Nicole Nguyen

Batteries have a certain capacity, a certain output, and a certain peak wattage.

If you look at the appliances that you need to keep running during an outage, and it's different for everyone, maybe it's your Wi-Fi router, maybe it's your fridge, maybe it's an electric blanket, you need to tally up that wattage by looking at the label on the appliance.

Make sure that the battery that you're buying has enough capacity and output in watts to power all of those appliances.

So for example, my electric water kettle is 1500 watts.

So I need a battery that's rated for at least 1500 watts.

My fridge is only something like 150 watts continually.

But to start, it needs a huge...

1000 or 2000 watt burst in order to get the coolant running through its system.

And there's another number that you should look for when you're shopping for a battery, which is watt hour.

And that refers to the battery size.

So that's how long the battery will last.

If you're running a 60 watt electric blanket, and you have a 2000 watt hour battery, then you can run that

electric blanket for hours and hours.

So it really just depends on how long you want to plan for and how many appliances you want to plug into this portable power station.

And what's the range of cost?

A portable power station can cost anywhere between a hundred bucks to thousands of dollars.

So you can really scale up.

Many models are

work with expansion packs.

So you can start with a battery that costs, you know, $200, $300 that will tide you over for a couple of hours.