How reliable is the power over there? I get 2 or 3 power cuts/brown outs a year.
It depends on the area. Sometimes on the street. The street my folks' house is on has historically been one of the worst for power outages. Like I said, there's a blip almost every other day, and if there's a wide-spread outage, it's always one of the last to get turned back on.
There was one winter where an ice storm blacked out half the county (which is millions of people). In about two days most places were back on. In about 3 days the neighborhood was back on, and in about 6 days their street was back on. But no matter what, we can't seem to communicate these issues to the power company.