[Delphinus]

Yeah, most inexpensive UPS's are really intended to give you 5-10 minutes to save your work and then gracefully shutdown your PC. A UPS that would run your reef during a blackout of this magnitude out here would run you into the thousands. Not cost effective. If you're going to compromise on what one powerhead you'll run, one heater, at that point your better off using battery operated air pumps and the like.

A generator may not be much less money but as has been pointed out will be a very broad spectrum tool. You can run your fridge and freezer, for example. People out here, have to throw away all their food now. Don't eat your meat, don't eat your dairy. Presumably, there are going to be a pile of restaurants too, that have food that has to be chucked. What a mess.

Another option that I have been sort of tossing back and forth in my mind as to what I want to do to protect my reef, in the event I can't buy a generator, is to use those battery operated devices, but instead of relying on just batteries, if the units can be made to operate on 12V ... 12V is reasonabky easy to come by. A small windmill or a solar panel could maybe be used in conjunction with the battery and then maybe between the elements, you can save your batteries for other things like flashlights in the event of a prolonged outage. Of course if it's cloudy or dark winter AND windstill then that's of little use, but I'm kind of geeked out on wind power and solar power and been wondering for years how to get in on that somehow. My neighbour has a small wind generator on his garage. One day I am just going to ring his doorbell and ask what he's running off it. It's the coolest little thing, turbine is about 2', 2.5' in diameter, sits on the corner of his garage.

While you may be hearing that power is coming back to the affected area, I should point out that it's still a very precarious situation out here. As power comes back so does demand and they need to match the ramping up of both quite evenly, or risk roving brownouts. So it's still going to be a process for some time yet.

I just want to know what the hell happened here. At this point, nobody really has any idea. A lot of good sounding theories, and a lot of "well we know it wasn't US" going on. But I think it's conceivable that we may not EVER really be 100% certain. My theory is that there have been a number of causes that compounded one another. All I know, it's been a real mess. I suppose for a individual consumer it's not a whole lot different than say a power outage causxed by an ice storm or a hurricane or whatever, in this case the difference is the sheer magnitude of the affected area. What a mess.