Power outages up to 4 hours really shouldn't cause a great deal of harm to your tanks or filters as long as the room stays reasonably warm. The tanks will cool some, but if you wrap them with a blanket or comforter, even that cooling will be minimized .. Your filters, cannister or otherwise will also survive with little loss of the bacteria .. They are bacteria, not higher organisms with huge O2 demands.
UPS and other battery backups, even large modified ones will only give you a couple of hours at best if you have pumps and heaters running ; unless you are using a huge battery bank and inverter designed for continuous operation .
Your best bet for long term outages is to buy a small gas powered generator. An 1800 w generator will power a rather impressive fish room and still leave you with enough reserve to power some lights for yourself. A bigger generator, 3500 to 5000 watts, can also power your furnace, if you know how to separate the electrical controls and blower motor from the electric grid. The best way is to have the furnace connect to your house power by a plug to a wall socket. Then in cases of power outages you can unplug from house power and plug into an extension from the generator.
A furnace generally only needs about 1800 watts maximum to run, but starting draw on the blower often needs 2 or 3 times that much .. That's why the much larger generator is needed to power a furnace. For the same price , or less, of a limited ability battery backup, you can buy a good generator that is far more capable and useful.
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