Hurricane Irene

Dan_ed, What is the source for power? Diesel?

How do you keep fuel from going stale or is it natural gas powered?

Albert-

If Dan_ed doesn't mind, A Generac unit runs either on propane or natural gas, and the transfer switch senses load or lack thereof, and adjusts accordingly. I am looking at a 20Kwh unit myself.

That makes sense, there would not be the issue of stale gasoline or Diesel.

Natural gas would be great for generator, I've never seen gas shut off unless they were working on our hot water heater.

I don't suppose it would be cheaper to generate your own power with gas as opposed to buying from the utility.

I have a Generac 17k model and they are amazing. Fully automatic operation, kicks on within 15 seconds and waits a few minutes to monitor voltage srability before auto shut off. It has digital screen to monitor all functions and service issues, runs at your selected time 15min weekly to lube, charge battery and check for any potential issues. I have my entire home on it aswell as 220 line for my barn. I even had electric stove and dryer plus normal activity on it before with no hicup. If you have everything on you may see it brown down but I mean a big load. You can have an entire home normal power on with zero hassle.
Factor $5k for unit and install then enjoy, money very well spent!

Thanks for chiming in Slipknot and Chadnliz. Chad has a nice setup. That functionality used to cost closer to $10K. I stayed with an 8 kW portable generator that runs on gas. It has electric start (you do need this!) and feeds a 10-circuit manual trans-switch. We don't have the stove, A/C, and washer/dryer in the circuits but the well and pretty much everything else is. Things are pretty "rural" around here so any propane use takes the large tank in the yard. Our neighbor has one for their gas appliances. We do use heating oil so I suppose that could be used as a source, but then you would be working against yourself in the winter when most of our outages occur. But if you're going for the Full Monty generac putting in a tank shouldn't be that big of a deal.

I can even listen to my stereo on the generator. YOu can hear it running in the background when the music is quiet but it definitely sounds great, better than the power company sounds. :-)