[mike31154]

I have two of the battery powered air pumps that sense power is off in my 77. An inexpensive, but effective way to get you through a shorter outage. It's a good idea to have a look at the internals of these battery powered pumps though, I remember reading about one frying up due to a short circuit. While it is powered by a couple of batteries, there is also 120 volts in there for the small sensing relay which switches the pump on when AC power is lost. Mine are ok, but the build quality/soldering under the cover where the relay is can vary. To be expected from an inexpensive item like this.

Another alternative is to simply have a deep cycle 12 volt battery on hand & an inverter. I have an old car battery outside with a small solar panel keeping it charged up. An inverter hooked up to this could keep minimum lighting & a few air pumps/powerheads going for quite a while. In fact, if you have VorTech powerheads, with a small DC adapter you could hook the 12 volt battery directly to the backup power pin on the controller. Heater is another matter, they draw a lot of juice. I'm a bit hesitant to run a car in a garage to be able to use that battery. Last time I experienced an outage of more than 5 hours, I removed the battery from my truck (it's a diesel & has 2). Of course you'd need to re install it & run the vehicle to charge it before it's down too far. Seems we're fortunate here in the interior of BC, very few outages that last any amount of time. In Vernon we're only a few hours away from Revelstoke & the huge dam/power generating station there.