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ERCOT expects Texas power demand to break the all-time record every day from August 20 through 24, and about 20 minutes of prep can keep your Austin home's Wi-Fi, computers, and smart tech safe through the strain.
Here's what's coming. The Texas grid set its all-time demand record, 91,090 megawatts, on July 22 of this year. On August 18, Bloomberg reported that ERCOT's forecast now shows demand topping that record every day from Wednesday, August 20 through Sunday, August 24, peaking around 92,200 megawatts on Thursday. Here in Austin, that same stretch lines up with the hottest forecast days of 2026 so far, with feels-like temperatures near 110.
We install and repair home tech across Austin every week, and record-demand stretches like this one follow a pattern: the calls come in not because of the heat itself, but because of what the grid does under the heat. Voltage sags, half-second blinks, and the little surge that follows when power snaps back. Those events quietly kill more routers, desktops, and smart home hubs than any lightning storm.
The good news: protecting your gear costs less than replacing one router, and you can do most of it tonight.
A stressed grid almost never goes fully dark. ERCOT and Austin Energy have handled record demand well this summer. What a strained grid does produce, especially at the neighborhood level, is dirty power:
Heat stacks on top of all of it. Gear in garages, attic closets, and sun-facing media consoles is already running 20 to 30 degrees above its comfort zone this week, and a hot power supply is far more likely to fail during a voltage event than a cool one.
A basic uninterruptible power supply (UPS) in the $60 to $90 range will run a modem and router for 30 to 90 minutes. That does three things at once: your internet stays up through blinks and short outages (fiber and cable often keep working when your block loses power), your gear is isolated from sags and surges, and your smart home doesn't have to reconnect forty devices every time the lights flicker.
If you work from home, this is the single best money you can spend this week. Put the modem, router, and any mesh base unit on it. Skip the laser printer, which will drain it instantly.
Most power strips in Austin homes are just extension cords with extra outlets. For this week, check two things:
Desktops, TVs, game consoles, and anything with a hard drive should be on real surge protection before Wednesday. For whole-home protection, a panel-mounted surge protective device installed by an electrician is the longer-term answer, and it's a reasonable project to schedule for September.
Power events are the number one cause of the dead external drives that land on our bench. If your family photos or business files live on one drive plugged into the wall, this is the week to fix that. The 3-2-1 rule is the standard for a reason: three copies, two different types of storage, one of them offsite or in the cloud.
At minimum, turn on cloud backup for the machines that matter and let them sync overnight while rates and temperatures are low. If you want it set up properly, with versioning and a tested restore, our data backup and recovery service does exactly this.
Walk the house once tonight and look for electronics in hot spots:
Move what you can into conditioned space, give the rest a few inches of breathing room, and vacuum the dust off any vents you find. Dust plus 110-degree feels-like weather is how fans fail.
If ERCOT issues a conservation appeal this week, it will target the 3 to 9 p.m. window. Two easy wins: pre-cool the house in the early afternoon and let the thermostat drift a couple of degrees during the peak, and shift laundry, dishwashing, and EV charging to after 9 p.m. Austin Energy's Power Partner thermostat program will even pay you bill credits for letting them nudge the thermostat on the worst days.
Make sure cameras, video doorbells, and hubs are on the UPS from Step 1, and confirm your smart locks have fresh batteries. A smart home with dead connectivity fails in annoying ways, and most of them trace back to the network, not the gadgets.
The post-blink recovery order matters: unplug the modem and router for a full minute, power the modem first, wait for its lights to settle, then the router, then everything else. Half the "internet is down" calls we get after an outage are devices that raced each other back online.
If a computer, drive, or router genuinely didn't survive the week, don't keep power-cycling it, especially a drive with data on it. That's a job for device troubleshooting and repair while the data is still recoverable.
Record demand weeks are becoming a regular feature of Austin summers. An hour of prep now means the grid's worst week is a non-event at your house. If you'd rather have it done for you, same day and on site, book a visit and we'll handle the whole checklist.
