Power Outage Planner exists to help you size and choose backup power without guesswork. Because a lot of what we cover touches safety, money, and health, we hold our content to standards we think you should be able to check. Here’s how we research, source, and review what you read here.
Who writes this site
Our guides are produced by the Power Outage Planner editorial team, published by SIA Digital Publisher. We write in plain English and try to answer the actual question fast, then back it up with the math and the sources behind it.
How we get our numbers
Most of our sizing and runtime figures come from a simple, repeatable calculation: a device’s running watts, its startup surge where it has one, and the watt-hours it uses over time. For appliance wattages we rely on manufacturer specifications and ENERGY STAR data rather than round numbers we made up. When we give a runtime or a recommended power-station size, we show the formula so you can run it for your own gear. That’s also why the site is built around free calculators instead of one-size-fits-all answers.
How we handle safety and health topics
For anything that can hurt someone — carbon monoxide, generator placement, food and water safety, medical devices — we follow and cite the relevant U.S. authorities rather than improvising. That includes the CDC, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the USDA and FSIS, the FDA, Ready.gov, and the American Red Cross. We don’t give medical advice; for medical questions we point you to your device’s manual and your doctor or pharmacist. Every safety figure on the site should trace back to one of those sources, listed at the bottom of the article.
Technical review
Our power and energy content — power stations, generators as a power source, batteries and inverters, and the load and watt-hour math behind sizing — is reviewed for technical accuracy by a power-infrastructure engineer.
Andrejs Kruminsh
Power-infrastructure engineer · technical reviewer (power & energy)
Andrejs is a power-infrastructure and data-center engineer with more than eight years designing and building large-scale power and computing facilities across five countries, totaling over 100 MW of capacity. His work spans power-supply redundancy, electrical and cooling infrastructure, and construction management for modular data centers and high-density computing sites — the same fundamentals that decide whether a battery or generator can actually carry a load. He reviews our power-station, generator-sizing, and battery content for technical accuracy. LinkedIn
Our prep, food, water, and medical-adjacent content is grounded in the official sources above. We’re in the process of adding named subject-matter reviewers in those areas; until then, those guides lean on the agencies that set the guidance, and we link straight to them.
How we stay independent
Our product recommendations are based on specifications and real-world fit — capacity, output, surge handling, battery type — not on who pays us. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. Affiliate links are labelled, and they never change which products we recommend — picks are by capacity, output, surge handling, and battery type.
Corrections
If you spot something that looks wrong — a number, a source, a safety detail — tell us and we’ll check it and fix it. You can reach the editorial team through our contact page. We’d rather correct a figure than leave a bad one up on a topic where it matters.