Backup power for home medical equipment

Start here, before any product: if someone in your household depends on powered medical equipment, the first two calls are to the clinician or equipment supplier who manages that device, and to your electric utility about its medical or life-support program. This page does not give medical advice, does not tell you a battery makes anyone safe, and cannot tell you whether a given device tolerates running on a power station. What it does is the sizing arithmetic, from manufacturer-published draw figures, so the conversation with those two parties starts with real numbers. We have not lab-tested any unit here, and the Amazon links above are affiliate links, disclosed at the top of this page.

Published draw figures, and where they come from

Sizing goes wrong when it starts from a category average. These are manufacturer-published figures for specific models, quoted with their published basis:

• Philips Respironics EverFlo, stationary oxygen concentrator. Philips's own EverFlo brochure publishes input voltage 120 VAC plus or minus 10 percent, input frequency 60 Hz, average power consumption 350 watts, sound level 45 dBA typical, and flow of 0.5 to 5 liters per minute. Philips's user manual carries the same 350 W at 120 VAC for the EverFlo Q part numbers as well, so the wattage covers both variants; the 45 dBA figure does not, since Philips publishes under 40 dBA typical for the Q.
• Platinum 10L oxygen concentrator. The current owner's manual, published by React Health rather than by Invacare, which no longer supplies it, lists electrical requirements of 120 VAC plus 10 and minus 15 percent at 60 Hz, power consumption of 585 W typical, rated current input of 4.9 A, and a flow range of 2 to 10 liters per minute. Higher flow costs more watts, and the gap between this and the EverFlo is most of a doubling.
• Inogen One G5, portable oxygen concentrator. Inogen's technical manual publishes the AC power supply as 100 to 240 V, 50 to 60 Hz, 2.0 to 1.0 A maximum, and the DC supply as 13.5 to 15.0 V, 10 A maximum. It publishes no watt figure. Treating the published 2.0 A maximum as a ceiling at 120 V gives 240 VA as an upper bound on what the supply can draw, which is a bound derived from the published rating and not a measured draw.
• Power wheelchair chargers. This is the category where a single published figure does not exist, and it is worth seeing why. Pride Mobility's battery charger manual is a compendium covering many different chargers, and the figures differ model by model. A universal AC input of 100 to 240 Vac plus or minus 10 percent at 50 to 60 Hz recurs across the range, but the fast-charge output voltage does not: 28.8 V plus or minus 0.2 V on some models, 29.6 V or 28.6 V on lead-acid units, 29.4 V on a lithium-ion charger, and 24 V DC on others. AC input current is published on some models and not others, at 3.8 A maximum on one and 170 W on another. So the wall-side number has to come from the label on your own charger and from the page of that manual covering your model. Read both before sizing anything.
• Home hemodialysis. No manufacturer-published AC draw figure that we could verify. See the FAQ above.

Two figures that nobody publishes are worth naming. Concentrators use compressors, and a compressor draws more at the instant it starts than it does running, but none of the makers above publishes a locked-rotor or inrush figure for these devices. And none of these devices publishes a tolerance for transfer time. Both gaps are questions for the device maker, not for us to fill in.

The arithmetic

Two steps, both with the assumption written down.

Step one: derate the battery. Rated watt-hours are stored energy, not delivered energy, and inverter conversion loses some of it. None of the makers here publishes a single household efficiency figure, so this guide assumes 85 percent throughout and labels it an assumption rather than a specification. Use your own figure if you have a better one.

Step two: divide by watts. Delivered watt-hours divided by the device's published watts gives hours.

Worked out on an EverFlo at its published 350 W average:

• Anker SOLIX C1000 Gen 2, 1,024 Wh rated. 1,024 times 0.85 is about 870 Wh, or about 2.5 hours.
• EcoFlow DELTA 2 Max, 2,048 Wh rated. About 1,741 Wh delivered, or about 5.0 hours.
• Jackery Explorer 2000 v2, 2,042 Wh rated. About 1,736 Wh delivered, or about 5.0 hours.
• BLUETTI Elite 200 V2, 2,073.6 Wh rated. About 1,762 Wh delivered, or about 5.0 hours.
• EcoFlow DELTA Pro 3, 4,096 Wh rated. About 3,482 Wh delivered, or about 9.9 hours.

Now run the same units against the Platinum 10L's published 585 W typical: the DELTA 2 Max gives about 3.0 hours, and the DELTA Pro 3 about 5.9 hours. A single concentrator model swap cuts every runtime roughly in half.

The number that matters most is the one this arithmetic makes unavoidable. Twenty-four hours of continuous oxygen at 350 W is 8,400 Wh of delivered energy. The largest single unit on this page delivers about 3,482 Wh under our assumption. One unit does not cover a day of continuous concentrator use at that draw, let alone a multi-day outage, which is why expansion batteries, a second unit, or a recharge path are part of any serious plan rather than optional extras. EcoFlow publishes expansion to 12 kWh on one DELTA Pro 3 and 2 to 6 kWh on the DELTA 2 Max; Anker publishes no expansion battery for the C1000 Gen 2.

Utility medical and life-support programs

Most US utilities run some version of a medical or life-support registry, under names that vary by state. Two real examples, read in August 2026, show what the category typically does:

PG&E Medical Baseline Program. It provides an additional monthly allotment of energy at the lowest price on your current rate, and additional notifications before a Public Safety Power Shutoff or during rolling blackouts, which may include extra phone calls or a door knock. PG&E's own help article on the question, dated June 17, 2024, answers it directly: medical baseline does not guarantee services, and customers remain at risk for shutoff or outage. The same article tells medical baseline customers to always have an emergency plan if they have life support equipment at home.

Con Edison life-support equipment registration. Con Edison asks households using life-support equipment to register so the utility can reach out in an emergency or power outage, and specifies that registration must be certified by a medical doctor, nurse practitioner, physician's assistant, or local board of health official within 60 days of receipt. Con Edison also states this matters even if you do not receive a bill because electricity is included in your rent, which is the detail renters most often miss.

The pattern across both: these are awareness, notification, and rate programs. They are worth enrolling in, and enrolling is free, but neither one is a promise of uninterrupted power. Look up your own utility's program by name, read what it commits to in writing, and ask whether medically certified customers get any priority in restoration, because the answer differs by utility and by state.

Choosing between the picks

• You want the smallest unit that publishes a switchover figure: the Anker SOLIX C1000 Gen 2, at 10 ms with every AC port supporting UPS, in 24.9 lb.
• You want capacity you can add to later: the EcoFlow DELTA 2 Max, published as expandable from 2 kWh to 6 kWh.
• You want a published switchover figure with more capacity than the C1000: the Jackery Explorer 2000 v2, at under 20 ms and 2,042 Wh. Note its 70 percent cycle-life floor when comparing cycle counts.
• The unit will sit in a bedroom: the BLUETTI Elite 200 V2 publishes 16 dB and a pure sine wave inverter, the lowest published noise figure of this group.
• You need the longest single-unit runtime: the EcoFlow DELTA Pro 3, at 4,096 Wh and a 10 ms published switchover with no mode qualifier attached.

The honest limits

Every number on this page is a manufacturer datasheet claim recorded with its published basis, not a measurement we made, and none of it is a statement about safety. A battery can run out, fail, arrive discharged, or be incompatible with a specific device's power supply. Manufacturers publish UPS switchover ratings for the power station, not compatibility findings for medical equipment. Prices on these products move often, which is one reason we publish none here. Before buying anything, confirm with your equipment supplier that the device may be run from a power station at all, confirm the device's actual draw from its label, enroll with your utility's medical or life-support program, and build a plan that does not depend on a single box. If you are comparing this path against an installed system, our portable versus home battery guide covers the trade, and how long a home battery powers a house runs the same arithmetic at installed-system scale.