When the power goes out across NSW — a summer storm tearing down lines, a winter front knocking out a substation, or a planned outage for grid maintenance — most homes simply go dark. The fridge warms up, the modem dies, the medical equipment stops, and you wait for a truck that might be hours away. A bit of planning beforehand turns that scenario from a crisis into a non-event.
Know what you actually need to keep running
Before spending a cent, list the things in your home that genuinely matter during an outage. For most households it is a short list: the fridge and freezer, lighting, phone and laptop charging, the internet modem, and any medical devices like a CPAP machine. Add a few comfort items if you like — a fan in summer, a single reverse-cycle head in winter — and you have a clear picture of your essential load. This is the number that should drive every decision that follows, not the size of your roof or the biggest battery a salesperson can sell you.
Why a battery beats a generator for most homes
Petrol generators are loud, need fuel on hand, can't run indoors, and won't start themselves at 3am when the grid drops. A home battery does the opposite: it sits silently in the garage, detects the outage in milliseconds, and keeps your essential circuits live without you lifting a finger. Pair it with solar and the battery recharges itself during the day, so even a multi-day outage doesn't leave you stranded. For anyone on a rural property where outages run long, that self-recharging ability is the whole game — it's the difference between a battery and a very expensive UPS.
Sizing it for a real outage, not a brochure
A typical NSW home's essential load — fridge, lights, comms and a bit of comfort — sits somewhere around 5 to 10 kWh of overnight use. A battery in the 10–15 kWh range will usually carry an average home through the night and into the next morning, when solar takes over again. Larger families, all-electric homes, or properties that want to run a bore pump or workshop will want more. The point isn't to chase the biggest number; it's to match storage to the load you mapped out in step one, then add a sensible buffer. If you're unsure where you land, our team can size it against your actual meter data rather than a guess.
Set it up before the storm, not during
The features that make a battery useful in a blackout — backup circuits, automatic changeover, solar recharging — have to be wired in at installation. A battery configured only for bill savings won't necessarily keep your home running when the grid fails, so it's worth being explicit with your installer that blackout backup is a priority. Decide which circuits you want kept alive, make sure the changeover is automatic, and confirm your solar is allowed to charge the battery while the grid is down. Get those three things right and the system simply does its job when the lights go out.
A few low-tech habits that still matter
Even with a battery, keep the basics covered. Save the energy provider's outage line and your installer's number in your phone, keep a torch and a power bank charged, and know how to manually isolate your system if you ever need to. If you rely on medical equipment, register with your electricity distributor as a life-support customer so they prioritise your address. None of this is expensive — it's just the difference between scrambling in the dark and barely noticing the outage happened.
Going further off the grid
If outages are frequent where you live, or you're on the end of a long rural line, it may be worth looking past simple backup toward a properly engineered off-grid or hybrid system. The same battery range that backs up a suburban home scales up to run a farm, a tiny home, or a property with no reliable grid connection at all. WISE designs these systems off-grid-first, so they're built to stand on their own when they have to.
Storm season is the wrong time to start thinking about this. A little planning now means the next outage is something you read about the morning after — not something you sit through in the dark.