Man, I’m deep in the generator debate again. We lost power over the weekend for a solid 8 hours. Was it snowing or stormy outside? Nope. Was it sunny and beautiful outside? Yup. Well, sunny and beautiful but also cold. Not cold enough to freeze pipes, but chilly inside. Then you gotta burn extra fuel to bring the house back up to temp.

Last time we lost power Amy felt it best to throw a significant amount of food out of the refrigerator and given the fact that we had just been to the store this past weekend, I was calculating the damage in my head as the hours without power ticked by.

So loosing power isn’t just an inconvenience, it’s damaging to property and thus wallets. Living where we do means there are an awful lot of remote locations where trees can topple over onto power lines. Apparently nothing can be done. We lack the technology to prevent this from happening, so we loose power a lot. For the first few years we just lit some candles and tolerated it but now we’re getting fed up and every time it goes out I hem and haw over the proper response.

Hope Depot can get you a cheap 5kW generator for around $600, which is great. 5kW is enough to run pretty much everything in my house at the same time. Well pump, fridge, furnace, lights and probably the TV or computer. So I’m all like, yeah I’m gonna have an electrician plug this bad boy directly into the breaker box and we’ll live in comfort no matter the conditions! Just have to keep the gas flowing and we’ll be cool. Uh oh, this unit doesn’t have an inverter. That’s why it’s so cheap. You wouldn’t really want to run anything with sensitive electronics off it, so now you’re wondering why you need 5kW, even though it’s so relatively inexpensive, if it can’t actually power everything you’d want to power with it. And why am I going to go through the bother of jacking it into the main box if it can’t power everything in the house? The alternative is running extension cords through the window, criss-crossing all over the house.

But now you’re salivating at the idea of beating this goddamn power outage with the awesome might of a generator plugged directly into the box.

Enter the Generac Guardian 8kW. Oooh, now you’re really talking. Let me break it down.

– 8,000 unstoppable inverted watts
– Runs off the LP I already have a gigantic tank of in the back yard
– Quiet(er)
– No lugging in and out of the garage
– Did I mention no going to the gas station and filling gas cans?
– Comes with all the gear to plug into the breaker box
– Auto start (my pipes never be freezin, yo)
– Auto stop

Okay, so it’s a bit on the large side. It’s also 5x the price of the cheapo 5kW portable job. Queue it!

They make smaller inverted portable units, but what’s the point? I want my food to stay cold and my house to stay warm. Don’t really care about surfing the web if those conditions aren’t met and 2kW isn’t going to do all that. A friend was suggesting I power the house off a 5kW unit and the sensitive equipment off a 2kW inverted unit, except now I’m maintaining multiple units and the price is climbing towards the preferred Generac solution.

But Ben, you don’t really need to surf the web during a power outage. Yeah, but once you’re in the game at all you’re making enough electricity to do it. So why am I running a 5kW motor when I’m only using 2kW at any given time? Just seems like a waste.

And my brain runs around and around and around and nothing gets done. Once again, my eyes are bigger than my wallet. Speaking of wallet, interesting things are happening there, both bad and worse. I’ll talk more about that later!