What do you want to power?
Do you want to power your whole house including heating and/or A/C or do
you want to power just enough of the bare essentials to survive a
temporary outage?
After making this determination, your options are pretty well laid out then.
Portable Generator
If you want to just power the essentials, you can get by with a portable generator. With it you will only power certain house circuits or
appliances.
So, how big a generator will you need?
Decide what appliances you want to power, determine the wattage needed to run each one and then add them up. Whatever wattage you come up with
will be the minimum size generator you will need.
If you go to www.consumerreports.org you can use their wattage calculator to determine these numbers.
It is said that a generator capable of outputting 2500 -7500 watts
(2.5 - 7.5 kw) should be good for many appliances BUT not the A/C.
Permanent Generator
To supply power for your entire house will take a permanently installed generator. These will output 20 to 45
kw (20,000 to 45,000 watts) or more of power.
In determining how big a generating unit you will need, you will have to
know how many circuits you want to power. These permanent generators go by
circuits needed, not by wattage needed.
How will your generator be powered?
You have all choices here. Gasoline, electric, natural gas or propane.
Obviously if you are planning on using it when the power goes out you can’t use the electric powered one.
Gasoline will only last for few hours so you need to have a supply of it.
For long term usage you need propane or natural gas.
That just about sums up the basics.
If you have never purchased a generator before, these are just a few things to consider. You will most definitely have other things to consider but they should be minor in comparison to these few starting points.
At the very least, having some prior knowledge about the basic features will help you tremendously in selecting that perfect generator for needs.
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