A practical guide for Australian households. Real appliance figures, real runtimes, and the right size battery for your actual life.
The first sign that something has gone wrong is rarely dramatic. The kitchen clock blinks. The fridge falls silent in that particular way only an unpowered fridge can. The router LEDs go from green to dark, and somewhere in the house, a phone starts the slow, irritating job of dropping off Wi‑Fi and looking for mobile data. If anyone in the household uses a CPAP machine, the third realisation arrives quietly and at the worst possible time.
We have spent more storm seasons than we would like talking to Outbax customers in exactly this scenario. The questions are almost always the same three. Will the fridge survive the night? Will the internet hold up long enough to find out when the power is coming back on? And, for a meaningful share of Australian households, will the CPAP make it to morning?
This guide answers those three questions in that order, using real appliance figures, real Australian conditions, and one product we genuinely think most households should be looking at: the DJI Power 1000 V2 portable power station. If a smaller Gentrax unit is the right fit instead, we will say so. The aim here is not to sell you the biggest battery in the warehouse. The aim is to size your backup to your actual life.
VoltX V1800 Portable Power Station
What Actually Fails First When the Power Goes Out
Australian blackouts are not all the same. A Brisbane storm cell brings down lines in 20-minute bursts. A bushfire forced outage in the Adelaide Hills can last 12 to 36 hours. AEMO-directed load-shedding events, which are rare but real, can hit a suburb for two to three hours during a heatwave. None of these lasts long enough to require a generator, but all of them last long enough to spoil food, cut off the NBN modem, and put a CPAP user in a difficult overnight position.
The order things fail in matters. A fridge holds temperature for around four to six hours if you keep the door shut. The Wi‑Fi router goes dark the moment the power does. The CPAP, if you sleep through the outage, simply stops, sometimes without waking the person who needs it.
This is why a household backup plan is not really about lighting the kitchen. It is about keeping three quiet loads alive: the compressor, the modem, and the medical device.
Will a Power Station Run My Fridge?
The maths is more friendly than most people expect.
A typical Australian 400-litre bottom-mount fridge draws around 100 to 150 watts when the compressor is running. The keyword is when. Compressors cycle on and off, running for a few minutes at a time, then resting. Averaged over an hour, that 400-litre fridge pulls roughly 30 to 45 watts of continuous load.
The DJI Power 1000 V2 holds 1024 watt-hours of usable LiFePO4 battery capacity. Allowing around 15 per cent for inverter overhead, you have roughly 870 watt-hours of real-world energy available.
Divide that by 40 watts of average fridge draw, and you get around 22 hours of fridge runtime on a single charge. That is enough to carry most households through any normal blackout, including the storm season events that cause the bulk of food spoilage claims on home insurance.
The figure that catches people out is not the running watts but the surge current. A fridge compressor draws a brief spike of two to three times its running wattage when it kicks in. A cheap modified sine wave inverter often trips on that spike. The DJI Power 1000 V2 produces pure sine wave AC and handles surge current up to around 3000 watts, which is why fridges run on it the same way they run on mains power. Nothing whines, nothing trips, nothing wakes up the household.
VoltX M2400 Portable Power Station
Keeping the Wi‑Fi and NBN Running
This is the part of the conversation that catches the most people out.
A standard home router draws between six and twelve watts. A separate NBN modem or NTD adds another five to ten watts. Even a busy household setup with a mesh node or two rarely exceeds 40 watts of continuous Wi‑Fi draw.
What catches people out is the NBN delivery type. Households on NBN HFC and NBN FTTP have a powered NTD inside the house that fails the moment the mains power goes out. Households on NBN fixed wireless rely on a tower that, in many regional areas, has its own backup battery, but only for a few hours. If the outage drags on past the tower’s battery window, even a perfectly powered router at home will sit there with no upstream connection.
Knowing your own NBN type is therefore step one. If you are on HFC or FTTP, a portable power station will keep your home internet alive as long as the network itself is running. If you are on fixed wireless in a regional area, you can power the inside of the house, but you cannot do anything about the tower. Many of our regional customers solve this by keeping a 4G or 5G mobile broadband backup running off the same battery.
For most households, the Wi‑Fi load is the easiest line item on the budget. On the DJI Power 1000 V2, a router-plus-modem combination running flat out for a week of evenings barely makes a dent in the battery.
Running a CPAP Overnight on Battery Backup
This is the section we get the most direct questions about, and it deserves the most honest answer.
A ResMed AirSense 11, which is the most prescribed CPAP in Australia, draws around 30 watts on standard settings with the humidifier off. Switch the humidifier on, and it climbs to between 50 and 65 watts depending on the heat setting, the ambient temperature in the bedroom, and the prescribed pressure.
Two things matter for safe overnight backup. The first is the inverter type. CPAP devices are designed for clean mains power, and the pure sine wave output of the DJI Power 1000 V2 is what manufacturers expect. Cheap modified sine wave inverters can cause an audible buzz, a higher motor temperature, and, over time, more wear on the device. The second is overnight runtime, which depends almost entirely on whether the humidifier stays on.
Running an AirSense 11 with the humidifier off, the DJI Power 1000 V2 will hold for somewhere in the region of 25 to 28 hours, which is three full overnights on a single charge. With the humidifier on, that drops to around 14 to 17 hours, which is one full night with a comfortable buffer or two shorter nights.
A practical answer most CPAP users land on is to keep the humidifier off when running on battery, and to start the night with the unit fully charged. We strongly recommend checking with your CPAP provider before changing humidifier settings, especially during the colder months. This is general guidance, not medical advice.
DJI Power 2000 Portable Power Station
Running All Three at Once
The realistic worst case is the fridge, the router, and the CPAP all running together for a full night.
Add it up: 40 watts average for the fridge, around 15 watts for router and modem, around 35 watts for the CPAP with humidifier off, and you have a household drawing roughly 90 watts continuously. Against 870 usable watt hours, that gives you around nine and a half hours of combined runtime, which is enough to bridge a typical overnight blackout from before bedtime to well after first light.
For a longer outage, recharging is where the conversation shifts.
Recharging During a Multi-Day Blackout
This is where the choice of LFP chemistry stops being a marketing line and starts being practical.
The DJI Power 1000 V2 accepts a solar input of up to 600 watts. Paired with a 200-watt panel in Australian sun, you can expect to return roughly 1.1 to 1.3 kilowatt hours into the battery on a good day, which is more than the unit’s own usable capacity. Two 200-watt panels, which most caravan owners already have, can effectively keep the unit topped up indefinitely as long as the sun cooperates.
The second option, often overlooked, is the car. A vehicle’s 12-volt outlet feeds slowly but reliably, and on a long outage, even an hour or two of idling the car can put a meaningful charge back into the battery. The DJI Power 1000 V2 also supports EV charging station inputs, which we mention mostly because customers ask, but which is genuinely useful if your blackout coincides with a planned outage and a friend across town still has power.
Power Station, Petrol Generator, Or Both?
It is a fair question, and the honest answer is that they solve different problems.
A petrol inverter generator gives you unlimited runtime as long as you have fuel, and the output to run heavier loads like a water pump or a power tool. The trade-offs are noise, fumes, indoor safety, fuel storage, and the fact that you have to remember to start it. None of those are dealbreakers, but they are real.
A portable power station gives you silent, indoor-safe, instant-on backup with no fumes and no fuel. It will not run a 2.4-kilowatt induction cooktop or an air conditioning unit, but it will absolutely run a fridge, the internet, a CPAP, a couple of phone chargers, and a handful of LED lights for the duration of any normal Australian blackout.
For most households, the LFP power station, like the DJI Power 1000 Mini Portable Power Station, is the better fit. If you live somewhere genuinely off-grid or rely on equipment a battery cannot handle, the generator earns its place. Plenty of our customers, especially in regional NSW and Queensland, run both.
DJI Power 1000 V2 Portable Power Station
Choosing the Right Size for Your Household
If you only need to keep the Wi‑Fi and a couple of phones running, a 500-watt-hour unit from the Gentrax range will do the job comfortably and save you money.
If you need Wi‑Fi, phones, and a CPAP through a full night, you are at the 1000-watt-hour threshold. The DJI Power 1000 V2 or the DJI Power 1000 is the sensible minimum, and the one we recommend to most households in this category.
If you also want to keep a 400-litre fridge alive through a 24-hour blackout, the DJI Power 1000 V2 paired with a 200-watt solar panel is the household-scale answer that most of our Australian customers settle on. It is silent, safe indoors, ready in seconds, and quietly capable of handling the three loads that actually matter when the lights go out.
Storm season starts in October. Bushfire season overlaps. Most of the equipment gets ordered in the week of the first big event, when shipping is slowest. Buying ahead is the unglamorous part of being ready, but it is the part that actually works.
