Many of you know that I’ve been doing my typical fence sitting vis-a-vis the generator debate. Well, I done decided.
Behold, the B&S 5500 Storm Responder!
That Home Depot link isn’t exactly the model that I picked up. It’s not on the site for some reason, but the specs seem to be mostly the same with the exception of the gas tank being a little bit larger on mine and slightly more expensive. And anyway, it’s got the words Storm and Responder on it so it must be good at responding to storms, which is when I’ll need it most, dagnabbit! Also when the sun is shining and birds are chirping, because alcoholics will drive their cars into poles any time! And lord knows people like to have a pop and drive around here. If I picked up every beer can on the side of the road and traded it in I’d still be poor, but I’d also waste a lot of time and energy doing it too!
Why do rednecks insist on trashing their beautiful countryside, by the way? I don’t get it. We can talk more about this later.
Yeah, so Stormy is all gassed up and ready to roll, although naturally I have now insured that we will never loose power ever again. So I’m sure it will gather dust and rust out in a corner. Mission accomplished!!
However, in the very unlikely event that we do loose power, she came with a heavy duty four banger extension cord which I could bring into the house in the immediate future. Phase two is getting it hard wired into the house, or at least rigged in a way that we don’t have extension cords running through open windows in the dead of winter. I’ve blown a call into our local electrician for an estimate.
I also plan to build a little lean-to for it in the spring so it will have a place to live that’s not in the garage, but keep it protected in bad weather and hopefully dampen sound a bit. And it can safely burn that down instead of my garage. Security will be a concern I guess. We got word that a few houses have been robbed up the road a piece. Might take the wheels off and chain it to something solid if I do put it in a lean-to permanently.
So, what I liked about this unit was the 5500 watts seems like it will keep all of our critical items online at the same time, and it’s got the peak output of 8250 watts for when everything kicks on at once. I can prevent that a little by controlling things with breakers in the house, but I appreciate the extra headroom. Do I wish I had the inverted 8kw propane powered beast? Yes. But as I always say, it’s nice to want things.
3 responses to “powerful decisions”
Rocky’s generator is similar. He slips a piece of wood (about 3′ long) under the handle and on top of the fuel tank to wheel the beast around.
That might give me some nice leverage, but it’s not all that hard to move around to begin with as long as it’s on the wheels. I won’t move it around as much as he does either.
The pipe handle doesn’t give you much distance from the unit to actually walk and maneuver. (It was smaller than a 2″x4″ but heavier than moulding.) Looked like a good idea as he wheeled it in the garage.