After several long bouts without power here, during an ice storm years ago we went 8 days in January with the same problems, no water, no heat, phone knocked out by a truck which caught the group of downed lines and a car who's transmission was fractured while trying to get the car out of the ice, we decided this year to go with a whole house generator that comes on automatically when power goes out. Of course now that we invested so much in this unit, we'll never have another power outage.