Hurricane season backup power checklist

Hurricane preparation is one of the few outage scenarios where you get a published warning window, measured in days, and the whole point of a battery plan is to use that window rather than discover it has closed. This guide builds the timeline from the National Hurricane Center's own stated lead times and the load list from published appliance figures. It is written for Florida, Texas and the rest of the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, where the storm is scheduled and the outage is not. We have not tested any of these products, and the Amazon links above are affiliate links, disclosed at the top of this page.

The charge-ahead timeline, from NHC's published lead times

The National Weather Service publishes exactly how far ahead each product is issued, and those intervals are your schedule:

1. Tropical Weather Outlook, 5 days out. NHC publishes a discussion of disturbed weather with a categorical probability of tropical cyclone formation over the next 48 hours and over the full 5-day period. This is the cue to check state of charge, not to act.

2. Watch, 48 hours out. NHC issues a hurricane watch 48 hours before it anticipates tropical storm-force winds, and states the reason plainly: it may not be safe to prepare for a hurricane once winds reach tropical storm force. A storm surge watch carries the same 48-hour horizon. Everything should reach full charge in this window, not the next one.

3. Warning, 36 hours out. NHC issues a hurricane warning 36 hours in advance of tropical storm-force winds "to give you time to complete your preparations." A tropical storm warning and a storm surge warning share the same 36-hour horizon. By the end of this window, preparations should be complete.

4. Advisories every 3 hours. NHC and the Central Pacific Hurricane Center issue tropical cyclone advisories at least every 6 hours, at 5 am, 11 am, 5 pm and 11 pm, and move to every 3 hours once coastal watches or warnings are in effect.

5. Extreme Wind Warning, one hour out. Sustained major-hurricane winds of 115 mph or greater, usually associated with the eyewall, expected to begin within an hour. Nothing on your list happens in this window.

The practical read is that the watch is the deadline and the warning is the reminder. A large power station recharging from a wall outlet is a multi-hour job, and expansion batteries lengthen it.

What to pre-charge, and in what order

1. The main unit, to 100 percent. Units that live on a shelf at a storage state of charge need deliberate topping up, and this is the item that takes longest.

2. Every expansion battery. These charge through the main unit on most systems, which serializes the job rather than parallelizing it.

3. Laptops, tablets and phones. These are the cheapest energy in the house to store, because they already contain batteries, and every watt hour stored in them is a watt hour the station does not have to convert twice later. The same reasoning is in our work-from-home outage kit.

4. Power tool batteries, headlamps, portable fans and any battery-powered radio. Small, forgettable, and useless flat.

5. Medical device batteries, per the device manufacturer's own instructions, which govern here rather than anything on this page.

6. The car. A full tank is also a phone charger and, in some vehicles, an outlet.

The load priority list

Sizing a battery for a hurricane means deciding in advance what it will and will not carry, because the decision is much worse made in the dark. In descending order of value per watt hour:

• Refrigeration. Ready.gov states a refrigerator keeps food cold for about four hours and a full freezer holds temperature for about 48 hours, so the first hours cost nothing if the doors stay shut. After that, published annual energy figures divided by 8,760 hours put a typical refrigerator's average draw between roughly 46 and 85 W, which our refrigerator guide works through model by model. This is the highest-value load in the house.
• Communications. A modem and router pair sits around 15 W at published average draw. It is the cheapest thing you can keep alive and often the thing that matters most for finding out when power returns.
• Medical equipment, according to its own manufacturer's documentation and your provider's guidance, which is the only authority on whether a given power source is appropriate for a given device.
• Fans, not air conditioning. A box fan is tens of watts. Even a window air conditioner is hundreds: LG publishes 660 W at 6.2 amps on 115V for its 8,000 BTU LW8016ER and 990 W at 9.3 amps for its 12,000 BTU LW1216ER. Every pick on this page carries those running watts, and the question becomes runtime. Central air is a different category entirely, gated by locked rotor amps that no portable unit's published surge reaches, and our air conditioner guide has the numbers.
• Lights. LED lighting is close to free on this scale and worth planning for anyway.
• Water, if it is not municipal. See below.
• Everything else. Coffee makers, ovens, dryers and water heaters are resistive loads drawing kilowatts continuously, so an hour of use costs several kilowatt hours and the smaller units here are emptied in well under an hour. They are not part of a hurricane plan.

The well pump problem, and the water problem

If your water comes from a private well, an outage is a water outage, and the well pump is one of the most demanding loads a battery can be asked to start. Franklin Electric publishes locked rotor amps for its four-inch two-wire single-phase submersible motors at 230V: 32.2 amps for a 1/2 HP, 48.7 for a 1 HP and 66.2 for a 1.5 HP. At 230V those are roughly 7.4, 11.2 and 15.2 kVA for the starting instant, against published surges here of 8,000 W to 14,400 W. The full arithmetic, including which units clear which motors, is in our well pump guide.

Two consequences. A well pump is a hardwired 240V load, so it needs an electrician-installed transfer switch before it is even reachable, which is a pre-season job rather than a pre-storm one. And storing water is cheaper than storing the electricity to pump it. Fill containers during the watch window.

Municipal supply is more resilient in an outage but not guaranteed, and CDC guidance notes that when power goes out, water purification systems may not be functioning fully, and that safe water for drinking and cooking includes bottled, boiled or treated water, with your state or local health department making the specific call for your area.

Generator and battery together, honestly

The two are not competitors in a week-long outage, and it is worth being clear about which does what.

A generator makes energy for as long as you can feed it, which is the only thing that solves a multi-day outage outright. It is also loud, needs fuel that is hard to buy after landfall, and cannot run anywhere near the house: Ready.gov states generators and fuel should always be used outdoors at least 20 feet from windows, doors and attached garages, with working carbon monoxide detectors on every level, and CDC states never to run one inside a home, basement or garage "even if the doors or windows are open, unless the equipment is professionally installed and vented." Sources: Ready.gov, Power Outages and CDC, What to Do to Protect Yourself During a Power Outage, both read August 6, 2026.

A battery stores energy and runs out, but it is silent, needs no fuel, produces no exhaust, and hands over in milliseconds rather than after a pull-start. Among the units here, EcoFlow publishes 10 ms for the DELTA Pro 3.

The pairing that works is the battery carrying the house continuously while the generator runs in blocks to refill it. That cuts generator run hours, which cuts fuel consumption and noise, and it means the house never sees the gap between the generator stopping and starting. Our battery vs generator guide compares them on the specs rather than the vibes.

Recharging after landfall

This is where hurricane plans most often break, because the assumption is that the sun comes out and the battery refills. Two published facts and one unpublished one shape the reality.

Anker publishes up to 3,200 W of solar input on the SOLIX F3800 Plus with dual MPPT across an 11 to 165V range, which is the highest PV input figure among the units we track. For the other units in this group we could not trace a solar input figure to a maker's own spec table at the time of writing, so we do not print one.

The input rating is not the constraint, though. The array is. A pair of 400 W portable panels totals 800 W at standard test conditions and delivers less than that in real light, at real angles, on a roof or a lawn you may not be able to reach. Filling a 4,096 Wh unit from 800 W of nameplate panel is a multi-day proposition even in clear weather.

And none of these makers publishes a recharge figure under post-storm overcast, which is the condition that actually applies. Treat solar as a way to stretch the battery across more days rather than a way to refill it in an afternoon. If the requirement is genuinely a week of grid-down operation, the honest answers are a much larger installed system, a generator in the loop, or both.

Off-season, not in-season

Three things on this list cannot be done during a watch, and are the reason to read this in May rather than September:

• A transfer switch or interlock, which is a licensed electrician's job and the only way a plug-in unit reaches hardwired loads like a well pump, a furnace or an air handler. Our transfer switch guide covers what each device is.
• An installed system, which involves permits and a utility interconnection and is measured in weeks or months. The complete backup guide is the starting point, and the Florida and Texas reports cover what applies in the two states this page is mostly written for.
• Knowing your own numbers. The nameplate on the well pump, the annual kWh on the refrigerator, the amps on the furnace. Those are five minutes of reading in fair weather and impossible to look up with no power.

Every figure above is a manufacturer datasheet or federal agency publication recorded with its stated basis: watch and warning lead times from the National Weather Service, food and generator guidance from Ready.gov and CDC, appliance figures from LG, Goodman and Franklin Electric, and power station figures from each maker's own spec table. None of it is a measurement we made, and none of it is a promise about your storm.