About the site
Backup-power decisions deserve visible assumptions.
CPAP Backup Battery exists because most advice about powering a CPAP machine through an outage or a trip falls into one of two traps. It either quotes an off-the-shelf average — "a CPAP uses about 40 watts" — that may be double or half of what your machine actually draws, or it pushes a specific product without ever showing the math that justifies it. Neither helps you when the power goes out at 2 a.m. and your therapy depends on a battery you sized from a guess.
This site takes the opposite approach. Every runtime estimate is built from published manufacturer data, and every assumption behind it — capacity, load, conversion losses, reserve margin, humidifier settings — is stated where you can see it and disagree with it. If a number can't be traced to a source, it doesn't get published. That standard is written down in the editorial policy, and it applies to every guide and every tool here.
What you'll find here
The core of the site is a set of free planning tools that run entirely in your browser: a runtime calculator that estimates how long a given battery will run your machine, a multi-night planner for longer trips, a power-consumption reference covering machine draw at different pressure settings, and a printable emergency go-bag checklist, among others. Around those tools sit guides for the situations CPAP users actually plan for — home outages, air travel, camping, cruises, RV life — written to distinguish what a manufacturer states from what is calculated and what is simply unknown.
Who runs it
Max, the founder and editor, is a CPAP user himself — he sleeps on a ResMed AirSense 11 with a full face mask, every night. That matters more than any credential could: the outage scenarios these guides plan for are ones he has a personal stake in, and the site is, at bottom, the planning resource he wanted for his own bedside. He also brings more than twenty years in IT and operations, where capacity planning and power budgeting are part of the day job — sizing loads, planning headroom, and keeping equipment running around the clock. That combination is why this site treats a battery purchase as an engineering estimate rather than a shopping impulse: read the spec sheets, cross-reference the numbers, state the assumptions, and show the work.
That experience supports electrical planning and source review — nothing more. Max is not a doctor, a respiratory therapist, or a licensed electrician, and the site never presents him as one. Being a nightly user informs which questions get asked; the answers still come from manufacturer documentation and transparent arithmetic, which is exactly what most backup-power decisions need and rarely get.
What this site will not do
It will not give medical advice or suggest changing prescribed therapy settings. It will not claim something was tested or measured unless evidence of the test actually exists. It will not accept paid placements or let a commission decide a ranking — the site earns money through clearly disclosed affiliate links, explained in the affiliate disclosure, and a product that pays a commission can still be excluded for weak documentation or poor compatibility. When an error is found, it gets corrected on the page where it appeared.
Always follow your CPAP manufacturer's instructions. Ask your care team about therapy or health decisions, especially when backup power could affect treatment continuity.