What is the best backup power for a Houston home?

For most Houston homes, a solar generator in the 3,500Wh class — our pick is the Jackery HomePower 3600 Plus — is the right size. It stores 3,584Wh, puts out 3,600W, expands to 21kWh, and ties into your circuits through a transfer switch, which is enough to run a window AC unit in one room plus the fridge, Wi-Fi, and lights through a multi-day CenterPoint outage. If central air conditioning has to stay on, step up to the Solar Generator 5000 Plus, which delivers 7,200W with 120V/240V output.

How long do Houston power outages last after a hurricane?

Plan for days, not hours. After Hurricane Beryl came ashore in July 2024, roughly 2.2 million CenterPoint customers lost power, and restoration across the Houston area stretched past a week for the hardest-hit neighborhoods. CenterPoint restores in priority order — transmission and substations first, then critical facilities, then main feeders, then neighborhood branches, and individual service drops last — so a citywide restoration percentage tells you very little about your own street.

Why does Houston lose power so often?

Two reasons stack up. Most of Texas runs on the ERCOT grid, which is largely disconnected from the two national grids and cannot easily import power during a crisis — that is what turned Winter Storm Uri into a days-long statewide blackout in February 2021. On top of that, Houston's local distribution network runs through a dense tree canopy across a very large service area, so wind events take lines down block by block. The May 2024 derecho knocked out nearly a million CenterPoint customers before Beryl arrived two months later.

Can a solar generator run air conditioning during a Houston summer outage?

A window unit, yes. A single window AC draws roughly 500–900W while running, which a HomePower 3600 Plus handles alongside a fridge and lights. Central air is a different class of load — it needs 240V and heavy continuous output — so that takes a Solar Generator 5000 Plus (5,040Wh, 7,200W, 120V/240V) or a properly sized whole-home system. In a July outage in Houston, cooling is the load to size for first: heat is what makes a summer blackout here dangerous rather than merely inconvenient.

Is a solar generator better than a gas generator in Houston?

For most homes, yes. After Beryl, fuel was hard to find across the Houston area for days, because stations without power cannot pump. A gas generator also has to run outdoors, well away from windows and doors — carbon monoxide from portable generators kills people after storms every season — and it cannot be refuelled safely in the middle of one. A solar generator has no fuel, no exhaust, runs near 30 decibels, and recharges from its panels each day the sun returns.

Will my rooftop solar panels keep my Houston home powered in an outage?

Not on their own. A grid-tied array on CenterPoint's network shuts down automatically the instant the utility fails — an anti-islanding rule required by UL 1741 and IEEE 1547 that keeps power off lines a crew may be repairing. Unless your system includes a battery and an inverter that can form its own AC waveform, your panels sit idle through the exact outage you bought them for.

Houston Backup Power for the Next CenterPoint Outage

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The short answer: size for cooling first. Houston’s dangerous outages are the summer ones, and the load that decides your unit is air conditioning — a window unit needs a HomePower 3600 Plus, central air needs a Solar Generator 5000 Plus, and a fridge-and-phones kit needs a HomePower 3000. Here is how each one maps to a Houston outage.

Houston backup power, compared

Unit	Capacity / output	Best for in Houston	Buy
HomePower 3000	3,072Wh · 3,600W · panels included	Fridge, Wi-Fi, phones, and fans for 1–2 days; apartments inside the Loop	Shop it →
HomePower 3600 Plus (our pick)	3,584Wh · 3,600W · to 21kWh	One room cooled with a window AC, plus the essentials, through a Beryl-length outage	Shop it →
Solar Generator 5000 Plus	5,040Wh · 7,200W · 120V/240V · to 60kWh	Central AC, or a well pump on a property outside the city	Shop it →

What a Houston outage actually looks like

Houston has had three separate lessons in three years, and they were not the same lesson.

Winter Storm Uri, February 2021. Frozen generation across the state pushed ERCOT into rolling blackouts that became multi-day outages. The failure was statewide and had nothing to do with local lines — there simply was not enough generation, and Texas could not import much from its neighbors.

The derecho, May 2024. A line of straight-line winds tore through downtown on a Thursday evening and knocked out power to nearly a million CenterPoint customers, blowing windows out of high-rises. This was a distribution failure: poles, spans, and trees.

Hurricane Beryl, July 2024. Beryl came ashore as a category 1 and still put roughly 2.2 million CenterPoint customers in the dark. Restoration ran past a week in the hardest-hit neighborhoods, in heat indices near 100°F, and the outage itself — not the wind — is what caused most of the harm.

The pattern worth planning around is the third one. A weak hurricane can strip the Houston distribution network for a week in the hottest month of the year, and no amount of grid investment changes what happens in your house on day three.

▶ Shop the HomePower 3600 Plus — our Houston pick

Size for the heat, not for the lights

Everywhere else in this country, sizing a backup system starts with the fridge. In Houston in July, it starts with cooling, because a house with no air conditioning at 95°F and Gulf humidity gets dangerous within a day — especially for older residents and anyone on medication that impairs heat regulation.

Here is what the Houston load list actually looks like:

Load	Typical draw	Energy per day
Window AC (one room)	500–900W	~6,000Wh (12 hrs)
Central AC	3,000–5,000W + 240V start	25,000Wh+
Fridge/freezer	100–200W (cycling)	~1,000–1,500Wh
Box fans (two)	~100W together	~1,200Wh (12 hrs)
Wi-Fi router + phone charging	~20W	~250Wh
CPAP (humidifier off)	30–60W	~300–400Wh per night

Read down the table and the strategy picks itself: cool one room, not the house. Running a window unit in a single bedroom plus the fridge and a router is roughly 7,500Wh a day, which a 3,584Wh unit covers with a solar refill during the day and a sensible duty cycle at night. Trying to run central air off a portable unit is a different purchase entirely — that is the Solar Generator 5000 Plus with its 7,200W output and 240V, and even then you are managing the load.

▶ Shop the Solar Generator 5000 Plus — runs central AC

If your plan is just to save the food and keep phones and a CPAP alive, the HomePower 3000 is the cheaper way in, and its bundle includes the panels that refill it.

▶ Shop the HomePower 3000 use code DEAL5

Why CenterPoint’s restoration order sets your sizing

Restoration is not first-come, first-served, and understanding the order is what tells you how many days to plan for:

Transmission lines and substations — nothing downstream can be energized until these are back.
Critical facilities — hospitals, 911 centers, water and wastewater treatment.
Main distribution feeders — the circuits that restore the most customers per repair.
Neighborhood branch lines — the spans down your street.
Individual service drops — the wire from the pole to one house, usually last.

Two things follow. First, a citywide “85% restored” headline can be true while your block is still on step four. Second, if the drop to your own house or your meter enclosure was damaged, you may need an electrician before CenterPoint can reconnect you at all — days that no restoration map shows.

That is the argument for sizing to a multi-day outage with solar refill rather than to a single overnight. A unit that runs for a day and then needs a wall outlet is the wrong tool for a storm that took the wall outlet away.

The gas generator problem in a Houston summer

Houston empties the shelves of gas generators after every event, and then relearns the same three limits.

Fuel. After Beryl, stations across the metro either sold out or could not pump without power of their own. A five-gallon can beside the generator is a one-day plan for a week-long outage.

Carbon monoxide. A portable generator has to run outdoors, well away from windows and doors — never in a garage, never on a covered patio. Storm seasons in Texas and Florida produce CO poisonings every year, usually from people who ran a machine somewhere sheltered.

Heat and noise. Running a generator means going outside to refuel it in the same heat you are trying to escape, and living next to 70–90 decibels for a week.

A solar generator has none of those failure modes: nothing to store, nothing to spill, no exhaust, near-30-decibel operation, and it recharges from panels on the driveway. The honest trade-off is that a gas generator has effectively unlimited runtime if you can get fuel, and costs less upfront — but in a Houston July, “if you can get fuel” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

What to do before the next storm

Charge it and leave it charged. LiFePO4 holds a charge for months. Top it off at the start of hurricane season and again whenever a system enters the Gulf.
Decide which room is the cool room. One bedroom with a window unit, door closed, is a plan. Trying to cool the house is not.
Test it against your actual fridge. Plug your real refrigerator in for an hour and watch the draw, rather than trusting a spec sheet.
Find the panel spot now. Driveway, back patio, or a stretch of lawn you can reach safely once the wind drops.
Keep the cables in one bag. The most common day-one failure is a missing DC cable, not a dead battery.

Where to go next

Houston sits inside a statewide problem, and it is worth reading both halves. Our Texas grid backup generator guide covers the ERCOT picture and the same three units sized for the state as a whole. If you already have rooftop panels and are wondering why they went dark during Beryl, can off-grid solar back up your Texas home in an outage? explains anti-islanding and what it takes to make an existing array keep running. And if you are weighing panels in the first place, start with Texas solar incentives & costs.

▶ Shop Jackery backup generators — compare all three

Keep reading: Texas grid backup generators compared · Can off-grid solar back up your Texas home? · Texas solar incentives & costs · Hurricane backup power in Orlando