How often does the power go out in Massachusetts?
How often the power goes out depends mostly on where your house sits on the grid. Homes on long overhead lines through wooded areas lose power far more often than homes on underground service in a town center.
Massachusetts is served by investor-owned utilities, mainly Eversource and National Grid, plus municipal light plants in a number of towns. Each publishes its own outage map, and the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) tracks outages statewide during major storms. Those maps are the best place to see what is happening in your town right now.
For a national baseline, RoseWater cites EIA figures showing that U.S. customers averaged a little over 7 hours without power in 2021. That number only counts full outages. The sags, surges and blinks between outages happen much more often, and they are what slowly wear down the equipment in a modern home.
| Cause | What happens | What it does to the house |
|---|---|---|
| Nor’easters | High wind and heavy snow bring trees and limbs onto lines | Blinks, then outages that can last days in hard-hit areas |
| Heavy wet snow and ice | Weight on branches and wires | Widespread tree damage and long restoration |
| Summer thunderstorms | Wind, falling limbs and lightning | Surges, blinks and short outages |
| Tropical storm remnants | Sustained wind and saturated ground that topples trees | Regional outages, often worst near the coast |
| Heat waves | High demand on the grid | Low voltage and brownouts |
| Everyday switching | Utility equipment and large motors cycling | Small sags and spikes many times a day |
How long do outages last after a nor’easter?
Outages after a nor’easter last anywhere from minutes to several days, depending on how much damage the storm leaves. The number of downed trees is usually what decides it.
Utilities restore power in a set order. They repair transmission lines and substations first, then the main lines that serve the most customers, then side streets, and finally individual service drops to single houses. A home at the end of a long rural line, or one whose service wire was torn off the house, is often among the last. If your service drop is damaged, an electrician may have to repair the connection on your side before the utility can reconnect you.
For houses where several days without heat, water or refrigeration is unacceptable, battery backup alone is not the full answer. The usual plan is an always-online battery system with a standby generator behind it. Our generator and battery guide explains how that works.
Why do the lights flicker before an outage?
The lights often flicker before an outage because the utility’s equipment is trying to clear a fault on the line. A branch touching a wire is the classic case.
Devices called reclosers open the circuit when they sense a fault, wait a moment, then close it again in case the problem has cleared. They usually try a few times. Each try is a blink in your house. If the branch burns off or falls away, the power stays on. If it doesn’t, the recloser locks the line out and the outage begins.
Those blinks are hard on equipment. Each one can reset lighting control, reboot the network and restart every touchscreen in the house. A standby generator does nothing for them, because the outage has not started yet. An always-online system rides through every one.
What should I do to protect electronics in an outage?
Without a whole-home system, the best protection is to switch off sensitive equipment when the power fails and bring it back in stages once the power is steady. That works if someone is home and awake.
- Switch off or unplug AV equipment, computers and network gear.
- Leave one light on so you know when power returns.
- Wait a few minutes after power returns before turning things back on.
- Restart the network first, then control systems, then everything else.
- Never run a portable generator indoors or in an attached garage.
The trouble is that storms rarely happen at a convenient time, and second homes are empty when they hit. A RoseWater HUB keeps the protected circuits running through the blinks, the outage and the return, with nothing to switch off and nothing to reset.
What happens to my home when the power comes back on?
When the power comes back on, everything in the house tries to start at once. That moment is one of the roughest in the whole outage.
Heat pumps, compressors, well pumps and air handlers all start together, and so do the same loads in every house on the street. The voltage can swing while the grid settles, and the utility may switch circuits a few more times as crews bring sections back. Equipment that lost power hard may come back with corrupted settings or not at all. If the house is on a generator, the transfer switch moves it back to the grid, which is one more interruption.
What RoseWater does differently
A RoseWater HUB is always online, so the circuits it serves never see any of this. Power enters the HUB, is converted and rebuilt as a clean 120 V, 60 Hz supply, and leaves for the house. When the grid blinks or fails, batteries that are already part of the path carry the load with zero transfer time. When the grid returns, the HUB absorbs the disturbance and recharges its batteries. Surge and lightning protection is rated for up to 40 strikes of 140,000 V.
The HUB20 covers a 100 A service, the HUB40 a 200 A service, and 3-Phase systems cover 208 V three-phase homes. All of them work with a generator for long storms.
Planning for the next storm
The best time to plan is before storm season. Our Power Plan tool helps you decide what has to stay on. We serve homes across Greater Boston, MetroWest, the North Shore and the South Shore from our shop in Norwood, as well as Cape Cod and the Islands, coastal Rhode Island and southern New Hampshire. We design the system and coordinate the work with your licensed electrician and RoseWater’s commissioning team. Get in touch to start.
