I moved to an area served by Duke energy. Never before in my life have I had to deal with outages on a regular basis. It’s totally ridiculous how often we deal with this, in the suburbs of a big city no less. I even moved a few streets away to a neighborhood with BURIED utilities, only to find out they are sent power via the same crappy lines as before, no main feed that is more secure. It’s just unbelievable.

Will be made much worse with the coming of the electric cars I’m sure.

My solution so far has been a Yamaha 2000 watt rig from Costco. Cost like 550 about three years ago when we finally had enough and at least wanted to keep the fridge on. I bought a good heavy cord and this gets us by for the most of a day we are left hanging usually. Just depends on what you want to do.

IIRC a 5k budget won’t get you anything near the juice to run a whole house, at least not a new setup. Trying to think what it cost when I looked about three years ago and I want to think it was more like 8k. As much as it sucks, it would only be worth it if the power is down for several days. You have to keep that jewel up. So far all I’ve done is fire up the little guy a couple times a year and it’s been flawless at running the fridge and then the freezer switching it as needed.