[img]/forums/images/icons/crazy.gif[/img] I have thee most beautiful setup for standby power that you could ever ask for [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] and ...... well, .... we haven't lost power? On Sunday's 5-something-o'clock evening news the weather man all but GUARANTEED us that we would be outa power by Tuesday so I got out of my recliner and beat feet to Menard's for a generator on sale. I got there fifteen minutes before closing time and they had two left. I bagged one and was headed for home by seven PM. On Monday I serviced the unit and test ran it with some temporary cables. I filled up my fuel cans and got them ready. It was a pretty wild Monday night and we did get one heck of a lot of ice, but we were just a bit south and west of the main front and were kind of going from ice-to melting-to-ice-to melting all day on Tuesday. We had some pretty serious power winks, but the juice stayed on. Just twenty miles farther west is a MESS. Trees and poles and lines down all over the place. Our daughter and her husband bought a Menard's generator too and were just getting it set up and testing the engine when POOF their power went out.
[img]/forums/images/icons/blush.gif[/img] Yes, what we have here is a teeny unit, only 5500 watts, and yes, I have always intended to buy a big unit (10,000+) on Propane, but this was one of those cases where "intend" might have left us out of power so we bought this intrim unit. [img]/forums/images/icons/crazy.gif[/img] We have had our house double-wired for a generator ever since we remodeled in '02. '03, and '04; but power outages were so infrequent that we never bought a generator. We had never seen an ice storm until last February. [img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] Oh well, at least I finally got busy and finished out my standby power system; getting the neutrals isolated and the permanent cables made up. I'm setting everything up for 50 AMPS 240V , even though this little unit is less than half that. We still INTEND to get that big one someday. [img]/forums/images/icons/crazy.gif[/img]