"Frank" wrote in message
oups.com...

I did same. Generator and panel have been in place one year and used
3 times with longest outage 20 hours. It is my opinion that the power
infrastructure has been deteriorating over the years. We live in a
treed area and power company has been saving money on tree cutting.
Just about whole neighborhood has generators.

I'm served by a co-op. They are very good at trying to keep service on.
Note the *trying* becuase there service area is rural and a lot of it is
heavily forested. Even underground service can be taken out by landslides
or tree root balls lifting the cables when the tree blows over.

They mangle the trees near the main lines three times a year. They also
have a program in place to put problem causing lines underground. They rank
the sections of overhead line by the number of outages by customers affected
times hours of outage. Right now, of the 11 miles from the substation to my
house, 3 miles are underground. By the end of the year, it will be 5. 3
more miles are on the "list", but are ranked lower. The last 1 1/2 miles
probably will never be put underground due to the low number of customers in
my immediate vicinity.