Staying powered through outages — and hurricanes

If you live anywhere storms knock the power out — and along the hurricane-prone Southeast coast like here in Charleston, that's often — a battery earns its keep. Unlike a generator, a whole-home battery system — wired to a smart electrical panel — switches over automatically and silently the instant the grid drops: no fuel to fetch, nothing to start.

And it's not only storms — the grid also goes down for planned Dominion maintenance, equipment failures, and heat-driven demand strain, year-round. Backup earns its keep even in calm weather.

What matters most to keep running, roughly in priority:

• Fridge & freezer (saving your food)
• A few lights and phone/device charging (light + staying reachable)
• Internet / Wi-Fi (info during the storm, working from home)
• Medical devices — CPAP, oxygen — if anyone relies on them
• For flood-prone homes: your sump or septic pump
• Cooling — a window unit or mini-split runs for hours; central AC and electric water heating drain a battery fast

The trick is planning for the loads that matter most, not running the whole house at once.

And be realistic about duration: a battery covers an outage up to its capacity — usually the hours-to-a-day outages you get most. In a major, multi-day event it will run down, and with the grid out you'd recharge it from solar or a generator. Plenty of people who want to ride out anything pair a battery with a generator — the battery for instant, silent, automatic backup, the generator to recharge it over a long haul.