A site about keeping the lights on at your house.

The Home Backup is a small site about one thing: keeping a house warm, lit, and humming when the grid takes the night off. This page is the tour: how the desk works, and where the money comes from.

Updated September 9, 2026

The short version

• The Home Backup covers exactly four categories for people in outage country: portable power stations, standby generators, home batteries, and portable solar panels.
• No rooftop solar, no Powerwall, no invented lab stories.
• One desk writes everything, the money comes from disclosed affiliate links, and every spec we print carries the date we checked it.

We keep this site small on purpose: four categories, real questions, and nothing else. A young site has no business pretending to be an encyclopedia of solar, and you don’t need one at nine o’clock on a stormy night. If an installer is already measuring your roof, or you’re pricing a Powerwall, you’re in good hands somewhere else, and we’d rather say so on the first visit than waste your evening. (The masthead we’re building toward is thehomebackup.com.)

Most people find us the way you may have: the lights already flickered once, or the forecast turned, and you want one machine that “covers the house.” Most houses aren’t one machine. The fridge and the Wi-Fi are a portable power station’s job. A 240-volt well pump wants a bigger battery that speaks both legs, or a generator on a pad. And a week of ice on the lines is a fuel question, not a handsome brick on the counter. So we write the fork in the road first, and the shopping second.

What we write about

• Whole-house and standby generators: what they cost once installed, and when a portable on a cord is enough. (No Generac affiliate arrangement exists here, and we don’t pretend one does.)
• Home batteries you can grow: expandable, transfer-switch-friendly cabinets, not installer-only quotes. The one we name that speaks 240 volts is the Anker SOLIX F3800.
• Portable power stations from Jackery, BLUETTI, and Anker SOLIX: the Explorer 2000 Plus, the AC200L, and the C2000 Gen 2.
• Portable solar panels that fold or briefcase into a station: the SolarSaga 200W, the SP200L, and the PS400. Driveway panels, not roof kits.

What you won’t find here

• Rooftop solar, microinverters, or anyone selling your phone number to installers.
• Tesla Powerwall comparisons or Tesla referral links.
• Guru essays about “energy independence.”
• Invented credentials, lab stories, or scraped spec sheets dressed up as first-person tests.
• Generated or stand-in product photos for named Jackery, BLUETTI, or Anker SOLIX machines. Product photos come from the maker’s own US product page, and we say so under each one.

Who writes this

The Home Backup is one desk, owned and written by Julio Martinez. Every article here is written by me. Spec sheets get read, prices get dated, and the pages go up under this name. There are no novelist bylines and no invented lab.

How the money works

Simply, and out loud. Product hops exist so destinations can change without rewriting articles. We are not earning commissions from Jackery, BLUETTI, Anker SOLIX, Amazon, or EcoFlow today (L-05 register not approved). When a program is approved, this page and the on-page disclosure will say so in the same deploy as the tracking URL. The featured hops today are catalog deep links or brand roots: /go/jackery, /go/bluetti, and /go/anker-solix. The long version lives at the affiliate disclosure. We prefer partner programs with a roughly 30-day cookie, which is why some otherwise-good brands never get a featured cart on this site.

Every spec in our tables is a snapshot with a date on it (August 26, 2026, as of the last check), because manufacturers change firmware, models, and inverter ratings whenever they please. Before you spend four figures, open the live product page and give it a minute. How we work walks through the rest of it. And if you spot a number that moved, write us. It helps the next reader.