Who this page is for
You have had an outage, or you can see one coming, and you want a battery that keeps the important things running without putting an engine outside your house. This page ranks five of them by the length of outage each one actually covers.
The ranking is not a score. We have not tested these — nobody here has plugged one in — so a numerical rating would be an opinion dressed as a measurement. What we have done instead is compile the published specifications so they compare honestly, and compute the two numbers manufacturers leave out: how long each unit runs a real refrigerator, and what its stored energy costs per kilowatt-hour across its rated life.
Start with your outage, not the products
The EIA's Electric Power Annual for 2024 records an average of eleven hours without power per U.S. customer — the most in a decade. But the shape of that number matters more than its size. About two hours came from ordinary faults; nearly nine came from major events, and Hurricanes Beryl, Helene and Milton alone accounted for 80% of all national outage hours that year.
Which means the average household experiences several short interruptions and, occasionally, one long one — and those need different machines. A household in South Carolina, which averaged nearly 53 hours in 2024, is solving a different problem from one in Arizona, which averaged under two.
Match the purchase to the outage
Capacity is not a preference. It falls out of two numbers: how long your power is usually off, and what you refuse to lose while it is.
| Your outage lasts | What has to keep running | Realistic product class |
|---|
| 2–6 hours | Router, phones, a few lamps, the fridge cycling | 300–600Wh station
See the under-$500 picks |
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| Overnight, 8–14 hours | Above, plus the fridge staying properly cold and a furnace fan | 1,000–1,200Wh station with an 1,800W inverter
See the home-backup picks |
|---|
| 1–2 days | Above, plus a sump pump cycling and repeated device charging | 2,000Wh+ station, or a small generator
See generators under $1,000 |
|---|
| 3+ days | Everything above, plus a way to refill whatever you bought | Dual-fuel generator, or a battery plus solar
See the hurricane-season picks |
|---|
Duration figures are the U.S. Energy Information Administration's, from the
Electric Power Annual for 2024. Your utility publishes your own local reliability data and it is worth more than any national average —
how to find and read it.
How long each one runs a refrigerator
This is the calculation everybody wants and almost nobody publishes, because it requires committing to an assumption. Here is ours, stated so you can change it.
Champion's published wattage reference puts a domestic refrigerator at 150–400W running. But a fridge does not run continuously — the compressor cycles, typically somewhere around a third of the time in normal conditions. We use an average draw of 150W, which is a reasonable figure for a modern unit whose door stays shut, and we take 15% off for inverter conversion losses.
So: usable hours = capacity × 0.85 ÷ 150. On that basis the BLUETTI AC180's 1,152Wh gives about 6.5 hours, the Jackery 1000 v2's 1,070Wh about 6.1, the Anker C1000's 1,056Wh about 6.0, and the EcoFlow DELTA 2's 1,024Wh about 5.8. The Jackery 300 Plus does not appear because its inverter cannot start the fridge at all.
Two honest caveats. An older, larger or frequently-opened refrigerator draws considerably more than 150W average, and every figure above falls proportionally. And inverter efficiency varies with load and with the unit — 85% is conservative for a good inverter and generous for a cheap one. Substitute your own numbers; the full working is here.
What the stored energy costs
A battery's sticker price is nearly its whole cost — there is no fuel — but that cost is spread over a rated number of cycles, and the ratings differ enough to matter. Cost per usable kilowatt-hour is capacity multiplied by cycle count, divided by purchase price. We cannot publish the dollar figure here because we do not publish prices we cannot verify live, but the energy side of the ratio is fixed and published:
What it costs to actually run
The sticker price of a dual-fuel generator is a fraction of what it costs you. The sticker price of a battery is nearly all of it. Here is the arithmetic, with the inputs stated so you can redo it with your own fuel price.
| Unit | Published consumption | Cost per hour | Cost per 24 h |
|---|
| BLUETTI AC180 | 1,152Wh × 3,500 cycles | 4,032 kWh lifetime | Highest here |
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| Jackery Explorer 1000 v2 | 1,070Wh × 4,000 cycles (to 70%) | 4,280 kWh lifetime | Different endpoint |
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| EcoFlow DELTA 2 | 1,024Wh × 3,000 cycles | 3,072 kWh lifetime | Expandable |
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| Anker SOLIX C1000 | 1,056Wh × 3,000 cycles | 3,168 kWh lifetime | Fastest refill |
|---|
Lifetime energy = published capacity × published cycle rating. Note the endpoints differ: BLUETTI, EcoFlow and Anker quote cycles to 80% of original capacity, Jackery quotes 4,000 cycles to 70%. A 70% endpoint is the more permissive test, so the Jackery figure is not directly comparable to the others despite looking like the largest. Divide by the live purchase price for cost per kWh — we do not publish a price we cannot verify.
What none of these will do
No unit on this page runs central air conditioning, an electric range, or an electric water heater. Champion's reference puts a two-ton central air conditioner at 2,000–2,500W running and 3,500–4,500W starting, and an electric water heater at 3,000–4,500W. Those are generator or standby numbers, not battery numbers, and the whole-home scenario page deals with them properly.
None of them will get you through three days either, unless you can refill them. That is not a criticism — it is the defining property of stored energy, and it is why the generator comparison is worth reading before you commit, and why adding a panel changes the calculation entirely for long outages.
The budget ladder
If everything here is more than you want to spend, the honest next step is down rather than out: the under-$500 picks cover the short-outage case genuinely well, and a small unit you own beats a large one you did not buy. If you are looking at these and thinking they are too small, go up to the home-backup tier or across to generators under $1,000, which buy far more watt-hours per dollar at the cost of noise, fuel and having to stand outside in the rain.
