When the power matters most: stair lifts, elevators and medical devices in an outage.

The March 24, 2026 windstorm knocked out power to more than 53,000 Vancouver Island homes, with gusts hitting 100 km/h. For most households it was an inconvenient evening. But think about the same evening in a home where someone relies on a stair lift to get to their bedroom, an elevator to leave the house, or an oxygen concentrator to sleep safely. The lights going out is not the problem. Being stranded on one floor of your own home is the problem.

More Victoria families are choosing to stay in the homes they love, the same Gordon Head and Oak Bay and Saanich houses they’ve lived in for decades, with the help of exactly this kind of equipment. So let’s talk about what actually happens to it when the grid drops, and what it takes to keep it running.

What happens to accessibility equipment in an outage

• Stair lifts. Almost all modern stair lifts run on onboard batteries, usually two 12-volt batteries driving a 24-volt motor, that trickle-charge from a wall outlet whenever the chair is parked at its charging station. That’s genuinely good design: the lift finishes its trip when the power cuts, and a fully charged unit typically has 10 to 20 trips in reserve. The catches: those batteries age (they’re usually replaced every 3 to 5 years, and a worn set holds far less), the reserve only shrinks as a multi-day outage wears on, and once it’s gone the lift is a chair bolted to your staircase until the grid returns. A home battery keeps the charging station live, so the trip count never runs down.
• Home elevators. Many residential elevators include a battery lowering feature: enough stored power to bring the cab down to the ground floor and open the door, once. Normal service does not resume until grid power does. If the elevator is how someone in your home reaches the kitchen or the front door, a multi-day outage confines them to whichever floor they happened to be on.
• Powered wheelchairs and mobility scooters. The chair itself carries its own battery, but it charges from the wall every night. In a short outage that’s fine. Across a multi-day event, every trip spends range that can’t be replaced, and the user has to start rationing their own mobility.
• CPAP machines, oxygen concentrators and home medical equipment. A CPAP typically draws only 30 to 90 watts, an oxygen concentrator a few hundred. These are small loads with outsized stakes: they’re needed precisely at night, when an outage is hardest to work around, and BC Hydro’s own advice for medically dependent customers is to have a backup power plan of your own.

The good news: these are small loads

Here’s the part that surprises people. The equipment that matters most draws the least. A stair lift’s charger sips a few watts around the clock. A CPAP running all night uses well under one kWh. An elevator motor draws real power, but only for the seconds it’s actually moving; a few floor-to-floor trips a day add up to a rounding error. Compare that with the loads we usually size backup around: a fridge at one to two kWh per day, a heat pump at ten or more in winter.

What that means in practice: a home battery sized for ordinary backup carries accessibility and medical equipment almost incidentally. A single battery that runs your fridge, lights and wifi for days will keep a stair lift charged for weeks. This isn’t a case where you need a bigger system because the need is critical; it’s a case where the critical need is the cheapest thing on the list.

Why a battery beats a generator here

The traditional answer to outage risk is a gas generator, and for some properties it’s still a reasonable tool. But for this specific job, keeping essential equipment running for a household where someone has limited mobility, it has real problems: someone has to wheel it out, fuel it, start it and run cords through a window, in exactly the storm conditions that caused the outage, and possibly exactly the household least able to do any of that. It can’t run overnight indoors (carbon monoxide), which is when the CPAP needs it.

A home battery has none of those steps. It switches over in a fraction of a second, automatically, whether you’re home or not, awake or not. The stair lift keeps charging, the concentrator keeps running, and often the first sign anything happened is the neighbours’ dark windows. If the battery is paired with solar, it recharges every day the sun comes up, which in a Victoria storm is usually the day after the front passes. Our outage resilience page shows how that handoff works, and both the Tesla Powerwall and the modular SigenStor systems we install do this automatically. (An EV with bi-directional charging can extend runtime further still; see our V2X explainer.)

Sizing it: an honest worked example

Take a realistic Victoria scenario: a two-storey home, one occupant uses a stair lift daily and a CPAP nightly. The outage backup list is the stair lift charger, the CPAP, the fridge, some lights, wifi and phone charging. That whole essentials package runs around 3 to 4 kWh per day, and the accessibility equipment is the smallest slice of it. A single home battery holds several days of that. Add solar and the runtime stops being measured in days at all: the battery refills faster than the essentials drain it.

You don’t have to take our word for the arithmetic. Our Backup Designer lets you build your own essentials list and see the runtime for different battery options. If you’d rather talk it through, that’s what the free assessment is for.

Rebates still apply

None of this requires a special medical-equipment program: it’s an ordinary solar-plus-battery install, which means BC Hydro’s standard rebates apply, up to $5,000 for eligible solar and up to $1,500 for eligible battery storage (our SigenStor qualifies; Tesla products are excluded from BC Hydro rebates). As a Home Performance Contractor Network member, we register and file the paperwork as part of the install. Full details in our rebate guide.

Worth doing before storm season

Island storm season runs roughly October through February, and the March 2026 windstorm was a reminder that big outages don’t always wait for the calendar. A backup system installed this fall is designed, permitted and switched on before the first big front arrives. If someone in your home, or in a parent’s home, depends on equipment that stops when the grid does, this is the season to solve it calmly rather than during the next outage.