Building Resilience – Part 3: Emergency Power

This video visits two homes built to keep the power on during outages, one in a wildfire-prone area and one a passive house (a tightly sealed, highly insulated design) built in 2023. The wildfire-zone home backs up its whole electrical system with a 20,000-watt propane generator fed by two 125-gallon tanks. The owner has filled the tanks only once in three years, even though outages there are frequent, sometimes lasting up to eight days. The generator runs briefly every Sunday to make sure it starts when needed.

The second home uses a battery system instead of a generator: two 15-kilowatt batteries, charged by rooftop solar panels, for 30 kilowatts total storage. Because the batteries can't run everything indefinitely, the owners chose which circuits stay on during an outage, such as the main house and the pump that supplies water, while things like the EV charger, a second water heater, and the range go without power until the outage ends. Some systems let you adjust these choices from a phone in real time. The video also notes that generators, batteries, and related equipment take up real space and that utility companies set rules about where that equipment can go, so it's worth thinking about placement early if you're planning something similar.

The homes also include fresh-air filtration with activated carbon to filter out wildfire smoke particles and odors, something the builder frames as part of overall home resilience alongside backup power.