Then...reality set in. I'm now on emergency back-up power, how long is this going to last? What's my fuel burn rate? Do I really have enough fuel on hand for what could be an extended outage?
...
After just two days I was very glad when the power came back on. Fortunately the generator had performed flawlessly and it was a relief to be back on grid power. So, its a case of "Be careful what you wish for"! Or maybe a case of "Better to have it and not need it, than to need it and worry about how long you might have to feed it!
That pretty much covers it. I discovered how unreliable power was at this house the hard way - we had a five-day winter outage start the night we moved in. It was a hardcore survival situation there for a few days, and I was eternally grateful to the neighbor down at the bottom of the hill who got out with his 4wd pickup after using his 4wd tractor and loader bucket to clear enough road to get a run at it. He tried to get up our piece of road and got so stuck that he had to drag it out with the tractor the next day.
Anyway, I sent him away with my two five-gallon kerosene cans (for the heater)which he filled up, after visiting four stations before he found one with power and kerosene. I then had to hump them up 100' of hill in four feet of snow.
That was a powerful lesson. How much generator fuel could I store onsite with a reasonable turn rate? How much could I manufacture out of available materials (RUG and WMO)? How much runtime would that get me? The road was only impassible for four days that time, but what if it had been a hurricane or wind and ice? You can only chainsaw so many 60' oak trees a day, and it's about a mile down to the highway.
It's not a game at that point. You do the math, figure the probabilities, and decide what is the smallest generator that will meet your needs. I decided on an MEP-002A, which is the 'big' generator. I also have a little gasoline generator with a carry handle on top. It's just big enough to run a few lights and the woodstove blower and charge a deep-cycle battery.
The little generator is the primary tool for overnight runs because it burns a quart every 3 hours. The big generator gets run for 2-4 hours/day unless we need air conditioning (as after the derecho, when it was 92 F). Yes, it's easier and more comfortable to just run the big generator all the time, but it burns as much fuel in two hours as the little one does in twelve. And I have vehicles full of fresh fuel for the little generator.
If the little generator packs it in, well, we've got the big generator. If the big one quits, the little one will charge the deep cycle battery, which, with the inverter, will run any of the freezers or the fridge in turn, as well as run lights and the woodstove blower.
This sort of math gets us reliable heat and power for five days. After about day 3, if it was obvious that we might be stranded up here longer, I'd probably start economizing, mix up some black diesel, that sort of thing. And work on getting out with the quad with a couple of fuel cans strapped to the luggage racks.
Yes, we have lots of food in the basement. I discovered that doing generator management, tree removal, snow removal, etc, I reliably go through 3500 calories a day instead of my baseline 2000 or so.
