Good luck to everyone in the storm’s path. This time, Florida is looking at it from the outside, but all the preps are similar to what we deal with for Hurricanes.
I couldn’t afford a whole house generator, but my setup evolved over the years to be pretty effective, and was a lot less expensive. I have to go manually plug in and start the generator and throw the cutover switches, but it’s not bad. I attach the big connection cord before a major storm so I don’t have to deal with that during bad weather.
First, I had gotten a 9000 watt generator and ran it on gasoline. Then, I decided I needed better hookups, and, mostly, needed to run my well pump on the generator (I don’t have city water). So, I went to Home Depot and got a cutover switch, outside connector socket and connector cord, and installed that. It powers the 240V well circuits as well as the kitchen 120V, lights and outlets in the living room, bedrooms and bathroom.
That was nice, but gasoline left in generators tends to ruin things, so I decided to convert the generator to a dual fuel setup and started running it off 20lb propane tanks. Then a hurricane came along, and we were without power for many hours while it was still pouring rain, and I couldn’t run the generator in the rain, so I built a permanent house for it where I can lock it in, but it’s vented so the generator can run sheltered. Then I got sick of being limited by propane cans, so I plumbed into my whole-house propane tank, and ran a line out to the generator house.
Now I can run for about a week or so depending on how much gas is in my big tank (and how conservative I am), and run most of the house except central air and the stove/oven. I have a propane water heater, so I get hot showers, a room AC unit for the bedroom, and lights/outlets for most of the house. The whole rig was about $2K total to put together. Not as nice as a Generac, but a lot less expensive perfectly comfortable and effective (other than having to go outside in the storm to start it up).
