About SunGrid Living
SunGrid Living is written and maintained by one person — Hilario Herrera, a Florida-based web developer — with a simple premise: hurricane backup power is a math problem, and most sites covering it do not show their math. This one does, everywhere.
Who runs this site
I'm a web developer living in South Florida, which means two things are true at once: I build the software that runs this site — the runtime calculator, theopen dataset, the Storm Score — and I sit through the same hurricane seasons as every reader, with the same gas lines, the same cone anxiety, and the same "will the fridge make it" arithmetic. The site exists because when I did that arithmetic for my own household, most of what I found online was either vague or wrong.
I am not an electrician, an engineer, or a meteorologist, and nothing here pretends otherwise. What I bring is the discipline of a developer: every number on this site traces to a source, runs through one published formula, and gets audited. In August 2026 I ran an adversarial audit of every numeric claim on the site against primary sources and corrected everything it caught — that is now the standard for new content.
How the research actually works
The full version lives on the methodology page — sources in priority order, the exact runtime formula, every derating assumption, and a changelog. The honest summary: we do not lab-test products. We build a verified spec corpus from manufacturer pages and certification databases, verify every listing by hand monthly, take safety guidance only from CPSC, CDC, USDA, FDA and the National Hurricane Center, and state plainly what we cannot know. Product images are labeled illustrative renders, not photographs of the units.
What this site will not do
- Claim hands-on testing that never happened
- Publish a product without at least one honest limitation
- Use badges or superlatives that cannot be derived from the data shown
- Let a manufacturer pay for placement, supply units, or preview content
- Give medical or tax advice — those sections are general information, flagged as such
How the site makes money
Affiliate commissions, primarily Amazon — disclosed on every page that carries a paid link (full disclosure). The commission is the same regardless of which product you pick, which is what keeps the cons lists honest. If you buy something through a link here, thank you; it is what funds the research time.
Corrections and contact
Found an error? [email protected]. Verified errors get fixed in place, and material corrections are noted on the affected page. I read everything; a spec correction from a reader is worth more to this site than a sale.
Elsewhere: my development work · Fizz & Frillz, my trending-products site · GitHub