Residential resilience
Critical home loads: a practical starting list
How to rank lighting, refrigeration, communications, and medical devices before you size a battery.
Most home backup disappointments start with an unspoken list. Someone imagined the whole house, while the battery was sized for a fridge and a few lamps. Write the list first.
A useful first pass is lighting in occupied rooms, refrigeration, communications (router and phone charging), and any medical device you actually use at home. Entertainment systems, laundry, and whole-house air conditioning are later options, not silent defaults.
Duration matters as much as watts. A two-hour evening interruption is a different design from a night-long event. The home resilience calculator can explore ranges for Iran’s Full pack; it will not invent a guarantee.
Assumptions to keep visible: which circuits are in, which are out, and whether charging an EV is allowed to compete with food and light. Limitations: this article is educational planning, not a wiring design.
When you are ready, a feasibility study turns the list into a brief a designer can use. Related reading: evening household rituals, and the backup-hours FAQ.