Hi harstad, I too have been looking at this situation, we get a lot of power outages here in Cairns, cyclones, flooding etc and was tired of being without power for up to a week or so and this is what I did.

1. Figure out what you really want to run and add up all the watts.
2. Buy a generator that will handle the load to run everything including A/C (in my case a 6kva)
3. Figure out your power usage less your A/C and purchase a bank of AGM battries (may be only 2-3) a decent inverter a smart battery charger and a battery monitor, your battery bank should carry you for 3 to 4 days or so before needing to be charged, this will run lighting, fridge, computers, fans etc.
4. Get a sparky to install a power point in your electrical box and a change over switch, this insures no power goes back into the grid when you plug in your generator or running from the battery.

I use the generator as a back up and to charge my batteries and for those realy heavy days to run hot water and aircon thus keeping the cost and noise down running the genset full time. There is no cheap solution to this type of power supply so shop arround. Dont forget to run a generator once a month and put a good load on it and learn to look after those battery's, a lot of people let gensets sit in the garage for years without firing them up and wonder why they dont work!!! dito for the battery's you should get about 8 years from these IF you keep them charged correctly, this will insure a good working power supply when you realy need it most. This back up system did set me back a few K but what the hell when Sh*t did hit the fan my wife,kids and myself sailed through it comfortably.