You know the moment.

The notice comes through about a PSPS. Or the wind picks up in the hills and the lights flicker twice. Then the house goes quiet.

No hum from the fridge. No furnace fan. If you’re on a well, no water either, which means no shower, no flushing, no filling the dog bowl. Somebody in the house is asking about the CPAP. You’re doing the math on how long the freezer holds, and whether the elk from last fall is going to make it.

Outside, the neighbor’s generator is already droning, and it will be droning at 2 a.m. too. If it’s fire season, the air is thick with smoke, so the windows stay shut and the house gets hot. You think about driving to Medford for ice and remember that the gas stations might be dark as well.

And you have no idea if this lasts three hours or three days. Pacific Power can’t tell you either.

If you’ve lived through that in the Rogue Valley, you already know the truth: the grid is not getting more reliable, and you are depending on a system you don’t control.

Here’s the part nobody explained to you.

It doesn’t have to go like that. A home battery in your garage or on the side of your house watches the grid around the clock. The instant Pacific Power drops, it switches your home over to stored power in a fraction of a second. Faster than you can notice. The fridge keeps humming. The well pump keeps pumping. The furnace fan keeps moving heat. The CPAP never blinks.

No cord to pull. No fuel to store. No engine outside your bedroom window. Just a quiet house that stays on while the neighborhood goes dark.

That’s what this page is about: what a battery actually does, what it takes to get one sized correctly for your home, and what it really costs in 2026 with no sales games.

“Don’t I need solar panels for that?”

No. This is the single most common misunderstanding we clear up, and it stops a lot of people from ever calling.

A modern home battery does not care where its electricity comes from. It charges from the grid, the same power that runs your dishwasher, and holds that charge until you need it. When the grid fails, a transfer switch disconnects your house from the utility and runs it off the battery. That’s it.

So you don’t need a roof project, a permit for panels, or a five-figure solar system to have real backup power. You can start with the battery alone. And if you ever decide to add solar later, the systems we install are built to accept it, which is when your battery starts recharging itself during a long outage.

“Wouldn’t a generator be cheaper?”

Sometimes, and we’ll tell you if it is. We install batteries, so you know where we’re coming from, but here’s the honest comparison.

A standby generator wins on one thing: runtime. As long as you can keep feeding it fuel, it runs. If you regularly face week-long outages and you’re comfortable storing and handling fuel, it can make sense.

Everything else favors the battery. A generator is loud, all night, for you and your neighbors. It produces exhaust and carbon monoxide, so it lives outside, and during smoke season you’re adding fumes to air that’s already hard to breathe. It needs oil changes, test runs, and stabilized fuel. Most portable units need you home to start them. And during a wide PSPS shutoff, the stations where you’d refuel may be dark too.

A battery switches over by itself, whether you’re home or not. It’s silent. It’s safe inside an enclosed garage. There’s nothing to maintain and nothing to refuel. For the outages we actually get here, which mostly last hours rather than days, a properly sized battery covers the large majority with none of the hassle. Some of our customers keep a small generator as a backstop and let the battery handle everything else. We’ll help you decide which setup fits your home.

“Will it really run my well pump? My whole house?”

This is where sizing matters, and it’s why we don’t quote over the phone.

A single modern battery, like a FranklinWH aPower 2 (15 kWh) or a Tesla Powerwall 3 (13.5 kWh), comfortably runs a home’s essentials: refrigerator, freezer, lights, internet, a gas furnace blower, and a well pump. On essentials alone, one battery typically carries a home for the better part of a day.

The catch with well pumps is surge. A ½ HP pump that runs at about 1,000 watts can spike to 2,000 or 3,000 watts the instant it starts. A battery that can’t handle that surge trips, no matter how much energy it stores. That’s why we look at surge ratings first for rural properties. The aPower 2’s 15 kW surge and the Powerwall 3’s 11.5 kW continuous output both handle a well pump with room to spare.

Whole-home backup, including central air or an electric heat pump, usually means two or three batteries with smart load management. Most families land somewhere between essentials and whole-home. We’ll walk your panel and add up what you actually need, so you buy the right size instead of guessing.

“What does it cost? I heard the tax credit is gone.”

You heard right, and we’d rather you hear it from us. The 30 percent federal residential credit ended for systems placed in service after December 31, 2025. Anyone still quoting it for a 2026 install is either behind or not being straight with you.

Here’s the real picture. A single professionally installed battery generally runs between about $12,000 and $17,000 depending on the brand, capacity, and your panel. Two things bring that down or make it work harder for you:

First, Pacific Power’s Wattsmart Battery Program pays you to enroll a qualifying battery. It offers an upfront incentive plus ongoing bill credits, and you do not need solar to participate. You need to be on a Time-of-Use rate, which also lets the battery charge overnight at roughly 10 cents per kWh and carry you through the 28-cent peak window every evening. Most homeowners have never heard of this program. We’ll tell you exactly what it would pay for your system.

Second, we keep our overhead low. We’re a lean local company, not a national sales operation. There are no commissioned closers, no marketing budget baked into your price, and no dealer fee quietly rolled into a financing offer. You get a written, itemized quote you can read at your kitchen table and compare against anyone.

“Are lithium batteries safe in my garage?”

Yes, when the chemistry, the equipment, and the installation are all done right. The batteries we install use lithium iron phosphate (LFP) chemistry, which is far more thermally stable than the older lithium types in laptops and phones. Each unit has a built-in management system that monitors every cell for temperature and voltage. The systems are certified to the UL 9540 safety standard, and we install them to the national fire code for energy storage, including proper clearances and placement. As licensed electricians, that part is our job. A quality battery installed correctly is a very safe piece of equipment.

“Solar companies keep going out of business. Will you be here?”

That fear is earned. More than 100 solar companies have shut down or filed for bankruptcy in recent years, including some of the biggest names in the country, and they left Southern Oregon homeowners with equipment on the roof and nobody to call. We service a lot of those orphaned systems now.

We’re built the opposite way. We’re based in Talent, not a call center three states away. We’re licensed under Oregon CCB# 259590, NABCEP certified, BBB accredited, and held to Oregon’s HB 4029 consumer protection standards. We’re a certified installer for both FranklinWH and Tesla Powerwall. And we build every system as if we’ll be the ones standing behind it, because we will be. When you call in three years, a person here answers.

“I don’t want a sales pitch.”

Neither do we. Here’s how we work: we look at your home, we tell you what you actually need, and we put the number in writing. No same-day-only pricing. No pressure to sign at the table. If a generator or a hybrid setup is genuinely the better fit for you, we’ll say so. You keep the written plan either way.

Why Rogue Valley homeowners choose Concentric

• Local, and staying local. Based in Talent, serving Medford, Ashland, Phoenix, Jacksonville, Central Point, Eagle Point, Grants Pass, and the Applegate.

• Licensed and certified. Oregon CCB# 259590 · NABCEP Certified · BBB Accredited · Oregon HB 4029 consumer protections.

• Certified for the best equipment. FranklinWH and Tesla Powerwall certified installer.

• Straight with you. Every cost, every term, in plain language, in writing, before you commit.

• We stand behind systems, ours and others’. If a company left you stranded, we’ll take you on.