Value for money is not my argument.

I’m just saying loads of people for whom it would provide benefit don’t have $2k spare money to invest.

To put a different spin on it: the price point for the cheapest consumer unit should be way lower than that… unless you force landlords to install it at their own cost (as a landlord myself: a $2k legally mandated expense would not be happy fun times, but I could and would suck it up).

And even then, you’re still thinking in terms of the richest economies, and first quartile incomes in developing nations would struggle with $25 backup batteries let alone $2000.

One belief of mine which is shifting from all the replies I’ve been getting, is that I’m increasingly surprised how bad everyone’s telling me that America’s fundamental infrastructure is.

I understand your point.

I don't think of the infrastructure here as _bad_, though.

We do have the occasional outage after a storm, as I described. But, even if the uptime were as low as 99%, which it is not, I would not want to pay the cost of making the grid significantly more resilient than it is.

My electricity uptime has never been as low as 99%. South coast UK for the first 18 years of my life, total downtime would’ve been at most half a day, in 30-60 minute fragments, ~99.992% uptime. Never once failed when I was back there for 7 months to help provide care for my mum. Likewise Sheffield for about a year, and that place had an annoying prepay electricity meter.

Rural Wales for 3.5 years? 30 minutes of downtime total, ~99.998% uptime. Similar total downtime in Cambridge, but I was there 8.5 years, so 99.9993% uptime. I don’t think it’s ever failed me here in Berlin.

That in particular is why I’m saying here that American infrastructure looks bad. It’s not the only way, TBH, but it is so in a new and relevant way I wasn’t previously expecting.

I don't doubt that electrical service in nearly all the UK has _much_ higher uptime than the service here in Connecticut.

I could be wrong, but I suspect that the infrastructure in the two places is built essentially the same way. I think the crucial difference is that Connecticut has so many more trees. Downed trees break the lines all over the state whenever a windstorm or a snowstorm comes through. (Come to think of it, most of the UK doesn't get snowstorms, either).

I'm just saying that never for a second would I consider trading any of those trees for additional uptime. Nor do I want to pay the utility providers whatever it would cost to bury all those lines in the ground where they'd be safer from storm damage. I'd rather have a week without power every couple of years.

I'd be curious to know if the story is different in rural or semirural Scandinavia.