Although we never lost power during last year's ice storm, it scared me enough that I went out and bought the biggest portable generator I could find (and afford). I ended up with a Coleman Powermate 5500 watt unit that has mostly sat quietly in the garage ever since. That is, of course, until the power went out Sunday morning.
Once it was apparent the power wasn't going to come back on, it took Richard and I about 1/2 hour to get it wheeled around back and string some extension cords into the house. A couple quick pulls of the starter cord and my nearly-new generator started paying for itself. In all, we had the tanks, furnaces, fridge, and just about anything else we wanted up and running in no time. We were inconvenienced slightly by not having all the normal household lights and any high-amp/220v appliances, but overall, the whole ice storm event was pretty much a non-event for us.
Perhaps it's a little late, but here are some thoughts I had while running on standby power:
- You can never have enough extension cords on standby for this sort of thing. Although I had several, it was quickly apparent that we didn't have enough. I picked up several new cords (of various gauges, as well as three-way splitters) that are going to get boxed up and stored with the generator specifically for this use.
- Advance planning pays off. If I hadn't already thought this through, it could have been a total goat-rope. I still had a couple of surprises that slowed down the whole setup operation, though.
- Keep the generator where it can be easily accessed. Discovering that your generator is in the far back corner of the garage, behind everything else you own, after the power goes out is not a good thing. Ours was right up front and ready to go. I don't even imagine what it would have been like trying to grope around the dark garage and move everything out of the way first.
- Be sure you have enough gasoline on hand to run the generator for several hours. Our generator will run about 12 hours on 5 gallons. I had the tank full and another 8 gallons on hand. It was nice not to have to worry about rounding up gas at the last minute. Fortunately, the local gas stations had power, so it wouldn't have been a biggie for us. It could have just as easily gone the other way, though. Having that much gas gave me more than 24 hours to find more if it had been an issue.
- When hooking things up, don't do anything you're not comfortable with or trained to do. I have a LOT of training and experience working with electricity and was able to draw on that to get things running in our house in fairly short order. If you don't know what you're doing, you should stick with the basics and just hook things directly up to extension cords. For most folks, more simple = more better.
Our power has now been on for about 4 hours, DSL came up about an hour ago, and things seem to be back to normal. All that's left is to top off the tank and put the generator away for next time. Oh, and I still need to coil and store about 10 billion feet of extension cord.
For those of you without a generator, I sincerely hope you found a way keep things warm and flowing. Speak up and let everyone know how you fared the storm.