Your Power Setup · stories
Short reads about the tech that keeps your day running: at home, on the road and when the power drops out.
23 stories
FeaturedBC Hydro’s restored outage list records power back at 07:51 PST on 11 November for a row covering 439 customers near Anacla Village and South Bamfield Road. The row has no ticket number. Its start time, customer count, Port Alberni label and overlapping addresses match the earlier active listing for incident 2864176.
BC Hydro recorded power restored at 23:52 Pacific on November 9 for an outage that affected 5,100 customers in parts of Surrey and Langley. The utility’s restored outage list attributes the interruption to a tree that fell across its wires.
BC Hydro listed 4,484 customers without electricity in parts of Mayne, Pender and Saturna islands in its 04:16 PST dashboard snapshot on 11 November. The utility showed a crew on site and the cause under investigation. It gave no estimate for when power would return.
BC Hydro lists a Qualicum Beach power outage as restored at 11:52 PST on 11 November. The restored entry matches an earlier outage that the utility said affected 1,774 customers after a tree came down across its wires. The restored entry has no ticket number; the match comes from the start time, road boundaries, customer count and cause.
BC Hydro listed 2,820 customers without electricity in part of Surrey, British Columbia, in its 05:16 PST dashboard snapshot on 11 November. The utility showed a crew on site and estimated restoration at 07:50 PST. The cause remained under investigation.
BC Hydro said on 11 November that most main power lines in and around Prince George were back in service after a series of storms. Crews were still working on smaller pockets of outages and sites with extensive damage. The utility said new outage reports were coming in as winds returned.
BC Hydro recorded power restored to four groups of customers around Tofino and Ucluelet between 17:27 and 17:37 Pacific on 9 November. The four entries match the areas, start times and customer counts of the outage the utility said affected 4,951 customers earlier that day.
The Town of Okotoks says FortisAlberta is responding to intermittent power outages across Okotoks, Alberta. Its notice dated 27 October 2026 says the initial outage was reported at approximately 2:22 p.m. The affected addresses, customer count and incident-specific restoration deadline remain unknown.
City Power says its Hursthill Service Delivery Centre currently has no reported medium voltage outages. The 17:01 SAST statement on 8 October shifts attention to outstanding low voltage service requests. It does not explicitly close the earlier cable fault affecting two load centres, so full restoration of that particular incident remains unconfirmed.
A major power cut affected thousands of homes and businesses across more than 30 London postcode areas on Monday, 5 October 2026. Station displays and lighting were also disrupted. Reports of power being restored followed later that day.
At IFA in September 2026, Jackery showed the Explorer 1000 Plus v2 and European sales started on 14 October 2026. The name sits very close to the existing Explorer 1000 v2, yet the two are built for different needs.
EcoFlow unveiled the RIVER 260 Gen4 and RIVER 520 Gen4 at IFA in Berlin on 4 September 2026, aimed at devices that draw under 100 W. That focus touches a problem many owners of small power stations notice: low loads often run out sooner than the label suggests.
Meshtastic lets small LoRa radios pass short text messages to each other without a mobile network or internet connection. On 21 September 2026 the project published a guide to measuring how much energy a solar-powered node really uses, and the answer starts with watt-hours rather than a single current reading.
Home Assistant 2026.9, released on 2 September 2026, reworked how the smart-home platform talks to devices over Modbus. For owners of some Fronius and Sofar solar inverters, that means more detail with less manual setup.
Anker's MagGo 2 Pro (model A110R) is a 10,000 mAh magnetic power bank with a built-in fan, shown on Anker's sites from September 2026. A fan sounds odd in something pocket-sized, but it targets the main weakness of fast wireless charging: heat.
BLUETTI unveiled the Pioneer 5000 E-Generator at IFA in Berlin on 4 September 2026, aimed at building sites, events and other mobile work. The term battery generator is catchy, but it hides an important difference: this machine stores energy rather than producing it.
No bunker, no shopping spree. Light, a charged phone and a way to stay informed: most of it is already somewhere in your home.
A power station next to the router sounds like the answer to a power outage. It helps, as long as you know which boxes need power and what happens outside your home.
A power bank fits in your jacket, a power station needs a handle. Which one you need depends less on the size of the battery than on the plug at the end of the cable.
The Mini fits in a backpack, which makes it tempting to just take it. Five minutes of power checking at home saves a lot of frustration at the campsite.
Friday afternoon, a field, no power points. How do you keep your laptop, lights and speaker going until Sunday without dragging half your house along?
You unfold the panel, the sun is out, and the display shows less than you hoped. Usually it is not the panel, but where and how it lies.
