Well it's almost and summer, prime time for the electric going out. Is there anything I can do to keep at least a filter or air stone going if the power goes out? Is there anything battery operated???

You can get battery operated air pumps, they use them to keep fishing bait alive. As for the power goes off, the only thing you can do is rig yourself up to a generator. I actually think having battery back up on filtration system was would be a dam good idea. No doubt someone quite clever could make something that would work really well. Apart from that, I can't think of anything. This is the joy of a lot of canister filters and sump filters. Least if the power goes out, the media is always a submerged in water so will never dry out.

i've been doing some thinking about power outages as well lately and am working on an idea with a car battery and a power inverter. i'll post a thread about how to build it if it works like i hope

A friend of mine keeps a community tropical tank with an internal filter. Some builders were working on the house next door and they accidentally cut thro his power cable one weekend. The power was out for 12 hours. I warned him about the problem of all the good bacteria dieing in the filter and how he needs to test his water and that he may have to re-cycle his tank. Amazingly the bacteria survived the 12 hours without power. His test result for ammonia and nitrite were 0. I was always under the impression 4 or 5 hours was the max. So i woudnt worry about it too much if i was you

If your power is out for more than 4 hours could you test for ammonia and nitrite and post your results so we can get a better idea of how long filters can be out for before problems with the bacteria dieing off start to occur