I think a lot of it depends on where you live. City, suburbs, or rural. What's the infrastructure like - a lot of times the power grid is down due to storms an it can take days/weeks to repair, not just your place, but for the hotels as well. Are you on a hill, below grade, next to a creek, downstream on a flood plain, in a forrest, surrounded by lots of mature trees with overhead power lines, at the end of the line of the power grid?previous owner installed a whole house standby Generac - did not leave the receipt behind but I'm sure it wasn't cheap.
Last time I had the Generac tech out to perform yearly service, he mentioned that it was nearing EOL, which surprised me. Stated after ~15 years of service he starts seeing failures that aren't worth the cost to repair vs. replace.
I did the math and asked myself "do I typically experience $X/year of inconvenience due to power outages" and decided it was not worth replacing it when the next big repair bill comes due.
$50,000/15 years (plus service contract) = $3300/year. You can buy a lot of hotel rooms and bottled water for that cost.
Ice, flooding, wind, tornadoes, fires - these all affect people when the outages hit. Transportation in and out is affected. Refrigeration, keeping meds safe, pumping water, keeping pipes from freezing, keeping sump pumps operational, keeping snow melted around critical areas on roof/decks are all considerations.
For us it was simpler: we're rural, I told my wife she wouldn't have to worry about food, refrigeration, water, power, heat, etc. Peace of mind is worth it. Our cost for the generac installed was 13K or so. I did the trenching, and built the block pad above snow level myself. I don't need to run AC, just fans, so less demand. I also installed a pellet stove to lessen the demand for propane. And, I installed a whole house surge protector -- don't discount the value of this little item!
We have stored water, a second freezer, canned and dried food, and we keep the vehicles at 1/2 tank minimum. Our meds don't run low. We also insure we don't run low on food for the dogs.
Our one local gas station/small store has a large generator to stay operational in an outage as well.
As noted earlier, our generac is now secondary to the solar/battery system. So, on an outage, we have our battery kick in within a few seconds. Failing that, the generac kicks on 10 seconds after grid outage.
We've had 1,297 days of generac coverage. Run time to-date is 57 hours. Most of that is the weekly exercise. But, when the power does go out we look at each other and smile.
Statistics: Posted by Point — Thu Aug 08, 2024 11:43 am — Replies 24 — Views 1469