop solar, microinverters, or anyone selling your phone number to installers.
• Tesla Powerwall comparisons or Tesla referral links.
• Guru essays about “energy independence.”
• Invented credentials, “we tested 47 units in our lab” stories, or scraped spec sheets dressed up as reviews.
• Generated or stand-in product photos for named Jackery, BLUETTI, or Anker SOLIX machines. Product photos come from the maker’s own US product page, and we say so under each one.

The people behind the pages

Three bylines write this site, and here’s the plain sentence honesty requires: they’re the working pen names of one small editorial desk. The reading, the price checks, and the load math behind each byline are real work, done here. Invented lab credentials are not, which is why you won’t find any in the bios below. What each byline gets instead is the weather it grew up with.

Dale Fontenot

Lead editor

Dale runs the desk. He grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where losing power was a season, not an event. His family’s kitchen was the one on the block with the lights on, and half the neighborhood’s casseroles ended up in their fridge to prove it. He edits every page on this site and writes the hubs himself: the pages that help you figure out which machine fits your house before anyone talks price.

Writes: the four category hubs · what a station really runs · what a standby really costs

Ada Kirchner

Spec reviewer

Ada grew up behind the counter of her family’s electrical-supply house in northern Ohio, where she learned that the customers who came back happy were the ones somebody had taken ten minutes to really listen to. She reads every spec sheet, every manual, and every footnote so you don’t have to, and she’ll happily tell you which number on the box actually matters for your house, and which one is just there to look impressive. Where a maker never printed a figure, she leaves the cell quiet rather than guess, and she thinks that’s a kindness too.

Writes: the reviews · the head-to-heads · the best-of shortlists

June Alvarado

Preparedness columnist

June writes the guides you read before you spend anything. She’s from the Texas Gulf Coast, where the hurricanes came from one direction and the 2021 freeze came from the other, and what she remembers most isn’t the weather. It’s the neighbors on the porch, the card games by lantern light, the way a house full of people gets loud when the TV can’t compete. She writes for the person standing in a kitchen two days before landfall, so that night three feels less like an emergency and more like camping with better snacks.

Writes: the four buying guides · how we review · this page

How the money works

Simply, and out loud. If you follow a partner link and later buy something, we may earn a commission, and you still pay the listed price. That’s the whole arrangement. The featured links are /go/jackery, /go/bluetti, and /go/anker-solix, placeholders until each approved tracking URL is pasted in. The long version lives at the affiliate disclosure. We prefer partner programs with a roughly 30-day cookie, which is the unglamorous reason EcoFlow isn’t featured here.

Every spec in our tables is a snapshot with a date on it (August 26, 2026, as of this writing), because manufacturers change firmware, models, and inverter ratings whenever they please. Before you spend four figures, open the live product page and give it a minute. It’s the same minute we spend, and how we review walks through the rest of it. And if you spot a number that moved, write us. Genuinely, it helps the next reader.