I am not one to normally gloat but it is very satisfying when you explain to a neighbour why your house is a little oasis of light in so much darkness..
I have a load of generators here and the power is annoyingly reliable. Doesn't go out nearly often enough. It's far too long between outages to remind the Mrs why I had to buy another Diesel engine or generator. The point is well made on the rare occasions when it does fail but then when it's a few years till the next blackout, she forgets why we need all these things around the place! :0)
I remember one decent blackout about 12 years ago now.
Power went out at about 3 in the afternoon and stayed out till almost lunchtime the next day. Of course being the suspect type I am, I hooked to the genny and had more lights and things going than usual just to be a smart arse. The effect was quite unexpected though.
Elderly Neighbor from up the road I do a LOT of odd jobs for and has been like a grandmother to my kids comes down at her usual ungodly early hour and wants to know how come I'm the only one with the electric on? I tell her, You know all those machines up in my shed you are always telling me is rubbish and what for I need? well that's what they do, make power. The next thing threw me a bit. She got a bit upset and said if the power not come back on soon you have to run the wire to my house and give me power as well because it's not fair you have and I don't and I want as well.
Hmm. She's not subtle at the best of times often due to English not being her 1st language but this was not accidental. This was pure and utter entitlement and for someone pretty much the opposite by nature, it was an eye opener.
When I explained the difficult of running a lead that far ( she is several houses up rather than next door) the thing then was I " Have" to get other machine and put in her place so she has power too "because is not fair I have and she does not". I didn't even bother trying to explain that she could have a generator herself because she is a terminal Tight arse and is dismayed when I tell her I don't have a hinge for the cupboard and one will have to be bought. The mention of the cost of a genny of any size would have sent her into conniptions.
I have since read about other accounts of this sort of entitlement where prepared people in disaster prone areas like tornadoes loose power and then have a posse of Neighbors all demanding that person with Genny HAS to give them power as well but it never seemed quite real till this neighbour tried it on with me. Thing was I had already discussed with the Mrs that if the power was out too long I'd pull out a little Genny and take it up there to power her fridge and freezer and TV but the DEMAND from her was very unexpected.
I'll be moving soon to a semi Rural area and I was planning on setting up an over size Engine and gen head on a transfer switch so I could run whatever I liked during an outage but I am having 2nd thoughts. Might have half the road wanting power in case of an outage and frankly, I'm not going to spend my money to provide what others are too tight/lazy to provide themselves. My CS Lister with a 3Kw head will be more than sufficient to provide Lights, power the refrigerators, TV and even give hot water when run through a PWM controller to back off the current a bit so that's all I'll need.
just won't let the mrs know that but of course it will be important to have the other 7 gennys in case one fails and to call on for backup! :0)
While solar and wind has it's advantages, I think for emergency situations NOTHING beats a good old fashioned Genny. The very situations that are most likely to trigger the outage are the ones where other systems are most likely to fail where a Genny doesn't really care what's going on.