Dang out of town lurkers!! I be he even has ammo to sell on here too!

All he has to sell are Tumbleweeds and Armadillo carcasses his Wife shot.

Well, after one too many power outages and being inspired by y'all, I finally took a step in the world of generators. My original intent was just to write a big check and pay someone to come set up the whole shebang, to run the whole house, but then I realized that I could do what I needed without spending anywhere near that much money.

The previous owner of the house had installed a generator panel. It's labeled quite poorly, so I couldn't really tell what was connected to it, but I went on faith....

So here's what I did:

1) I bought a Harbor Freight Predator 3500 generator. Yeah, it's Harbor Freight, I know. But these generators have a great reputation, and they cost about $800.
2) I bought the components (cord, connectors), ran the cord through the opening that was already in the side of my garage, and assembled it to create the cable I needed to connect the generator to my generator panel.
3) After some research on what would fit, I bought a stowage tote from Target, and cut two holes in it for the exhaust and for cord/controls access. I double-back taped a few pieces of foam to the bottom of the container (thank you, Palmetto State Armory, hehe) so that the foam will rest on the top of the generator when in use, and it won't rattle around.

And today, I flipped off the main breaker to the house and fired it up....



(Don't mind that godawful extension cord, it's for the Christmas lights....)





Remember I said that the generator panel wasn't labeled very well, so I didn't know what would run? Well, here's what works:

- Kitchen lights and refrigerator. No kitchen outlets or microwave.
- Family room lights, outlets, TV, modem.
- One outlet in the garage. No lights, no garage door openers.
- Lights, outlets, fan, etc. in one guest bathroom.
- Lights in the guest bedrooms.
- Gas furnace.

What doesn't work, that I didn't list above? Dining room, living room, master bedroom, master bathroom.

But, the basics for comfortable survival during an outage are all there. And with all that stuff running, I never saw the generator get above 850W.

I'm fortunate that I have a gas hot water heater, gas furnace and gas cooktop -- so even with no or little power, I still have some of the usual comforts.

So far so good! Bring on the next windstorm!