I have a boat so the gas won't get old. I have 10 jerry cans.
All I turned off (at the panel) when I hooked up the 5.5kw was the water heater. We kept the central A/C turned off at the thermostat and didn't use the range or dryer. Other than that we used everything else pretty much normally, just turning off things when we weren't using them. Life was really pretty normal. I had 2 refrigerators going, 2 well pumps, pool pump and the mini split in the bedroom along with my general lighting load. We did have to swap the pool for the bedroom A/C (A/C at night, pool during the day) and occasionally I would get a trip if too many things were in locked rotor at the same time. I could turn off the well pumps, let the fridges start then turn the well back on. I ran the best part of 2 weeks that way. If we had natural gas that 5.5 would have been plenty for everything but the central air. In fact the 2KW Ed is talking about probably would have been plenty if I didn't have 2 well pumps and a pool pump running. (240v loads)
Ed could get a window unit for $125 to have on hand if needed to cool a room or two in an emergency. If you had a hurricane and power is out for a week, that would sure make a huge difference in comfort, especially sleeping at night.
By living in Florida I guess that you do not have to worry too much about keeping warm or pipes freesing in the winter and bursting.
You power outages would probably be mostly in the warm parts of the year. So you would just need to run a generator for say an hour every couple of hours . With gas to cook with an no water problems you are good to go for a while.
Where I am at , I have a heatpump so do no try to power that. I do have a wood stove for heat if needed. Also have one of the propane camp stoves to cook with. Being on a well for water, I need a generator large enough to power that.
Mentioned it before, just try to use the ethanol free gas on whatever you get. Run the generator empty and drain the tank if you do not plan on using it for a few weeks or longer. I have only used my generator a few times so keep it drained of gas. It has started with one or two pulls of the cord. I have a tiller that I only use once or twice a year. I let it run empty and the next year fill it with gas and it will fire off with just one or two pulles of the cord. In the past I had left some of that ethanol gas in the generator for about 2 months and it gummed up the works and would not start.Had to clean out the carborator each time.
You can go a lot longer than that, unless you need to use something that runs on electric. A fridge that's not being opened can easily go for
6, 12 hours or more. You can open it less frequently by putting frequently used stuff, eg beverages, in a cooler with some ice. The basement freezer here went a week during Sandy and I didn't lose anything. I did put extra containers of water in there when the storm was coming, to add additional ice to increase the capacity. And after about 4 days, I removed them and put in bags of ice a couple times. At the end of a full week, stuff had partially defrosted, but it was all still good.
With gas to cook with an no water problems you are
Buying a spare carburetor and having it on hand would be a good plan too. There are cheap ones for many engines on Ebay. But Ed has nat gas and for sure I'd get a generator where there is a conversion kit so that it can run on nat gas. One thing to keep in mind there is that on nat gas the max output will be somewhat less, need to take that into account when sizing.
I just installed one last year - no problems - and the screeching loud noise would probably even wake me in the night. Keep earplugs handy to get to the panel to turn it off ! .. it's painfully loud & an awful screech. John T.
Hot water is gas. Cooking is gas but would lose the oven. Can easily go two weeks with laundry. Biggest single load is the refrigerator, maybe a room AC to sleep.
Just a word of caution, make sure the exhaust of the generator can not get back in the house where you run the cord. My generator goes to a dedicated socket on the outside of the house so all windows and doors are closed.
More like $100. I got mine from US Carburetion and it was a tad over $100. Installing it is easy. You remove the carb, swap out the studs for longer ones, put the venturi plate in for the gas, replace the carb and mount the regulator. I probably spent close top an hour doing it but I could do another one in 15 minutes now that I understand what needs to be done. The kits for the little inverters mount the regulator remotely since there is no good place to put it on the generator. There are actually 2 regulators, the demand regulator for the engine itself and another one on the supply line to get the input pressure right but you might not need that one on a natural gas setup. I actually bought 2 of them for propane. One is on the big built in tank line and I have another one so I can run off a 20# portable tank. All in I was closer to $200 with all of the extra regulators and hoses. It is handy to have the portable capability tho if I want to use the generator away from the house and still not screw with gasoline. Once you use propane, you will wonder why you ever messed with gas. It starts easier and you do not need to worry about getting every last drop of gas out of the system when you put it away.
The Honda EU2000i would seem to be the ideal generator for you. The only drawback would be its small gas tank.
Other inverter generators in its class are less efficient because they may not throttle-down when lightly loaded. And they are loud compared to the Honda. (Apparently some use a different method of measuring their sound level.)
I have the Honda EU6500i. It probably uses more gas than the EU2000i, but has more power and a larger gas tank. With my light load, it will run at least 16 hours.
My refrigerator will keep ice solid for 8 hours, so I turn the generator off when sleeping.
I keep ten gallons of aviation fuel on hand. It seems to hold up quite well. After using the generator, I turn off the fuel valve and run it dry.
I've used cords and I've used the inlet and panel approach. Once you do the inlet and panel way, you forget about cords. Huge difference. You just open the large breakers on things you either don't need to run at all or will selectively manage. Then the rest of the house is powered and it's like living normally. TVs work, radios work all the light switches around the house work, bathroom fans, fridge, freezer you need something from another room, want to check on something in the basement, turn on the light switch, it's lit. Want to go out in the car, garage is powered, it's lit and the automatic door opens. You don't have much need for heat down there, probably don't have a furnace, but if you did, that's powered and so is a gas water heater if it's a newer one that needs AC to ignite, etc. It's close to having the whole house powered like normal, like what you'd have with a standby generator. Actually it's BETTER than most of those, because typically they use a separate panel that they rewire whatever circuits that you decide at installation need to be powered. With the panel interlock approach, you can power ANYTHING, as long as you have sufficient capacity. You choose which breakers to turn on during the power outage.
The inlet/panel approach is probably ~$200 if you do it yourself.
Don't know if this is your Master Plan For World Domination, but there are versions of avgas still readily available that contain... yes... lead in them.
Not like the good old days when Superman could use a bucket of it to shield the kryptonite, but yeah...
I lived without one for 33 years and Irma was really the only time I needed it. After Charley the lights were back in a day. We went to bed in the dark and the power coming on woke us up. The only reason I bought one was someone made me a deal I couldn't refuse ($300 for one new in a 10 year old box). He bought it after Charley (2004) and sold it to me in 2014, never having even started it. He had oil in it and pulled it over every year or two but did not put gas in it. .
I think you could run the washer on that 2kw but you would be using a clothes line to dry them. We did that for towels. Since the pool was blue, we stayed there a lot
At first I did not know about the lead. I was only interested in having gasoline that would hold up over time.
Now I find there are other blends that do not have the lead, primarily used in marine applications. But if I get the marine gas, how well does it hold up over time? The hurricane only drops by every two or three years.
Mine is on the far side of the garage. Just don't skimp on the wire. Those generators may only put out 115v and by the time that gets to the kitchen fridge (well over 100' away the way the wire runs) that ends up being more like 108-9. That fridge seems not to run that well. I rigged up a variac for that for next time. I can dial the voltage up to 120
That's why I don't want to invest in a big whole house unit for $5k to $10k installed. Would be cheaper to fly north of a week until the power comes on.
I got one of those for free, a Generac. A neighbor had one that was maybe five or seven years old, it crapped out, the company said it wasn't worth fixing. It was in good shape, the engine started up, it ran for about
30 secs, then shut down. Knowing just that, I figured maybe it was something fixable, so I picked it up. Quickly found out that after it started, it wasn't producing any voltage. Got the service manual and as best I could tell without special eqpt, it was likely the rotor that was shot. I think a new one was $350. But I wasn't sure that was all that was wrong with it either. And then I looked at reviews on Amazon, and OMG, what a disaster! Review after review of people having everything from brand new ones leaking oil, to similar failures to this after just a few years. So, I gave up fixing it and parted it out on Ebay.
That was interesting. Most of the modules went quickly. Oddly, first thing I sold was the cabinet. Then some nut in IL wanted all kinds of weird stuff, like the front panel, the wiring harnesses. Turns out he paid $800 for basically an engine and the generator section, nothing else! Bought it on CL. Unbelievable. I mean if that's all you have, how are you ever going to find all the other parts and what will all that cost? He bought a couple hundred just from me. I'd lay bets it all went into the crapper or he had to sell it on Ebay.
The engine took awhile. I was asking $350. I had it listed for local pickup only, so that makes it much harder. Some guy in Puerto Rico emails me and wants to know if I will sell it to him if he has a company pick it up and ship it. I said, sure, but unless you have some special way, that's going to be expensive. He buys it, it takes a couple weeks, I have to prod him along, but finally the shipping company calls me up. They want to know if I have a loading dock and confirm that it's ready to go on a pallet! ROFL. Took another week, they set up a time to pick it up, no show. Second time, they show up and take it. I asked the guy in PR how much it cost to ship, he said they initially told him $300, it wound up being $800! Also, hard to imagine that a generator company in PR that sells Generac would not have a used engine there, from some other crap one where the gen section failed, instead of getting it from me.
ROFL
I told him he should have just told me that, I would have agreed to cancel the transaction. But he says he's a man of his word, so he went through with it. This was before their big hurrican, I hope he had it working and it served him for that. If it ran giving him power for several months, it would make it worth it. But with all those terrible reports about Generac on Amazon, I wouldn't put any faith in their products. In the end, I think I probably made $700 bucks off that free generator.
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