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re: I See the Light
Something to remember about generators is, if you were running your whole house on one, the monthly bill to operate it would be in the thousands. They are fuel eating critters and fuel, by design of agenda driven P'sOS, aren't cheap and will get worse.
One fellow I talked to said he tried the fully off grid thing with his big generator and it cost him nearly four k a month. That was about fifteen years ago.
For that reason, it might be a good idea to limit emergency generator size and plan on having to do a bit more footwork.
The monkey wrench in this would be heat on a, for example 20 below day, if yours is electric. I was fortunate, I had both wood and gas heat (AND HOTWATER), so was unaffected by the grid crash on those accounts.
I lucked out and scored an 8 gauge, 100' cable from a garage sale (guy did a lot of welding), so can run the generator well away from the house and move the cable anywhere I like.
During a two week power outage, we kept the fridge and freezer charged. We had hot coffee. The Net was unaffected, so we were able to access it too (it, literally, was business as usual for customer emails, info shopping and so on). Too, at the time, I had a few thousand videos (I promised myself I could buy a video for each pack of smokes I didn't buy), so the kids were able to amuse themselves with a lot of movie and series choices.
This was all off a little 2.5 k Honda.
I will say, if I had it to do over, I'd bump that 2.5 to a 3, so it could run my airless, HVLP and more power hungry saws. Meanwhile, the Honda started in a couple pulls, after sitting several years.
One fellow I talked to said he tried the fully off grid thing with his big generator and it cost him nearly four k a month. That was about fifteen years ago.
For that reason, it might be a good idea to limit emergency generator size and plan on having to do a bit more footwork.
The monkey wrench in this would be heat on a, for example 20 below day, if yours is electric. I was fortunate, I had both wood and gas heat (AND HOTWATER), so was unaffected by the grid crash on those accounts.
I lucked out and scored an 8 gauge, 100' cable from a garage sale (guy did a lot of welding), so can run the generator well away from the house and move the cable anywhere I like.
During a two week power outage, we kept the fridge and freezer charged. We had hot coffee. The Net was unaffected, so we were able to access it too (it, literally, was business as usual for customer emails, info shopping and so on). Too, at the time, I had a few thousand videos (I promised myself I could buy a video for each pack of smokes I didn't buy), so the kids were able to amuse themselves with a lot of movie and series choices.
This was all off a little 2.5 k Honda.
I will say, if I had it to do over, I'd bump that 2.5 to a 3, so it could run my airless, HVLP and more power hungry saws. Meanwhile, the Honda started in a couple pulls, after sitting several years.
