Episode Details

Power flickers for five seconds. Your Wi-Fi goes down, your Zigbee network collapses, and you're re-pairing thirty smart devices. A generator can't help — it takes thirty seconds to start. But a modern UPS with lithium iron phosphate batteries can. Battery costs have dropped 40% since 2022, making home UPSs with 5-25 kilowatt-hours affordable. So where's the line between "buy a generator" and "get a really big UPS"? And is that line moving? We break down the physics, the economics, and the surprising products that are blurring the categories.