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I recommend you talk to your attorney if an outage could damage your equipment, or for any legal advice. But from a practical and strategic perspective, if you spread the issue to a community level, asking the company to pay for your APC's will set a precedent in the community that they won't want to set. The position you'll likely end up in is that you will only get a remedy when everyone else in the community gets a remedy, but only after strenuous opposition by the utility. In other words, once the whole community is involved, they can't make 1 person go away and it's worth their while to deploy considerable resources to fight the issue.
This is not uncommon. My borough wanted to save money on electricity for the water company. Peco sent 11 reps to the meeting to basically tell them how to conserve. The alternative was having dedicated lines installed from another distribution company through a rail easement that ran by the water company. The cost was $400k to run the power ..but the outside utility rebated $50k/year at their prevailing rate. No problem. It made dollars and "sense".
The oddity was that the outsourced utility ..due to legislation of the time had to buy grid power if it was below their avoided costs ..and the utility that they were purchasing it from was PECO.
In essence the borough had to pay $400k to buy cheaper electricity from PECO ..instead of them allowing the same lost revenue without the hassle. Peco lost either way, but wanted to retain the road block by not setting precedence.
Further deregulation (if you can sell it, you can produce it) neutralized the savings a bit ..but still resulted in discounts.
It's still cheaper for a consumer to produce their own "on demand" power. After the capital outlay, you can beat the utility by about a nickle. Interruptable service is at about a 60% discount.
