all good reasons but why did he have to bludge off the government to get
this extra generator

It's not exactly like you plan to have perishable food during a hurricane.
Like most, I have food in the refrigerator and freezer all year.  I don't
buy one meal at a time, I buy in relatively large quantities.  Then there's
all the fish and lobster I caught myself.  That tends to come in larger
quantities as well.  All in all, there's normally more than $1,000 in
perishable food on hand all the time.  When a storm hits, you either have a
way to maintain refrigeration or you loose that food.  The obvious
suggestion is not to have that food, but that's not really practical.  While
you read about hurricanes as single events, those events can happen anytime
during a substantial portion of the year.  You can have no storms, anywhere,
or you can have half a dozen hit you in a few month period.  There's really
no predicting how many or when they'll develop.  The perishible food is on
hand when the hurricane develops, and is still here if/when it hits.
Families with babies or people on medication have special problems.  They
have to have perishables on a more or less continuous basis.  Milk doesn't
do real well without being kept cool.  Neither do some medicines.  While I
do not make room for everything all of my neighbors want kept cold, I do
make room for baby food, milk and medicine.  I make any excess space
available to neighbors I'm most friendly with, but I don't make that widely
known.

Even though we don't get hit by nearly as many hurricanes as everybody
assumes, none so far this year, smart people prepare for them on a more or
less continuous basis.  My generators are an example, as is the fuel I stock
for them during the hurricane season.  I have half a dozen collapsable water
containers, a propane grill, a propane stove (mostly used for other things),
ice chests and have plenty of canned and other non perishable goods on hand
all the time.  My generators and fuel for them are the biggest single
preparation I do almost entirely for hurricane purposes.  I can store up to
about $250 gallons of fuel.  I normally start increasing my supply as
hurricane season starts and use it to fuel our cars as the season winds
down.  I stabilize the fuel to keep it good for the relatively short time I
store it.  Not only does this ensure a fuel supply in the aftermath of a
major storm, it also allows me to avoid the long lines and high prices that,
no matter how many laws are passed against gouging, still happen.  Three
days before Ike might have it S. Florida, every gas station in my area was
out of both regular and mid grade gasoline and high test prices were up by
about $.50 a gallon from their already high prices.  I paid over $5 a gallon
to fill my car.  My pickup and my wife's cars were full before things got
crazy.  Grocery store shelves and places that sell plywood were empty.
We're not talking about wide open places with a few hundred thousand people
around.  We're talking about an area with several million people, all
needing the same things.  The geography of Florida, that limits places you
can go to get away from a storm, don't make it any better.  The Keys, for
example, have one road in and out.  One accident on one of the bridges, and
nobody goes anywhere for hours.

There's no particular reason to explain myself, but if the information will
help people understand, why not.  There's more to the generator issue that
meets the eye.  I grew up in S. Florida without air conditioning.  Back
then, homes were built further apart and were designed to allow air to flow
through efficiently.  It was still hot and humid, but as long as there was
air movement, it was OK.  Over the years, more and more people from up north
have moved to Florida.  As they did, archetecture changed.  Homes depend
more and more on air conditioning and less and less on natural air flow.
Windows are designed for their insulation and hurricane resitance, not for
efficient ventilation.  We have lost the ability to live anything close to
comfortably without some form of cooling.  Every bedroom and my family room
have ceiling fans which would makes the house liveable without AC, but they
require power too.  My larger generator powers everything except the central
air conditioning.  My refrigerators, freezer and ice maker run anytime the
generator is running.  After Wilma, I chose to run it 24 hours a day
specifically because I was providing ice to others.  I thought I had enough
fuel stocked to so that.  It turned out I was wrong, the power was out for
much longer than anticipated and, while fuel was at the gas stations, they
had no power to pump it.  Nobody ever expected power to be out as long as it
was.  We learned from that and adapted.  With my generator, I can run a
microwave, stove top or oven, or my water heater, but not all at the same
time.  I normally run the water heater at night and other major power using
applicances during the day.  It allows us to live a relatively normal life
after a major storm.

I bought a window airconditioner that lives in the garage except when the
power is out.  After the storm passes, I take down the shutters and put the
AC in one of our bedroom windows.  It's used only to cool that room and only
at night.  Otherwise, we'd be sleeping in a puddle of sweat every night.  We
use the small generator to power it when necessary or when I don't need to
keep the big on running.  When possible, I run the window unit off the big
generator.  The small generator does more than that, though, a lot more.
Hurricane cleanup isn't easy and is often facilitated by power tools.
Battery operated drills, used to put up and take down shutters, for example,
have to be charged somehow.  Electric saws are used by those that don't have
gas operated ones or when no gas is available.  The small generator is
portable.  It can go where the need is.  The big one can't.  I mentioned
that gas stations didn't have power before.  One of the things I was able to
do with my small generator was power the gas pump at my boat club.  We have
an in ground tank that normally holds a few thousand gallons.  I, and others
with portable generators used them to power the pump and rationed gas
supplies to members.  Over the course of the post Wilma power outage, that
gas made the difference between staying up and running and having to shut
down.

I keep talking about Wilma because it was the most recent hurricane that
caused any real problems.  In fact, it caused more problems than any
hurricane since Andrew.  Wilma damaged the power distribution stations,
which had to be repaired before the normal downed wires and burned out
transformers could be fixed.  Thousands of older power poles snapped off and
had to be replaced before power could be restored.  In the recent past, a
couple of weeks was about as long as anybody expected to be without power.
Not this time.  My neighborhood has underground power lines.  They're much
more reliable than over head ones, but the power still comes through those
distribution stations and still gets to my neighborhood via overhead lines.

One more thing I failed to mention while being called a whore.  There are a
lot of retired people in S. Florida.  Many of them live in mobile homes.  A
mobile home is simply not safe in any major hurricane.  Some survive, many
don't.  Those that don't, tend to be completely destroyed.  While there are
shelters down here, they don't take pets.  Hell has a special place for
people that abandon their pets.  Because there are only two of us living in
a 2 bedroom home, we normally contact families we know that live in mobile
homes, that have pets, and provide food and housing for them during a
hurricane.  Once, we had to provide longer term accomodations when the home
of our guests was destroyed.

There's no setting.  Generators, at least all three of mine (includes the
one built into the boat), adjust the frequency of their power output by the
speed of the motor.  The one in the boat runs at 3,600 rpm any time it's
running.  Both my large home generator and my small one have a fuel saving
setting, but all it does is drop the rpm when there is no load at all.  A
single 120 volt draw kicks them up to full rpm.  Having said that, you are,
of course, right about fuel consumption.  The small generator will run
almost as long on a gallon of gas as the large one will on 5 gallons.

It's a non trivial issue, here, all the time.  My neighbors' walls are 12
feet from my walls.  My generators sit within that 12 feet.  Lucky for me,
and my neighbors, the power outlet I use to backfeed my panel is outside my
garage and as far as it's possible to be from my bedroom.  The neighbor's
house, on that side, is the opposite of mine, which means the generator is
also outside his garage and as far as possible from his master bedroom.
Both houses are sound insulated, minimizing the noise, but the large
generator is not quiet.  The small one is.

That's the goal.  Here are a few things to consider.  I'm sure you know one
of them.  I want to be very sure you know the other two:
1. Make very sure that the generator is well away from anyplace that will
allow CO to enter your home.  No matter how many times we announce it, we
lose a few families to CO poisoning every time power goes out.  Anywhere
inside your home is too close, including your garage.  On your patio, if
it's inclosed in any way, is probably also too close.  No matter where you
put the generator, go over to home depot, or similar, and buy a couple of
batter operated CO detectors and put them where you can hear them no matter
where you are in  your house.  They must be lower than your head, including
when  you are sleeping.  CO is heavier than air and will fill your home from
the bottom up.  A high CO detector is of no use at all.
2. Make very sure that, before you backfeed your breaker box, you disconnect
from the power company completely.  My house has an outside breaker to do
that.  More sophisticated systems have transfer switches that will not allow
both the generator and outside power to be connected at the same time.
Those with neither, pull the meters.  However you do it, make sure you do it
completely.  There will be power company workers out and about and they need
to know that, when they shut the power off from their end, it's really off.
It's been a long time since anybody was electrocuted thanks to someone
backfeeding the main line, but it's happened.  What's more common is that
the workers can't do their job until they have a dead line to work on.  Your
generator can prevent efficient restoration of service if not isolated from
their lines.
3. Every time a storm hits down here, there are people going around stealing
generators.  They've gotten quite innovative in their methods.  One of the
more interesting ways is to bring an old lawn mower in in to simulate the
generator noise while they disconnect and steal the real one.  Chain yours
to something substantial or risk losing it.

It's worse than that down here.  They use police to guard the gas stations
here.

Lee

Per Grumman-581:

Which begs a question I've had in the back of my mind.

Has anybody compared the fuel consumption of two gennies like the
Honda EU2000 running parallel to give 3600 continuous watts with
the consumption of a single machine putting out a like amount?

If it's not *too* much higher, I can see it might actually be
cheaper long-run bc both would not be running at capacity all the
time and maybe that consumption would be less than the single
larger one running at like capacities.