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[MineralMan]

3. Yah, well, I think you're not going to win this one.

For a lot of people, any power outage is an emergency of sorts. One that lasts for, as you say, two to five hours, is something a lot of people don't want to tolerate, so they invest in automatic generators that come on when the power fails. Lots of people here in Minnesota have those, because a power failure in the winter means that a home's furnace stops, too, and when it's 10 below, that's a bad thing.

Now, I don't have an automatic generator that starts whenever the power fails, but if the power is out for an hour during the winter, I haul my generator out from the garage, plug it into a special outlet I installed on the outside of my house that switches the furnace over to generator power, and powers some lights. I fire it up and go back to bed or whatever, knowing that my furnace will keep working.

There are many other reasons people consider power outages to be an emergency. Some are very real emergencies, like folks who rely on an oxygen concentrator for health problems or many other things.

As for your inability to return to sleep, check at your local drugstore. They sell very comfortable earplugs that will correct that problem for you, while your neighbor with the automatic generator has power for whatever he or she thinks is very important. Sometimes solutions are simple.