Glad to hear someone was successful. My experience
has been trying to run one furnace, and no lights. With
a 1200 watt ETQ generator (two stroke, junker) it was
nice to be able to run a furnace. One time I ran ancient
furnace with probably half horse blower motor.

Did you use extension cords indoors, or back feed?
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Christopher A. Young
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Yes, I measured one too and it was only taking a
couple hundred watts. It takes more to get it going
for the first few seconds of course. But I was very
surprised at how little modern appliances take.

During Sandy we ran two houses that included 3 gas
furnaces, 4 freezers/refrigerators, two gas hot water
heaters with blowers, plus some lights. I did some
minimal load management on my end, ie only one
furnace at a time, don't know what the neighbor did.

And this was with a junko 3500W Chinese generator,
with one house on the end of about 150 ft of extension
cord. I was expecting some decent voltage drop at
the far end, but it held nicely at 115V or so.

I had a Killawatt meter hooked to the extension cord
so I could monitor it. That meter is a great tool and
very useful for those with generators so you can see
what's going on. It reset my expectations on what
size generator you really need. I'd say 5KW max
would be plenty for me. Before this experience, I
was thinking more like 7 or 8.