About
A desk for backup power, not a solar blog.
The Home Backup is a niche affiliate site about one thing — keeping a house running when the grid quits. This page is how the desk works, who files the pages, and where the money comes from.
This desk keeps itself small on purpose: four silos, buyer-intent pages, high-ticket offers, and no sprawl. A new domain with no backlinks has no business chasing “best solar company” or “Powerwall cost” — those terms belong to sites with a decade of links, and pretending otherwise wastes everyone's evening. The working domain we brand toward is thehomebackup.com; it is not purchased from this repository, and the GitHub repo can keep its older working title while the public masthead reads The Home Backup.
Most people find this site the same way, and it's rarely a calm way. The lights already flickered once, or a storm is two days out, and you want one machine that “covers the house.” Most houses are not one machine. A fridge and a router are a portable power station, a 240-volt well pump is a split-phase battery or a pad generator, and a week of ice on the lines is fuel — not a 2 kWh brick, however handsome it looks on the counter. So we write the fork in the road first, and the cart second.
What we publish
- Whole-house / standby generators — including cost and standby-vs-portable. Informational. We do not fake a Generac (or similar) affiliate ID.
- Home batteries that are expandable and transfer-switch capable, not installer-only ESS quotes. The split-phase SKU we name is the Anker SOLIX F3800.
- Portable solar generators / portable power stations, with Jackery, BLUETTI, and Anker SOLIX as featured offers. Named cores: Explorer 2000 Plus, AC200L, C2000 Gen 2.
- Portable solar panels that fold or briefcase into a station. Named panels: SolarSaga 200W, SP200L, PS400. Not roof kits.
What we will not publish
- Rooftop solar, microinverters, or installer lead-gen.
- Tesla Powerwall comparisons or Tesla referral links.
- Guru-tone “energy independence” essays.
- Invented click IDs, fake “we tested 47 units in our lab” claims, or scraped spec sheets presented as reviews.
- Generated or stand-in product shots for named Jackery, BLUETTI, or Anker SOLIX SKUs. Photos come from the manufacturer’s US product page and are committed in this repo.
Who files these pages
Three bylines run this ledger, and here is the plain sentence the law requires: they are the desk's working pen names. The reading, the price checks, and the load math behind each one are real work done at this desk — 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 — he learned load math the way other kids learned batting averages, counting what the window unit and the chest freezer pulled against what the neighbor's generator could give. He edits every page here and writes the hubs himself: the pages that tell you which machine matches which job before anyone talks price.
Files: the four silo hubs · stations for home backup · generator cost
Ada Kirchner
Spec reviewer
Ada grew up behind the counter of her family's electrical-supply house in northern Ohio, checking packing slips against the shelf, and she has never stopped reading that way. She keeps the ledger: every spec table, every versus page, every named-SKU review. She copies figures off manufacturer pages with the date attached, writes an em dash where a spec wasn't stated, and considers that dash a finding.
Files: SKU reviews · versus pages · best-of ledgers
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 she kept a chest-freezer log through both. She writes for the person standing in a kitchen two days before landfall — what the money buys, in what order, and which cord to tape down tonight.
Files: the four buying guides · how we review · this page
How the money works
If you follow a partner link and later buy, we may earn a commission, and you still pay the listed price — that's the whole arrangement. Featured hops are placeholders until an approved tracking URL is pasted: /go/jackery, /go/bluetti, /go/anker-solix. The full text lives at the affiliate disclosure. We prefer programs with a roughly 30-day cookie, which is why EcoFlow is not a featured partner here.
The specs in our tables are buyer snapshots dated August 26, 2026, and manufacturers change firmware, SKUs, and inverter ratings whenever they please. Before you spend four figures, open the live product page and check. It takes a minute, and it's the same minute we spend — how we review explains the rest. Spot something that moved? Write us.
Not electrical advice
Nothing on this site is a permit, a load calculation, or a blessing to backfeed a dryer outlet. Inlet boxes, interlocks, and automatic transfer switches are licensed work in almost every US jurisdiction. Carbon monoxide rules for portable gas generators are not optional.