Blast, if your looking toward a generator, I would recommend a Briggs and Stratton 5500W or a Guardian Ultra Source Series 15 kW for portable. If you want a house one get what Izzy has a home Generac that powers the whole house. You need 12.5 KW or greater to power the house 100% or a 5500W one which will do the basics, no AC or water heater. A 7500 Watt one would do the water heater but not the AC. Izzy's home one is great if you have a source for propane, but we didn't want to buy a 200 gallon tank to hold the propane since gas and propane are about the same. I ended up going with the Guardian Ultra Source Series 12.5 kW gas and use a solar cell to keep the batteries ready to go at any minute. It powers the house 100% with everything on (AC,water heater,stove,washer,dryer,etc..) It's nice but it sucks fuel,15 gallons every 12 hours. We have learned ways to stretch the fuel out a long ways. We charge the deep freezers and refrigerators in the day for an hour or two, make ice and run it full bore at night enjoying a good nights sleep with TV and sometimes internet. Plus I can load that generator on my trailer and take it up to my parents house if they need it and power them up. I have leads and 50 foot of 4 gauge cable that clamps right on the main. At our house I have a big disconnect I plug in on the side of the house and I'm good to go. Each has there up's and downs, stabilizer and solar cells are your best friends with these. I can sometimes get gas in the storms, but I can't get propane where I'm at. If you have any questions about them, I'd be glad to help.

Also I'm sure you already know this, just remember not to let gas sit and crystallize in the carburetor, that's where a lot of people end up having to clean and put new gaskets and o-rings in the carb. Run it dry and stabilize the tank before storage, solar cell the battery and fire it up for about 20 minutes once a year and you'll be set.

Generac Guardians (I got mine cheaper at Home Depo)

http://www.generatorjoe.net/subcatmfgprod.asp?0=200&1=618&2=-1


Propane conversion kit for generators

http://uscarb.com/04451-kits.htm

Blast, i thought that you had already learned your lesson on working on lawnmowers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vu4orVdih5o&NR=1

Who knew that doing wheelies on a lawn mower was a sport. Course i have unintentionally done one on a tractor once or twice. The reverse wheelies are the ones that will wake you up, to much weight in the loader bucket.

Falcon,

Thanks for the info. I'm looking for something that will run our fridge/freezer and our second stand-alone freezer. I estimate I can get by with something under 5000watts to do this. Our water heater is gas and it continued to work throughout the power outage. I need to check if that would be enough to run our washing machine. Our dryer is gas and just uses 110V for it's electronics, so that shouldn't be a problem.

I like the inverter technology and quietness of the Honda generators, though they are pricey.

-Blast

With piped in natural gas, getting a generator that will run on that and propane is a option. They are out there, but hard to find. Sometime just changing the orifice will change one over.

SBRaider is right, if you have natural gas piped in, you have the best of both worlds. I would still get around 5000 watts or higher to take out the washer, dryer and oven if needed, if I was to go to a less wattage then go with a Yamaha generator. There great 2000 watt ones and a 1 gallon tank but with the freezers and the washer and dryer it is probably not enough. I have an old AW Sperry amp meter that can measure amps AC/DC up to 2000 amps that I use to see where my loads are coming in at. Do you have access to any amp meters that you can use to check your current draw? Power=Voltage X Amps. I think a 5000 watts may be what your after but I don't know all your load data. The 5000 watt ones have a 5 gallon tank and run 12-15 hours on a tank and it is a great generator from Brigs and Straton. We loved ours but after the DW complained about not having AC after a week without power and cold showers, it was worth it to shut her up to spend the money on one that would run the whole house.

We all talk about surviving bit when you have a wife going through flashes and taking cold showers then rules change. We sold our 5500W after one of our hurricanes and with the help of Fema, we got the brand new one (12.5K watt) for $1800 at Home Depo. It cost me $800 out of my pocket and has been working since.

In your case, depending on your wife, you could go with a window shaker (portable window AC $110) and a 5500W brigs with a gas converter and you should be set. A big one would be useless to you unless you want your house AC running due to your natural gas appliances. A 3000-4000 watt generators have poorer gas performance than the 5500W Briggs and since it has a 5 gallon tank, you can make ice at night and put the ice in trash bags to keep the freezers and fridge cool in the day time (drink the cold water when the ice melts ) and you can run it full bore at night with a portable AC unit at about 5 gallons of gas per day or 6-8 pounds of natural gas (assuming running the generator at night only).

Here's one for $540 off of Craig s list from San Antonio Texas, we paid around that for ours a while back. There are deals out there through e-bay and other stores,also with all that rain water you guys get plus your rain collection system, you should have a months supply of ice right there, just UV it before you drink it . The beauty of hurricanes is there's plenty of fresh water every where, if you collect it.

http://sanantonio.craigslist.org/tls/851028242.html


US Carbs is a good company and they can probably help you, they are pretty good at retrofitting carbs, shoot them an e-mail telling them what you want before you buy and see what they recommend.

http://uscarb.com/type_1.htm

Good Luck and welcome to the WWG (Wonderful World of Generators), a poor temporary solution to getting off the grid. Also a final note, with the economy going the way it is, and the hurricane season almost over, you will probably see many up for sale pretty soon. People tend to buy them when they need them the most and sell them when the danger passes instead of keeping them.

Do generators like this have a duty cycle? How long can they be run before they should be left to cool down?

That's a good question, You know I never checked it, (which is stupid on my part) but I can tell you that I have always ran both the Briggs and the generac 100% and only stopping when it ran out of fuel for days until the gas climbed up over $1.50, then we started becoming more fuel management due to fuel cost and not duty cycle. I know tons of people that run them 24/7 until power is restored and I think the manufactures know this. Without checking I would think it's 100% duty cycle, the manufacturer knows there's a lot of completion out there and they are always striving to make the most selling generator on the market. I just know by trial an error that neither generator has let us down yet.

Update: On both sites I believe it is 100% duty cycle.

Briggs site
http://www.briggsandstratton.com/engine_power/details.aspx?pid=146


And my favorite,the mother of all generators, the generac

http://www.generac.com/Products/Portable/UltraSourceSeries/UltraSourceSeries.aspx

If I could do it all over again, I would buy the Guardian 17.5 KW

Engine-wise there likely isn't.

HOWEVER - one must look carefully at the electrical specs to see what to do about inrush current when starting new loads vs. steady-state load.

Briefly, inrush current is the brief starting electrical load for (typically) motors to go from off to running. Inrush current can be 4 or 5 times the steady state draw and can last perhaps 2 seconds - long enough to trip a circuit breaker.

So your selection of a generator needs to take into account what loads you want to run continuously and what might be a start-stop kind of load.

Think of the movie Apollo 13 where the power-up sequence had to be carefully worked out so as to not exceed a limit. Working out this procedure may be necessary for your home. :-)

Correct, the generac bellow can handle 17,500 watts but when you fire off your AC it will surge very high, hince the 26,250 watt surge capacity. Mine is at the limit at 12.5 KW and when the AC kicks in, it will bog down just for a second, but a 15KW or 17.5KW would probably not surge as bad. I just leave my AC cold so I don't get the surging at night. Everything else in the house will not make mine surge, just the AC.


Model 5308
Rated Power (watts) 17,500
Surge Watts 26,250


Surge is the initial power up of a device with all the friction and power needed to turn a motor from a dead stop up to operating RPM, once up to speed the current goes drastically down.

Kind of like a wind up flashlight when the batteries are dead, hard to crank at first but the more juice the batteries gets the easier the cranking.

What's scary, is Blast is asking for a repair book BEFORE he gets a generator.