About half a year ago I bought a used UPS. It didn’t have enough output to power my main PC, but it’s perfect for my home server and network.
Starting on Christmas eve and continuing even today, my neighbourhood has been getting intermittent brownouts. It’s only affecting one phase (house is on a three-phase 240V connection), which happens to be the one powering my network (also all of the light fixtures, stupid Soviet house), and the UPS works beautifully. I didn’t lose any of my services even once. Without it, I would probably be reinstalling Proxmox and praying to the RAID gods to restore my hard drives.
“It pays for itself as soon as it is needed” is proven true once again.
I’ve done some bopping around looking at electrical systems for RVs and vandwelling and such, and it shocked me how cheap it is to buy some lithium batteries and solar panels. A couple of years ago, a 200 amp hour battery was like $2000 per battery, but it’s gotten way cheaper, really fast and you can assemble for yourself a little emergency setup for the price of a high-end PC or two. Which if you think of it, is crazy, as in the past those sorts of things only happened for like big businesses or whatever. Today, the main ‘cost’ is the time sink and research cost because there’s not a lot of experts out there yet even though the hardware is available, so you have to do a lot of research and be careful as hell because electricity is complicated and dangerous.
(You can also get one of the jackery systems or whatever from Costco or Amazon, which is more ‘plug and play’, but is also more expensive overall for the amount of electrical storage you get.)
You won’t be able to completely replace the strength and reliability of a normal grid connection, and you don’t want to use it to produce heating or cooling (because heating and cooling suck power like whoa), but for brownouts and blackouts and storms it’s pretty doable to put together a little battery system and some panels and stuff that will at least keep electronics powered. If you understand how much electricity you can store and how much your appliances draw, you can even (carefully) cook on it or keep a refrigerator going.
Like, it’s possible to do this in a RV or van, where space is limited, so if you have a house you could totally do a backup battery system that tops itself off of the grid, then is available if/when the grid goes down for X amount of days at Y amount of draw.