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Maine sees some of the longest outages in the country, and the benchmark is still the Great Ice Storm of January 1998, when days of freezing rain collapsed the grid across northern New England and left parts of the state without power for weeks in the dead of winter. It wasn’t a fluke: in October 2017 a single windstorm caused the largest outage Central Maine Power had ever recorded, knocking out hundreds of thousands of homes. In a state this rural and this wooded, a multi-day outage is a normal cost of living here. If you’re comparing Maine solar quotes, know that a grid-tied rooftop system shuts off in one of these outages unless you also have storage.
Why restoration takes so long in Maine
Central Maine Power and Versant Power serve homes spread thin along miles of tree-lined roads, so when ice or wind brings down limbs, the damage is scattered across an enormous area and crews work through it circuit by circuit. A house at the end of a dirt road in Aroostook or down east can be among the last reconnected. And a grid-tied solar array is no help while you wait — the anti-islanding safety feature shuts it off the moment the utility line goes dead. What carries you through is stored power you own.
Covering the essentials in a cold outage
The aim is to keep heat, food, and contact going, not the whole house. A refrigerator draws about 150W, a furnace or boiler circulator around 100 to 200W, ten LED bulbs near 50W, plus a router and phones — typically under 500W of steady draw. A HomePower 3000 runs that for one to two days and includes solar panels that recharge it on the clear days that follow most Maine storms, so it can stretch across a longer outage instead of quitting the first night.
▶ See the HomePower 3000 solar generator use code DEAL5
For a full house and a well
Many Maine homes are on a well, which means no power, no water. The Solar Generator 5000 Plus delivers 5,040Wh and 7,200W with 120V and 240V and expands to 60kWh — enough to run a 240V well pump, a full heating system, and the rest of a larger home through the kind of week-long outage 1998 became famous for.
▶ View the Solar Generator 5000 Plus
Ready before the first freezing rain
The state’s longest outages arrive with the least warning, and backup power vanishes from store shelves the day a storm is forecast. Charge a unit in the fall, learn its runtime, and keep the panels close. Have a look at the current deals before you decide.
Keep reading: Maine solar incentives & costs · Keep power on in a New Hampshire outage · Keep power on in a Vermont outage