Keeping the lights on: paying for backup power

A long outage rarely takes everything at once. The lights go first, then the refrigerator starts to warm and the furnace blower stops, and by the second evening the household is choosing what to keep running. Backup power comes in three forms: a portable generator, a home battery (alone or charged by solar panels), and a cheap layer of flashlights, coolers and blankets that works when the other two do not.

Start with a list of what must stay on

Before pricing anything, write down what has to keep working. For most homes the list is short: refrigerator and freezer, a few lights, phone and radio charging, and in winter whatever the heating needs, which for a gas or oil furnace is often only the blower and controls. Anything medical, such as a CPAP machine, goes at the top.

Then put a time next to each item. The CDC’s outage guidance is that a closed refrigerator keeps food safe for about four hours without power and a full freezer for about 48. So the refrigerator needs a few hours of power spread through the day, not a constant supply. Heating and medical equipment set the real size of the system.

For scale, Poland’s energy regulator puts the average yearly use of a household on the most common tariff at about 1.8 MWh (URE, announcing the 2026 tariffs), roughly 5 kWh a day. A house running only its short list uses a fraction of that.

A battery, with or without panels

A home battery is silent, gives off no fumes and sits indoors, which suits the night and the refrigerator. Its limit is capacity, and a space heater will empty it in hours.

Solar panels alone keep nothing on in a blackout. A grid-connected inverter switches off when the grid fails, so no power flows back onto crews repairing the line. Panels help only when the system has a battery and an inverter that can run in island mode, feeding a few backup circuits while cut off. Ask the installer which circuits those are, and put the short list on them.

What Poland pays toward it

Poland has subsidized home solar since 2019 through Mój Prąd, a program run by the National Fund for Environmental Protection and Water Management, NFOŚiGW. Its sixth edition paid up to half the eligible cost of a home battery, capped at 16,000 zł, plus up to 7,000 zł toward panels (program rules). Applications closed in September 2025, and the fund has said no seventh edition will run in the old form.

Its successor, Przydomowe Magazyny Energii, offered the same maximums this spring for systems installed between August 2024 and October 2025. A second round is planned for the last quarter of 2026, for batteries of at least 10 kWh, which is about two days of an average household’s entire use.

How the money moves matters as much as the amount. Both programs so far have repaid systems already bought, installed and connected, so the household pays the whole price first, and the wait is long. In April 2026 the fund was still assessing Mój Prąd applications filed the previous September.

When the payment meets the outage

Plenty of households finance a system like this, and that is a reasonable choice. The test worth applying belongs to preparedness in particular: equipment bought for a bad month has to be paid for in a bad month too. The winter a battery earns its keep may also be the winter one income stops or a storm costs a week of shifts. If the payment fits the budget only when everything goes well, the loan has not reduced the household’s risk. It has moved it from the fuse box to the bank balance, and those two tend to fail in the same season.

So set the payment against the lean month, not the typical one, and match the kind of credit to the size of the purchase. A battery system costing tens of thousands of złoty is an instalment purchase from a bank or the installer’s finance partner, spread over years. A short online loan, such as the 30-day loans Avinto sells with one repayment at the end, fits only something small, a portable power station or a generator bought before a forecast storm, and only when the whole sum can come out of next month’s pay. Either way the question is the same: would this repayment still go out on time in a February with one wage, a cold snap and the emergency fund half spent?

The grant belongs in that February too. Count it as money that arrives later, perhaps much later, and never as a discount taken on the day of purchase. A system bought at full price with half of it expected back from the fund is a loan for the full price until the transfer lands, and its payments have to be affordable on that basis. If they are not, saving first and buying a season later is the stronger plan.

Borrowing because the money for rent or a bill has already run out is another matter altogether, and nothing on this page speaks to it.

A generator, and the rule that comes before the rest

A portable generator is the cheapest way to get a lot of power for a long time, as long as fuel holds out. It is also the only option here that can kill. By the reckoning of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, one portable generator puts out as much carbon monoxide as hundreds of cars, and the gas has neither color nor smell.

The CPSC and CDC rules are short. Run it outdoors only, at least 20 feet from the house, with the exhaust pointed away from windows, doors and vents. Never run it in a garage, basement, crawlspace or shed, even with the door open. Fit battery-powered or battery-backup carbon monoxide alarms on every level and outside the bedrooms, and test them monthly. Plug appliances into the generator with heavy grounded extension cords, and never into a wall outlet: connecting a generator to house wiring needs a transfer switch installed by an electrician. Shut it off and let it cool before refueling. Headache, dizziness, nausea and confusion are the early signs of poisoning, and anyone showing them needs fresh air at once.

The cheap layer underneath

The backup that needs no fuel and no payments comes first in any plan: flashlights and headlamps with spare batteries, a battery or hand-crank radio, a charged power bank for each phone, a cooler that takes freezer packs, and warm bedding for one room the household can close off and keep warm. It covers the first night of any outage and the hours while a generator is fetched or a battery recharges. Candles and oil lamps belong at the end of that list, with the same care about fire and fumes as any flame indoors; the page on homemade lamps sets out the rules. With that layer in place, a battery or a generator becomes an upgrade to a plan that already works.