New York City has shown twice in a decade what a bad outage looks like. When Superstorm Sandy flooded a Con Edison substation in 2012, much of lower Manhattan went dark for days. Nine years later, the remnants of Hurricane Ida dumped record rain on the city in a single night, flooding basement apartments and streets across Brooklyn and Queens. New York’s grid is run by NYISO, but a renter can’t do anything about the grid — and can’t install rooftop solar either. If you rent your apartment, a rooftop quote is a dead end: you don’t own the roof, you may not have access to it, and no installer will wire panels into a building you’ll leave in a year. If you’ve been reading about New York solar and assumed none of it applied to you, here’s the part that does: a portable solar generator needs no roof, no permit, and no landlord.
NYC has done this before — and it will again
The city’s blackout history runs deeper than Sandy and Ida. The August 2003 Northeast blackout took down all five boroughs for more than a day — no subways, no elevators, no water pressure above the sixth floor in buildings that rely on electric pumps. In July 2019, a Con Edison relay failure blacked out roughly 30 blocks of Manhattan’s West Side on a Saturday night, and a week later Con Ed deliberately cut power to tens of thousands of customers in southeast Brooklyn during a heat wave to keep the wider grid from failing. That second one is the part renters forget: a New York outage isn’t always a storm. Load shedding in a heat wave is a planned event, and it lands hardest in exactly the neighborhoods of walk-ups and small apartments where nobody can install a standby generator.
An apartment adds its own constraints. A gas generator is illegal and lethal to run indoors, there’s no garage or yard to run one outside, and when the hallway lights and elevator are out, the only backup that helps is the one already charged in your closet. That’s the niche a battery power station fills.
What portable solar actually does for a renter
A portable power station is a large battery you charge from a wall outlet ahead of time, then draw from when the grid goes down. Pair it with a foldable solar panel set in a sunny window or on a balcony and it can top back up from daylight during a longer outage. It’s silent, produces zero exhaust, and is safe to run indoors — which matters in a studio or one-bedroom where a gas generator is simply never an option.
What it won’t do is power your whole building or run central air; that isn’t the job. What it will do is keep the things that matter through an outage — and knowing exactly how much those things draw is what tells you which size to buy.
How many watts does an NYC apartment actually need?
Apartment loads are small — that’s the good news. Here’s what the typical NYC blackout kit actually draws:
| Load | Typical draw | Energy per day |
|---|---|---|
| Phone charging (two phones) | ~10W | ~50Wh |
| Wi-Fi router + modem | ~15W | ~350Wh |
| LED lamps (three) | ~25W | ~150Wh (6 hrs) |
| Laptop | ~60W | ~200Wh |
| Box fan | ~50W | ~600Wh (12 hrs) |
| Full-size fridge | 100–200W (cycling) | ~1,000–1,500Wh |
| Window AC (one room) | 500–900W | ~6,000Wh (12 hrs) |
Read the table bottom-up and the sizing rule falls out on its own:
- Phones, Wi-Fi, lights, laptop, fan — everything except cooling and refrigeration — totals under 200W of draw and roughly 1,300Wh a day. A small 1,000Wh-class portable station covers a night or two of that in a studio.
- Add a full-size fridge and you’re at ~2,500–3,000Wh a day. This is the load that defines most renters’ kits, and it’s why the 3,000Wh class is the apartment sweet spot.
- Add a window AC — the July 2019 heat-wave scenario — and you need both more capacity and solar refill to stretch across a multi-day event.
What a one-bedroom actually needs
The table above is every load an apartment might run. Here is the shorter list a one-bedroom really runs on night two.
| Load | Typical draw | Energy per day |
|---|---|---|
| Fridge/freezer | ~150W running (cycling) | 1,000 to 1,500Wh |
| Wi-Fi router | ~10W | ~240Wh |
| LED lights (ten bulbs) | ~50W | ~300Wh (6 hrs) |
| Phones and a laptop | 20 to 60W | 150 to 300Wh |
| Fan | 30 to 60W | 400 to 700Wh (12 hrs) |
| CPAP (humidifier off) | 30 to 60W | 300 to 500Wh per night |
That comes to roughly 2,400 to 3,400Wh a day, call it 3,000Wh, and the fridge alone is a third to a half of it. The real question for a renter is not how many watts, it is how many days of fridge.
| Unit | Capacity | Days of that list, battery alone |
|---|---|---|
| HomePower 3000 | 3,072Wh | About a day, closer to two with the fan off |
| HomePower 3600 Plus | 3,584Wh, to 21kWh | A little over a day, the best part of a week expanded |
| Solar Generator 5000 Plus | 5,040Wh, to 60kWh | A day and a half to two days, far longer expanded |
Those are battery-only figures. A panel adds 1,500 to 2,000Wh on a bright summer day and a few hundred watt-hours on a grey winter one, so in July a good aspect puts most of that daily use straight back. Our sizing guide works through the method load by load, and the best solar generators for home backup roundup sets these three against the wider market.
▶ Shop the HomePower 3000, 3,072Wh with panels included use code DEAL5
Jackery models compared for a NYC apartment
Jackery’s lineup runs from throw-it-in-a-tote stations to whole-home systems. For an apartment, three tiers matter:
| Smaller portable stations | HomePower 3000 | HomePower 3600 Plus | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Capacity class | A few hundred Wh–2kWh | 3,072Wh | 3,584Wh (expandable) |
| Output | Varies by model | 3,600W | 3,600W |
| Phones, Wi-Fi, lights | 1–2 nights | Days | Days |
| Full-size fridge | Hours, model-dependent | 1–2 days per charge | 2+ days per charge |
| Window AC | No | Yes, shorter runtime | Yes |
| Storage footprint | Tote bag to carry-on | Suitcase-sized | Suitcase-sized |
| Best for | Studio essentials kit | Most renters with a fridge | Heat-wave-prone blocks, frequent outages |
All of them are LiFePO4 chemistry — stable enough to store charged in a closet for months — and all run near 30 decibels with zero exhaust, so they’re safe and neighbor-proof inside a small apartment.
For a studio essentials kit (no fridge), one of the smaller portable stations covers phones, Wi-Fi, a lamp, and a fan for a night or two without taking more closet space than a weekend bag:
▶ Shop Jackery portable power stations
For most NYC renters with a full-size fridge, the HomePower 3000 is the pick: fridge, Wi-Fi, and lights for one to two days, with bundled foldable panels that recharge it from a bright window or balcony while the grid is down — no rooftop required.
▶ Shop the HomePower 3000 — our NYC pick use code DEAL5
If your block loses power often, or you want a window AC covered through a multi-day heat event, the HomePower 3600 Plus adds capacity and expandability for the worst case:
▶ Shop the HomePower 3600 Plus
Charging panels on a balcony, a fire escape or a window
Which way your windows face decides what a panel is worth. A south-facing aspect gets sun for most of the day and is the one to use if you have it. A west-facing aspect gets the afternoon, the strongest light of a July day. An east-facing aspect gets the morning and goes flat by lunchtime. A north-facing aspect gets almost no direct sun, only indirect light, so treat it as a trickle rather than a charge. New York layers shade on top of that, because the building across the street can take your afternoon whichever way you face.
A balcony rail or a sunny window sill works for the same reason the power station itself works: the panel leans there, plugs in, and comes back inside when you are done.
A fire escape usually does not. A fire escape is an egress route. Buildings and the city both expect it to stay clear, so a panel, a cable, or anything else left out there is an obstruction as well as a hazard for every neighbor above you.
The practical answer is simpler than any of this. Charge the unit to full from an ordinary wall socket before the weather arrives, which takes hours and costs pennies, then use the panel to top it up in daylight and turn day two into day three. Our Boston portable solar guide covers the same problem in a colder climate.
▶ Get the HomePower 3000 with its panels use code DEAL5
What your lease and your building actually allow
This is the question renters ask first, and the answer is the reason the category exists. A portable power station needs no permit, no roof work and no landlord approval, because nothing is installed and nothing is fixed to the building. It plugs into a wall socket like a dehumidifier, lives in a closet like a suitcase, and leaves with you when the lease ends, which is the whole point for a renter.
The line to watch is the moment something becomes permanent. Anything bolted, drilled or wired does need permission, every time: a bracket screwed into a balcony wall, a mount clamped to a rail, a hole through a window frame for a cable. That is work on somebody else’s building, and it needs the landlord’s or the managing agent’s sign-off in writing.
Co-ops and condos add a second layer. Boards frequently have house rules about what may hang off a balcony or be visible from the street, and those run independently of anything your lease says. A panel resting inside on a window sill is rarely anyone’s business. A panel clipped to the outside of a railing might well be.
The sensible step costs one email: ask the building manager whether anything may be attached to the balcony rail before you attach it. Asking gets a yes or a no. Assuming gets a letter.
Blackouts New York renters have actually had
New York’s outages are not all one kind of event, which is why a renter should prepare for the generic version rather than for one named storm. In July 2019, a Con Edison equipment failure blacked out a stretch of Manhattan’s West Side on a Saturday evening, taking lights, lifts and traffic signals with it. Days later, in a heat wave, Con Ed cut power to customers in parts of southeast Brooklyn to protect the wider network, so households lost power in the hottest week of the year with no storm anywhere near them. In September 2021, the remnants of Hurricane Ida dropped record rainfall on the city in a single night and flooded basement apartments, streets and stations across Brooklyn and Queens. In 2012, Superstorm Sandy flooded a Con Edison substation and left much of Lower Manhattan dark for multiple days.
Those events look nothing alike, yet they land the same way on anyone above the sixth floor. Losing power in a tall building is not only losing light: the lifts stop, which turns a twelfth-floor apartment into twelve flights with the groceries, and in many buildings the water pumps stop too, so the upper floors lose water as well. A battery in your closet will not restart the pumps. It keeps the fridge cold, the phones charged, the router alive, and a lamp on in the room you are sitting in, which is the difference between camping in your apartment and leaving it.
Heat is the New York risk people underestimate
Ask most people to picture a bad New York outage and they picture February. The ones that hit hardest here happen in July, when an apartment that was merely warm turns unsafe for anyone elderly or unwell.
A fan draws 30 to 60W and uses 400 to 700Wh over a long day. Every unit here runs one for days alongside the fridge, and twelve hours of moving air changes how a hot apartment feels far more than the wattage suggests.
A small window air conditioner is a different animal: 400 to 600W while the compressor runs, and 4,000 to 8,000Wh over a hot day. The HomePower 3000’s 3,072Wh gives roughly five or six hours of compressor time and little else. The HomePower 3600 Plus at 3,584Wh is an evening per charge, and becomes a multi-night answer only once expansion batteries take it toward 21kWh. The Solar Generator 5000 Plus at 5,040Wh carries a window unit for most of a hot day.
The honest version: a fan is realistic on any of these units for days, a window unit is a few hours on the smallest. In a heat wave, run the fan and keep the fridge cold most of the time, and save the air conditioner for one closed room in the hours you need to sleep through.
▶ Shop the HomePower 3600 Plus, expandable to 21kWh
The noise rule that rules out everything else
Here’s a constraint specific to this city: New York’s residential noise rules are among the strictest in the country, and 311 noise complaints are consistently the city’s most common complaint category. A portable gas generator runs at roughly 70–90 decibels — lawnmower territory. Even if you had somewhere legal to run one (you don’t; indoors it’s a carbon-monoxide risk and on a fire escape it’s both a hazard and a code problem), it would draw complaints from every neighbor within earshot before the first hour was up.
A battery station simply isn’t in that conversation. At around 30 decibels — the level of a whisper — a Jackery running your fridge is quieter than the fridge itself. In a walk-up with thin walls, that’s not a nice-to-have; it’s the difference between backup power you can actually use and backup power that gets you a knock on the door.
Charge it now, before the next Con Ed outage
Sandy and Ida both arrived faster than anyone could shop for backup. Charge a station now, keep it in a closet, and it’s ready the next time the block goes dark or a summer heat wave strains the Con Edison network — then it comes with you when you move to your next apartment. In a city where you don’t control the grid or the roof, it’s the one piece of resilience a renter fully owns.
▶ Shop the HomePower 3000 — our NYC pick use code DEAL5
Keep reading: New York solar incentives & costs · Portable solar power for renters in Boston · Do New Jersey homes need solar battery backup?