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Larry Caldwell

In article . com,
(thetiler) says...

We went without power for 15 days after Hurricane Charlie
tore our place apart. I ran a 10 hp coleman and could only
get 5 hours out of 5 gallons of gas, so we ran it 5 hours and
roughed it until the next evening. If you plan on getting gas
out of your vehicles, invest in a good quality siphon pump.
I bought a cheap $10 one and it leaked badly.

It's fairly easy to store more gas than that. I store about 20 gallons,
and once every month or so I pour 5 gallons into the pickup gas tank and
take the can into town to refill with fresh gas. The gas is stored in
the garden shed, away from the house.

I assume you wanted the generator running all the time to run the AC.
If you shut the generator down after an hour, you can easily go for 2-3
hours before the heat builds up inside the house. At my house, power
outages are a winter phenomenon, and the wood stove means electricity is
not necessary for heat or cooking. It takes about an hour to heat a
tank of water and take showers, and the refrigerator and freezer can run
at the same time. Aladdin lamps, oil lamps and candles provide plenty
of light, with the addition of a fluorescent light for reading and
flashlights for moving around. 12 volt TV sets are cheap and common, 12
volt radios are even less expensive.

For long term power, like running a computer or TV set, the little 1200
watt 2-cycle generators will run about 4.5 hours on a gallon of gas, and
they don't make as much noise as the big sets. 1200 watts is plenty to
run most furnaces with 1/8 hp blower motors. Some people buy a GM
alternator, hook it to a couple deep cycle batteries and an inverter,
power it up with an old 3.5 hp lawnmower motor, and have silent power
for low power applications late into the night.

The first mistake people make is buying huge generators. You don't have
to be the power company. The second mistake people make is trying to
run the generator continuously. Four hours of power a day should be
plenty, unless you have to run a furnace to keep from freezing to death.
If the weather is too hot for you, go sit in the bathtub and read a
book. Running AC off of a generator is not practical. It takes too
much power, which, as you discovered, translates to too much fuel.

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