I own an 18-acre hill. It is surrounded by ravines except for my steep driveway, with a solar power gate/security camera. I love the seclusion, which is why we are here. The nearest town is 12 miles and has < 5000 people. This is the northeast Ga. mountains.
The reason I'm saying this is that when we lose power, we are cut off from the world.
Our first winter, we had a freak (for here) foot deep, heavy wet snowstorm.
It froze to a layer of black ice, and we were stranded. Even with chains on the wrangler, it was not safe going down the hill and I was sure I would not make it up and if I slide off the side, my jeep would be in the ravine. And, of course, we lost power. Since we are out in the country, there was nowhere to go anyhow.
I now have two Firman 10 KW generators wired into the 220vac buss. I learned years ago that anything you NEED one of, you need two. They are dual fuel, gasoline and LPG. LPG is rated 7.5KW but is actually about 5KW. It squats when the frig cycles or if you run the microwave.
But I'll tell you, there is nothing fun about being on generator for 6 and a half days. I ran it around the clock for the first three days and then I cut back to about six hours a day. Gas inventory got low, but I was also concerned about running continuous duty. My load was usually low, but that engine still has to turn. The well pump was the biggest load. I was heating with the wood stove.
Starting day three, I started hearing a dull clanging sound. I stopped it and checked the oil and level was good and the oil did not look bad. I topped it off and ran on LPG else I would have to start syphoning from the vehicles. At $4 gal, (Thanks Brandon), this is high dollar energy.
Also, the generator was running at about 62HZ, causing my battery UPS to cycle and alarm over and over. Also, the florescent lights had a god-awful flicker.
On the fifth day, the power company guys walked up our hill (they would not risk driving up with their boom truck. The outage wasn't on our property. I let them use the grandkids sleds (we use them to slide down the grass slopes) to get back down the hill and we got power back the next day.
So, I got another Firman (they give excellent support) since I had had bad luck with Generac's. I do think I will add a small Honda to the list to run nigh time loads and use the 10KWs for daytime when we have large load needs.
We are preppers, which is why we live where we do. You can prepare all you want but the test is reality. One week was a serious test. We went through a lot of firewood-over two cords. We were entertaining cooking on the wood stove with our dutch oven. We have loads of food stores, a roof cistern, two gardens and my wife even teaches a prepper class but there is no better teacher than reality.
