TheOldFellow wrote:

United Utilities are going to do some work here next week and plan to
replace my mains with a generator for a day. Rather good of them I
thought, last time they just cut me off. My suspicion is that this
might last longer than expected, hence the generator.

The question is, though, do I keep my computers on (websites, mailserver
etc)? My suspicion is that the generator is likely to be much more
spiky and I don't trust surge protection after the recent thread.

Does anyone have any experience?

The electricity supply where I live has been poor for years. Last summer
the utility shipped in generators and replaced all of the line through
the surrounding villages. The supply from the generators used over a
three month period was actually cleaner than the normal supply (as
clocked up by the software on my UPS that counts spikes and brownouts).

The major headache is at startup and shutdown on the generator which
causes massive surges. No worse than having the power go down/startup
during a storm though.