Originally Posted by PersianKitty

Every little outage we would get in the winters I kept saying I was going to get a generator. ..an hour or two here... 8 hours many times... several long dark nights... Then 2 winters ago we had an outage that lasted 5 days in my area. On day four after losing everything in my fridge and both freezers, I snagged a little gas generator at Sears. Even for the one day.. what a pain in the butt.

I started checking on Home Standby generators especially since I'm on a natural gas line. Finally settled for a beefy model so that it ran at a lower rpm. What I got is a Kohler 35KW. It's essentially a GM Vortec 4.3L V6 engine (I posted above it was a V8 but I was wrong). Generator alone was about $16K in 2007. Then there's the transfer switch and a very very long run of gas pipe that had to be done. Installed it was $23K. Some would say that's alot but with the value of my house and the fact that it increases resale value... and on top of that the fact that I'm not without power ever again short of some disaster that breaks the gas lines too....

it was worth it.