The sequence
The Five Stages, In Order
Read them in order and stop wherever the remaining problems stop mattering to you. Most households should stop before the last one. Each stage says plainly what it leaves unsolved and what to leave in the cart for now.
- 00
Before You Buy Anything
This stage costs nothing and closes out more outages than any purchase on this site. It covers the first hour of a short outage, the one where the useful information is knowing whether the problem is your house or the whole street, and where the useful equipment is a phone that was already charged.
Open this stageHours added at this stage
None
No hours are shown here because this stage buys no storage. What it buys is the difference between a household that knows what is happening and one that does not.
- 01
Light and a Dead Battery
Two events account for most of what actually goes wrong in an ordinary year: the house goes dark, and the car does not start. Neither needs a power station, and both are handled here for a fraction of what one costs. This stage is where the ratio of usefulness to money is at its highest on the entire site.
Open this stage12hoursHours of usable light across an evening and a night. This is the one figure on the site that does not come from the battery formula, because a flashlight is not a power station: it is a planning figure for a household light run on a low setting, and your light's actual runtime is in its manual.
- 02
Phones and the Router
This is where stored energy first earns its place. A small power station covers the loads that are cheap in watt-hours and expensive in inconvenience: phones, a laptop, a lamp, and the network gear. It is also where a surge protector belongs, because a single AC outlet on a small unit is not enough sockets and improvising that is where people get hurt.
Open this stage9.1hoursHours of a router and a phone on charge from a 288 Wh power station, computed from the same device figures the tables use. Adding a laptop to that load cuts it to under a third. An estimate, not a guarantee.
- 03
The Fridge Through the Night
This is the stage people think they are buying at when they walk into the category, and it is the first one where the specification that matters is not capacity. A compressor demands a spike of current to start that has nothing to do with what it draws afterward, and a unit that clears the running wattage can still refuse the load outright.
Open this stage17hoursHours of refrigeration from a 1024 Wh unit, with the 35 percent compressor duty share applied and the door kept shut. Computed from the refrigerator device page, so the two cannot disagree. An estimate, not a guarantee.
- 04
Multi-Day and Recharging
Everything before this stage assumes the power comes back. This one does not, and the arithmetic gets uncomfortable quickly. A large power station is a fixed number of watt-hours, and across several days the binding constraint stops being capacity and becomes the question of how anything gets refilled.
Open this stage16hoursHours of a router, phone charging, and a few LED lamps from the largest unit in this catalog. Notice it is not a day, and that is the argument of this whole stage: past one charge the constraint stops being capacity and becomes refilling. An estimate, not a guarantee.