Smoke's story about having a generator reminded me of two things.
In 2008 the tail end of a hurricane made it all the way up to Ohio. I lived just outside of suburbia, half or most homes had some form of generator. Just driving down the road you could hear who did and who didn't!
After the 2008 experience, I was talking with our CEO and he had me get him prices on sone units to take care of a family of 4. I got him prices on 5 different set ups. The next major outage was in winter about 3 years later. I ask how his family was holding out? He said they would be much better off, if he had bought one of the units I priced! They had done nothing! Good ideas don't keep the lights on without acting on them.
Ivan
We went through a number of outages without a generator, but generally our outages were a few minutes to a few hours. Then one summer we had crazy hot weather that we'd never seen before at 115-116 degrees for days, and power went out for a couple days! Soon after my wife told me we needed a generator!
I worked my adult life as a licensed electrician, and the company specialized in commercial large generator sales and installations. I did generator installs in buildings and homes in 5 states, but never did my own home. So we happened to be at our local Costco a couple weeks after the outage, and saw the 9500 watt generator for sale. I did a quick online search of reviews, and history of the brand, and saw nothing but great reviews. The price was crazy cheap at $710, so we bought it and brought it home.
I wired in a transfer switch breaker setup, and a flanged make outlet outside so all I need to do is fire the generator up, plug it into the house, and flip the transfer switch. We run it until we see neighbor's houses lit up, and then shut it down and flip the transfer switch back to normal. Easy peasy, and we use it often.
I usually wait about 10 minutes before rolling it out of the shed, as sometimes outages are very short and don't want to go through firing it up just to have the power return shortly. I did that one time and didn't get the switch changed before the lights came back on. I left it outside for a few hours, just to make sure power was good before putting it away again.