Most homeowners think about the lights when they think about a power outage. But a summer outage affects a lot more than that. 

The AC stops running, which in a Wisconsin July means the house gets uncomfortable faster than most people expect. The sump pump goes offline, which matters most during the kind of heavy rain that tends to accompany the storms that knock out power in the first place. The refrigerator and freezer start warming, and food safety becomes a real consideration after a few hours. And for the growing number of households with someone working from home, the Wi-Fi dropping and the home office going dark means the workday doesn’t pause just because the power did. 

None of these are catastrophic on their own. But they arrive all at once, and managing several of them simultaneously is a different situation than dealing with any one of them separately.