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In September 2020, a rare inland windstorm packing hurricane-force gusts tore across northern Utah, snapping thousands of trees and power poles and leaving parts of the Wasatch Front — Salt Lake City, Bountiful, Ogden — without electricity for days. Utah has no regional grid operator; Rocky Mountain Power runs the grid across most of the state on the Western interconnection, so when its lines go down, there’s no neighboring operator waiting to flip you back on. That windstorm was the dramatic version of a routine problem: winter storms and heavy mountain snow bring down lines every year, and losing heat in a Utah cold snap is a genuine safety risk. If you’re already comparing Utah solar quotes, it helps to know a grid-tied rooftop system shuts off in any outage (anti-islanding rules) unless you also have storage, so panels alone won’t keep the heat on.
What the 2020 windstorm exposed
The homes that came through it best weren’t the ones with the biggest gas generators — they were the ones that could keep a furnace’s blower, a fridge, and a few lights running quietly without hunting for fuel in a town where every gas station was also dark. That’s the everyday-outage tier, and the HomePower 3000 fills it: about 3,072Wh and 3,600W output, enough for those essentials for one to two days, with included solar panels that recharge it in Utah’s strong high-elevation sun between storms.
▶ See the HomePower 3000 solar generator use code DEAL5
Sizing up for a bigger home or a colder snap
If your house is larger, or your heating load is heavier, the Solar Generator 5000 Plus is the one to size around: 5,040Wh and 7,200W with both 120V and 240V, expandable to 60kWh. It can run a furnace blower alongside several rooms, or absorb the startup surge of bigger appliances, through a multi-day Provo or Cedar City outage.
▶ View the Solar Generator 5000 Plus
Between the two sits the HomePower 3600 Plus — 3,584Wh, 3,600W, expandable to 21kWh, and able to tie into your home’s circuits through a transfer switch. It runs the gas furnace’s blower, the fridge, lights, and Wi-Fi through a Salt Lake City snowstorm or a St. George heat wave, with room to add batteries for more runtime. And because every Jackery here is LiFePO4, vents nothing, and runs near 30 decibels, it’s safe indoors when it’s too cold or too windy to put a gas generator outside — as it was across the Wasatch Front in 2020.
▶ Check the HomePower 3600 Plus
Utah’s geography also shapes the choice. The Wasatch Front homes hit hardest in 2020 tend to run gas furnaces, so a mid-size unit that covers the blower and essentials is usually enough up north. In St. George and the southwest corner, summer heat is the bigger concern, which nudges those homes toward more cooling capacity. Either way, the sun does the resupply: Utah’s high-elevation light is strong even in winter, so the included panels can refill a unit between storms rather than leaving you with one charge to ration.
Not sure which size fits? List what has to stay on, add up the watts, and match it to a unit with headroom to spare.
▶ Compare all Jackery home backup options
Keep reading: Utah solar incentives & costs · Best solar generators for home backup (Colorado) · Best solar generators for home backup (Nevada)