Best posts made by frugalpete

Another backup is your car. A few electric cars can supply current to your house or built-in inverters to give 120V for plugging in, but most of us don’t have those. What most of us can do is to buy a separate inverter to supply 120V to recharge the UPS or other backup battery, and/or use the 12V outlet (formerly called the cigarette lighter), to charge our cell phones with an adapter or run/charge other devices with a USB adapter. If needed for a prolonged time, you may need to run the engine to charge the car battery.