Where I'm the Emergency Management Coordinator, tropical storm Irene knocked out an absurd number of key transmission lines in the area, requiring epic levels of effort to simply get to them to restore power.

For about half of our residents, the power was out for 4 days, the rest in varying amounts with about 20 homes out for 13 days. We were out for 9 days.

Here's what I learned:

- Don't ever use the "standby" mode of a generator when you hook it to a refrigerator. It turned out that the low voltage combined with low current draw of our "super-hyper-amazingly-efficient" refrigerator led to a slow suicide of the compressor and controller CPU. That was a $1,400 mistake.

- Ethanol is very, very bad for older gas equipment. The day before the storm hit, I went out, tested the generator, it started up fine. I checked everything. Then, in the middle of the night, the power was out, we got a call that a dam broke in the town across the river, trees were snapping left and right - and I decided to have a look at the water level in the sump. It was about 1/4" below the top! So I bailed out some into a big rubbermaid tote, and then went to start the generator...hundreds of pulls, starter fluid and all that, and eventually it ran. Long story short - some seals in the motor were ruined by ethanol. They would have died eventually, but unlike my usual routing, when I did the test run the day before, I didn't run out the fuel in the system. This was just enough to finally kill things. I had the generator updated with new, ethanol-proof seals and gaskets, but don't trust a 12 year old motor with any ethanol in it.

- Hot water heaters are very well insulated. We have an electric hot water heater. The water in there stayed bath-warm for 6 days! We never connected it to the generator (it's too light-duty for that kind of load.

- LED lamps are fantastic. They are bright and draw next to nothing - I had a few LED light bulbs and they really work well and kept the lights on.

This year, we're more ready but I still don't have a backup power source for my sump pump. The pit and plumbing will NOT accomodate a second pump, I really need to knuckle down and buy that 1500W invertor with integral transfer switch and just do it already.