Just a few thoughts/experiences with my generators.

I’ve got an older portable 8K gasoline backup Generac that’s hooked up to our old house (my daughter and grandkids are living there now). It’s enough to run the essentials like the swamp coolers, refrigerator, microwave etc. The house in on natural gas so it works out ok. Our power out here is pretty reliable, (we only loose power about once a year so) it doesn’t get used that much. I keep 20 gallons of fuel in cans on hand for it and run it about every 6 months to exercise it and make sure it’s good to go if needed.

Biggest problem is fuel. It burns about a gallon an hour under load. Besides the 20 gallons I figure I can usually pull another 80 gallons out of the vehicles around here if needed. I don’t trust the fuel in the cans to stay good much longer than 6 months so I usually pour it into one of the trucks and refill the cans every 6 months. When I shut it down I cut the fuel off so the carburetor drains and then drain the gas tank to make sure there is no stale gas in it when I go to start it. It’s a PIA but it gets us by when the power goes out.

My wife and I moved into a smaller (1000 sq ft) house a couple of years ago that’s all electric. I’m currently hooking up an 18K whole house standby generator to that house. I went propane for a couple of reasons…..the gas company not wanting to run a new service for just a standby generator made the decision pretty easy though (LOL). Propane has a couple of advantages. It doesn’t go bad and if what ever caused the power failure affects the NG supply I’ll still have power. Running propane also allows the 18K to put out the full 18K power. If I was running NG I would have needed a 20 or 22K generator as the 22K power rating drops to around 19.5K when run on NG.

Our new generator is set to automatically start when the power goes off which I opted for as the wife and I aren’t getting any younger.

Something else to think about when picking a generator is if you will be if you or your wife will be able to get it going in a few years. When my mom started going down hill several years ago we originally set her up with a portable generator. She lives in the mid west and it worked great but someone had to come over and get it started. The first bad winter storm she had it took 2 hours before someone made it there. That’s when we upgraded her to a whole house generator with the auto startup.

Just my 2 cents.