Being on the Texas Gulf Coast, I have lived through a fair amount of hurricanes. As a child, I remember Alicia in 1983, being 10 years old, how the water backed up and how much fun we had outside during the “eye” of the storm passing over. We were in Rita in 2005 at my grandparents’ place in East Texas. We evacuated for Ike in 2008, having just built the house we are in now. Most recently, Harvey being just a rain event, and just this year, Nicholas passed over us, leaving us without power for 15 hours. Also in 2021, the Houston Snow-pocalypse the power outages ranged from 23 hours to 3 days.
Simply, the winter event lead me to start reviewing what we wanted to do for backup power. Whole home are expensive, but easy. They start automatically, and have a yearly maintenance fee. We plan to get into the RV lifestyle soon with a travel trailer, so a portable generator quickly became the primary candidate. Now, how big does it need to be?
Depends on what you want to run. Here’s a chart from my generator manual:
I made a list of device I wanted to run – two window ACs, two refrigerators, computer, TV, etc. That got be to two numbers: peak and running watts. My peak was around 5000 and my running was about 3500. I wanted to try and run one of central air units, so that got me to 8000/6500. You never want to run a generator at full load, so I said this was 60% load – can started looking in the 13kW range.
Now, the largest portable I found was 15,000W (peak) for about $3,200. It’s a little more than I wanted to pay, so I opted for the size down: 13,000W with 10,500W running. That was 55% the cost of the 15k one, and I liked the cost, so now the hunt. The “name brand” motors were as much as the 15k unit I found, and I talked to a friend who has a Briggs and Stratton and he’s never had engine issues. I looked at review on Northern Tool and Home Depot and decided on…. Duromax. It had the right specs, and dual fuel with gas and propane (you can make ANY carbureted gas engine to run off natural gas with a kit) and just inside the weight I wanted. It has an 8.3 gallon tank, should last 8-10 hours (depending on load), and is 76db, just a little softer than my lawn mower.
Next, I’ll look at hooking up generators to homes.