WHO NEEDS A GENERATOR, when you can get a big honking battery that will run a refrigerator for under three hundred bucks.

This is actually sort of cool, and much safer than a generator, as there’s no gasoline storage, danger of carbon monoxide (which is nontrivial with generators), etc. My house is actually wired for a generator, with a transfer box and inlet, but I’ve never gotten around to buying one, partly for those reasons and partly because our power has been quite reliable in recent years. (What I should really get is the conversion that turns your hybrid car into a whole-house generator . . . .) Anyway, this is kind of neat. Not really a full-bore substitute for a generator, at least not without adding additional batteries, but not bad, and if you live in an apartment or somewhere that won’t permit a generator it’s a decent alternative.

I already have our cable modem and wireless router on a big UPS that’s enough to run them for days. We may not have lights but we’ll have Internet!