Watt & Warden
About Watt & Warden
A site for one specific person: someone sizing backup power to their own outages and their own budget, who would like to see the arithmetic before spending money.
Who writes this
Sawyer V. — an enthusiast who is genuinely into this stuff. No lab coat, no test bench, no van full of generators.
What there is: manufacturer manuals read end to end, published specifications compiled into tables you can actually compare, and the electrical arithmetic done properly and shown in full. If a number is on this site, you can check it — the source is linked and the working is on the page.
That is a deliberately modest claim and it is an accurate one. This site does not run a testing program and does not pretend to. The method, including where it is weaker than a test bench.
Who the site is for
Someone whose power went out for two days last winter and who does not want that again. Someone who has read four review sites and noticed they all recommend the same thing without ever explaining how much you actually need.
Concretely: a person sizing backup power to their own outage history and their own budget tier. Not a spec-comparison hobbyist, not an off-grid homesteader, not someone building a data center. The buying decisions on this site are made in that person's terms — how long is your power off, what has to keep running, what can you spend.
What makes it different
Two things, and both are arithmetic rather than opinion.
Duration to capacity. Every other guide in this category sizes by appliance list. None connects how long your power is off to what capacity that requires — even though duration is the variable that decides between a $400 battery and a $4,000 generator. That page is the center of the site.
Cost to run. A dual-fuel generator's sticker price is a fraction of its real cost; a lithium battery's sticker price is nearly all of it. Nobody publishes the running arithmetic, and it is computable from published fuel consumption and a dated fuel price. Here it is.
What this site will never do
- Claim to have tested something. We have not, and we say so on every page that recommends anything.
- Publish a price we cannot verify. Prices render from a live data layer or the button reads “Check price”. There is no code path that can show a remembered number.
- Publish our own star rating. We run no test bench, so a numeric score would be an opinion wearing a measurement's clothes — and it never appears in our structured data either.
- Recommend something without saying who should skip it. Every pick carries a disqualifying condition. It is a required field in the content system, so a page cannot ship without one.
How it is paid for
Watt & Warden is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We earn a commission on qualifying purchases made through links on this site, at no extra cost to you.
It has never changed a ranking. We accept no sponsored placements and no free products, because accepting them would create exactly the obligation the method exists to avoid. The full disclosure and the editorial policy.
The site as it stands
46 content pages across six product categories and a scenario axis, every one carrying its sources. It is a young site and it will grow — the gaps we know about are named on the pages where they belong rather than quietly left out.
Contact and publisher
Reach us at info@wattandwarden.com, or through the contact form. Corrections are genuinely welcome — if a figure here is wrong we would rather hear it than leave it standing.
Watt & Warden is published by Fathom & Foundry. There is no premises, no phone number and no service area — this is a national publisher, and inventing any of those would be the same kind of fabrication as inventing a price.