Ed Pawlowski wrote:
> "Steve Freides" > wrote
>>
>> But we bought a used commercial, albeit small, generator yesterday.
>> It was a fun outing - we found it on ebay by doing a search for
>> sellers nearby and then picked it up in the car, discovering a
>> lovely bakery/cafe along the way from which we brought home a ham
>> and mozarella quiche and a delicious peach cobbler. And this bakery
>> made its ice coffee with coffee ice cubes - excellent results,
>> delicious iced coffee. All in Staten Island (a borough of NYC) on
>> Victory Blvd. for anyone interested. The place is called Mother
>> Mousse. It's got 2 x 20 amp outlets and is rated at 6kw, enough to
>> power our
>> first floor a/c and both our refrigerators and have some juice left
>> over. Battery for electric starting, circuit breakers onboard, and
>> is generally the kind of thing that just makes a guy happy to own.
>> I feel like that comedian who had the Tool Time show on his
>> sitcom. (I now make gorilla noises ...) Vroom!
>>
>> So, yes, the hurrican was just an excuse to get a new toy. <sigh> But
>> our food won't go bad.
>>
>> -S-
>
> I've often thought about a generator. In the 45 years of home
> ownership, only once did we have an extended outage of about 36
> hours. That was in 1985 with hurricane Gloria. This is about the
> same. So far, it has not been worth the $500+ investment to sit in
> the garage unused. Two other times we had outages of about 8 hours,
> during daylight hours so no loss, no inconvenience.
>
> At least you had a nice day out to go with the purchase.

We don't have battery backup for our 3 sump pumps - if we did, then the
generator wouldn't be as necessary. Last time the power went out when
it was raining heavily, we didn't put 2 + 2 together and didn't realize
until a few days later that our basement was starting to smell - the
sumps hadn't worked when the electricity was out, and while we didn't
get much water, we got enough.

We had a 2-1/2 day outage about a decade ago, but it was just our
house - a moving truck clipped the wire running across the street to our
house and it took down the small transformer that was on the pole.

And there was a big outage when we weren't home, something like 5 days
long, so our neighbors just threw away all our food for us.

I wish I didn't need this but we've had all of those things in less than
20 years of home ownership at since I'm planning to be buried in the
back yard I expect we'll get some use out of the generator yet -
maybe even tomorrow.

-S-