Keeping Your Home Online Through Storm Season

Four o’clock in July: the sky goes dark, the lights blink, and the Wi-Fi drops. The power is back a second later, but the internet takes five minutes to return, the doorbell camera is offline, and someone’s video call has ended.

Storms are part of life in Northeast Florida, from the afternoon thunderstorms most of the summer to the occasional hurricane. You can’t stop the power from blinking, but you can keep the house online through most of it and protect the equipment when it matters. Here’s how I set homes up for storm season.

Why the internet goes down when the power blinks

Your internet depends on a short chain of equipment: the modem (or the fiber box on the wall), the router, sometimes a network switch, and the access points or mesh units around the house. Every one of them needs power. When the power blinks for even a second, they all restart, and a full restart can take several minutes.

There’s a second part you don’t control: your provider’s equipment in the neighborhood also needs power. In a long outage, your internet may go down even if everything in your house is on backup power. That’s where a backup connection comes in (more below).

1. Put the network on a battery backup

A battery backup, also called a UPS (uninterruptible power supply), sits between the wall and your equipment. When the power drops, it switches to its battery instantly, so nothing restarts.

• Plug in the whole chain: the modem or fiber box, the router, and any switch that powers access points or cameras. Leave out things that don’t need it, like printers.
• Size it by what’s plugged in. Modems and routers draw little power compared to a TV or a computer, so a modest unit goes a long way. Add up the watts on the equipment’s labels and check the UPS’s runtime chart.
• Look for one with surge protection and a replaceable battery. UPS batteries wear out after a few years. Most units beep or show a warning when it’s time.
• Keep it somewhere cool. Heat shortens battery life, so a hot garage is a poor spot. If your equipment lives in the garage, that’s worth rethinking anyway.

For the everyday blink, this is the single most useful thing you can do. The Wi-Fi simply stays up.

2. Have a backup way online

When the outage is long, or the provider’s network is down, you need a second path to the internet.

• Your phone’s hotspot is the simplest backup. It’s fine for a laptop or two, as long as your plan includes hotspot data.
• A router with cellular failover switches to a cellular connection automatically when the main line goes down, and back again when it returns. The whole house stays online without anyone changing a setting. It needs a cellular data plan, and it works best where the cell signal is good.
• A second wired provider (for example, cable plus fiber) is the most robust option where both are available, but it’s a second monthly bill.

Whichever you choose, test it before the season starts: unplug the main connection and make sure the backup actually takes over.

3. Protect equipment from surges and lightning

Florida gets more lightning than most of the country, and power surges are hard on electronics, especially when the power comes back on after an outage.

• Plug electronics into surge protectors, not plain power strips. The UPS covers the network gear; the TV, computers and game consoles need their own.
• Remember the other wires. Surges can also travel in on the coax cable or the phone line. Some surge protectors have coax and network jacks for this.
• When lightning is close, unplug what you can. No surge protector stops a direct or very close strike. If a storm is right overhead, unplugging the computer and the TV is the only sure protection.
• Ask an electrician about a whole-home surge protector at the electrical panel. It works together with the plug-in kind and is installed by a licensed electrician.