Okay, obviously I have power back now that I'm posting this, but I just wanted to share with everyone what I did in the case of a power outage of un-known duration.
Okay, so yesterday morning I woke up at 8am and the power was out! I live in Detroit, so the temperature was a balmy 30 degrees Fahrenheit. I found out from a neighbor that the power left at about 5am. So it had already been 3 hours. My main concerns were my display tank, which is a 29 gallon reef and my 10 gallon quarantine. Both of them I keep at 80 degrees. at 8am the room temp was 69 degrees, which wasn't too bad, and the water temperature was 78 degrees.
On both tanks I had covers. The display has a partial glass covering, and I put a piece of scrap acrylic over the water and I put about 3 large towels over the top (the acrylic so the towels wouldn't soak up water). Then I taped a layer of large-cell bubble wrap around the tank to further insulate it. I read somewhere that the water oxygen level decreases rapidly, so to counter this I went to petsmart and bought a penn-plax battery backup air pump. I hooked up one of those to my display tank.
Now by 10am the room temp had dropped to 63 degrees and the water temp to 76 degrees. I decided I needed to start a rotation of hot water bags (the gas hot water heater still worked). I used the hottest water the tap could produce and filled a 1 gallon bag about 1/2 way. Replacing the hot water bags every 2 hours I was able to maintain a water temperature of 77 degrees in both tanks (it seems the heat loss was actually similar with both the 29 gallon and the 10 gallon).
In conclusion, our power outage lasted about 16 hours, and doing this I lost no livestock and everything was okay. I have, however, gained the desire to set up an emergency backup procedure. The scary thing is that we were scheduled to leave for vacation that morning, and had the power outage waited just a few more hours I would probably have lost everything. Also, It would suck to have to do this for days on end if the power went out for say, a week. My FW tank did drop to 63 degrees, but they are lake fish so I normally keep the temp about 70.
What I would like input on is this: What are your emergency power plans?
I have thought about setting up a power inverter, but I don't know how feasible this would be with high-draw heaters and/or lights. If someone knows of a good setup, please post it!