On Saturday, May 25, 2019 at 6:03:14 PM UTC-4, wrote:
On Sat, 25 May 2019 13:02:39 -0400, Ed Pawlowski wrote:

On 5/25/2019 12:02 PM, wrote:

I lived without one for 33 years and Irma was really the only time I
needed it. After Charley the lights were back in a day. We went to bed
in the dark and the power coming on woke us up. The only reason I
bought one was someone made me a deal I couldn't refuse ($300 for one
new in a 10 year old box). He bought it after Charley (2004) and sold
it to me in 2014, never having even started it. He had oil in it and
pulled it over every year or two but did not put gas in it. .


That's why I don't want to invest in a big whole house unit for $5k to
$10k installed. Would be cheaper to fly north of a week until the power
comes on.

I feel the same way about a bigger gen set. 5.5kw seems to be plenty
for that once every 30 year storm that knocks the power out more than
a few hours. The strange thing is my ex up in Maryland seems to have
more need than me, mostly because they have a lot more blackouts and
they are usually in the winter where survival starts looking more
important.

I think the neighbor that had his 12KW Generac go kaput is the kind of
guy that was sitting there with all the lights on, stove running, multiple TVs,
hot tub going, AC too. Maybe if he had a lesser load on it,
might have lasted longer. And around here, the power outage distribution
is something like 20 secs maybe few times a year, couple hours maybe
once a year. The exception of course being Sandy. And his Generac
didn't make it to Sandy. It probably got more hours with the weekly
exercise for 10 mins than it did from actual power outages.
He replaced it with an 18KW one. I agree with you, I think 5KW is
plenty for most people and depending on what you want to do, even
less could be fine. During Sandy we had two big houses running on
the neighbors Chinese one, I think it might have been 3500 watts.
That was lights, power vent water heaters, 4 fridges/freezers,
two furnaces. And the second house was with probably 150 ft of
regular mostly regular extension though I did have one 50 ft ten gauge.
He was a little like the other crazy neighbor. At one point the
lights were dimming, the generator was struggling, turns out he
was trying to run the washing machine! Great idea, right? This
was during Sandy, when the power was out for a week and he had
to load that generator with the washing machine too. If he had to
do it, you'd think he'd have let me know, so I could have shed all
loads here first. He also was using an electric space heater,
I showed him how to get the gas furnace running. It's amazing he
didn't kill that Chinese thing.