Blog / planning
What to keep running when the power goes out
Storm season is a good time to decide on paper what actually has to stay on when the hydro goes out, what can wait, and what that costs.
Every fall I get the same call. The wind comes through, the hydro goes out for six hours, and somebody discovers that the thing they assumed would keep working did not.
Ontario gets a reminder of this every couple of years. The ice storm that started on March 30, 2025 knocked out power to more than a million homes and businesses across the province, and some rural and seasonal properties waited weeks, not hours. Federal emergency guidance says to be able to look after yourself for at least 72 hours. Most people I talk to are set up for about twenty minutes.
The fix is not a shopping list. It is a decision about what actually has to stay on.
Write the list before you buy anything
Take a sheet of paper and put things in three columns.
Column one: what must keep working for the first hour. For most households that is a phone with a charge on it and enough light to find the stairs. For a small business it is usually payments, the phone number customers call, and whatever holds the schedule.
Column two: what must keep working for a day. This is where the internet connection, a laptop, a freezer and maybe a furnace fan land.
Column three: everything else. Be honest about how much of your house belongs here. The Wi-Fi in the garage does not.
Almost every conversation gets easier once that list exists, because now you are pricing three specific things instead of asking a vendor to solve "backup power," which is an invitation to sell you the biggest thing in the catalogue.
A UPS is not a generator
The most common mistake I see is expecting a battery backup unit to run a house. It will not. A UPS does two jobs: it carries you through the short blinks that make up most outages, and it gives equipment time to shut down cleanly instead of dropping mid-write.
Runtime is all about load. A basic unit, typically $100–250 in Canada, will hold a modem, a fibre ONT and a small switch up for a few hours because those together draw very little. Put a desktop and two monitors on the same unit and you get ten minutes, if that.
So split the load. Network gear on its own small UPS, workstation on another, and nothing else plugged in for convenience. Laser printers and space heaters do not go on a UPS at all.
One thing people forget: the batteries wear out. Three to five years is typical, and a unit with a dead battery gives you the beep and none of the protection. Put a reminder in your calendar the day you buy it.
Your internet needs power in more places than you think
If you have fibre, the box on the wall needs hydro. If you have cable, the modem needs hydro, and so does equipment out on the pole. Keeping your router alive does nothing if the piece upstream of it is dark.
For most homes, the honest answer is that a phone with a data plan is your outage internet, and that is fine. For a business that cannot take orders without a connection, cellular failover is worth pricing out properly, and worth testing before you need it. Cell sites have their own backup power, though it is finite, so treat it as a few hours of grace rather than a guarantee.
Generators are an electrical decision, not a tech one
Anything that feeds power back into your panel involves a transfer switch or an interlock and a licensed electrician. That is not a corner to cut, and it is not a place where I would take the cheapest quote. Get the electrical work quoted on its own so you can see what you are actually paying for, the same way I would tell you to unbundle any padded quote.
A portable inverter generator with extension cords is the middle ground, and for a lot of households it is the right answer. Just decide in advance which circuits or devices it feeds, because standing in the rain at 11pm is a bad time to work that out.
Test it once, on a Saturday
The whole plan is theory until you pull the plug on purpose. Kill the main breaker on a quiet afternoon and time how long each thing on your list survives. You will learn more in twenty minutes than from any amount of spec sheet reading, and you will usually find one surprise: the alarm panel, the well pump, the garage door, the camera recorder that was quietly running on wall power the whole time.
For a business, run the same test against a real transaction. Can you take a payment? Can a customer reach a human? Write down the answers.
Where this ends up
Most people land somewhere modest: a small UPS on the network gear, a charged power bank, a plan for the freezer, and a written decision about what they are choosing not to protect. That last part is the valuable one. An outage is much easier when the things that stopped working are the things you already decided could stop.
If you want the network side of that done properly, with the gear on battery and labelled where you can reach it, my company RelayPoint Technologies handles that kind of installation across Southern Ontario. And if you are building this into a broader plan alongside your backups and recovery, I do that as an assessment on a fixed fee, hourly or retainer basis depending on scope. Get in touch and tell me what you cannot afford to have go dark.