I know not everyone can afford a generator, but does practically everyone that can afford one, have one?
Are they that expensive to run? Do they power the whole house like electricity? What kind of fuel do they use? How many hours does a gallon last? Could a typical home owner safely store enough for a week of power?
Do they take a lot of maintenance and protection from the elements when not being used?
Percentage of ALL homes affected by the storm? Less than 1% I’m sure. It’s not a very common item to have on hand. Probably more popular in rural homes that can be stuck without power for extended amounts of time.
I’m camped out in a friend’s house in southeastern PA that has lost power, but which has a generator. It came on automatically when power failed and has been doing a fine job for about 30 hours now. It’s 17KW, which means it can handle something close to the full house, but probably not everything at once.
Seems to be burning a bit more than one gallon of propane per hour. The tank is 80 gallons, and the power is not projected to be back on for 3 days, so a propane refill may happen tomorrow.
The generator sits about 60 ft from the house (so noise is not a problem) in its own weatherproof housing. No particular maintenance is needed.
This is clearly a top-of-the line kind of setup - my friend put it in due to being in a tolerably rural area that sees several power interruptions a year (most seem to be of short duration).
I have no idea what percentage of houses have this. But it sure makes a power failure more pleasant.
Most people don’t have one.
Expensive to run? Depends on the type and what you’re trying to run. Portable generators usually run on gasoline (you decide if the price of gasoline is expensive for the service it will provide). The bigger they are the more they can run and the longer they can run on a tank. Many people will get something just good enough to run the sump pumps to avoid flooding.
If you can store gasoline in the proper containers then no reason why you can’t keep about a weeks worth of fuel available.
Maintenance? Needs oil of the proper viscosity. Should be protected from the elements when not in use.
Wow, 17KW?! That’s a mega-system, easily in the high four-figure price range to purchase & install (even if you do some of it yourself). Portable (or at least movable) generators you buy at Home Depot generally run from about the 1 to 4KW range.
To over-generalize: If you live in the city you’re not going to have a generator. There’s no need, most electric utilities are 99.98% reliable. Until recently I lived in a modest sized city my whole life and I can literally count the number of full scale blackouts lasting more than an hour on one hand. Plus generators are impractical for urban areas, too noisy, too bulky to long-term store in a garage or basement, too heavy to move easily etc. The suburbs are pretty much the same deal as the cities, although you’ll find the occasional do-it-your-selfer who might have a small one to power a lamp & a TV in a pinch.
I now live out in the country, where per square block the trees out number the homes by an order of magnitude. Out here I’d say at least 50% or more of homes will have one because out here it isn’t a case of if you’ll lose electricity, but when & for how long, and not just on special occasions like this, but semi-routinely. On average I’d say that over the course of one year we lose power for about three or four whole days total, every year. In the summer because of air conditioning overloads and, more importantly, in the winter because of storms (snow & ice knock down trees, trees knock down power lines). And in the winter these storms can cause outages of over a day, which means that if you don’t have a generator you can’t run your furnace, which means if the outage lasts too long and it’s too cold your pipes can freeze & burst causing a big mess & expense. Also when you live out in the country you don’t have municipal water pressure, you have a well pump, which means that no electricity equals no water. Not just no hot water, no running water at all! You can go days without TV, A/C, a furnace and just using flashlights, but no running water stops you in your tracks. No shower, no food preparation, no dish cleaning, and most importantly no toilet!
Since the price of gasoline doubled in the last five years it’s definitely way more expensive to use a generator than a utility (it was generally more expensive even when gas was cheaper) but over the course of just a few days or even a week you’re not gonna go broke using one. All home generators run on gasoline, a small percentage use propane instead (usually permanent, turn-key setups as propane is somewhat easier & safer to store long term). Only large industrial ones will be diesel (they’re in the five-figure price range). Permanent, turn-key ones are meant to be installed outside (on a slab) next to your house, so they’re designed to be weather-proof and pretty maintenance-free. Because they all generally don’t get used very much even the smaller, roll around, semi-portable ones are basically maintenance-free, just check the oil each season.
My dad’s house is a modest, two-story three-bedroom log house. We have a roll-around unit that puts out 3.5KW (3500W). I roll it just outside the basement/garage door and just cover the top with a piece of plywood to keep the weather off it (rain, snow), start it, plug in the wires, then close the basement door. Running it actually in the basement would be too loud and fill it with carbon monoxide (not a good thing). 3500 Watts powers the furnace, the well pump (220V), the refrigerator, a couple lamps and a couple big screen TVs w/o any trouble. Because we have cablevision phone service I also have make sure to plug in the modem/router or the phone won’t work.
The gas tank on the genny itself is probably less than two gallons, and running all those things it will last about five hours.
Hail Ants, sounds like you’d been pretty fortunate prior to moving out to the country. In 2011 in Chicago we had a few storms that knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of people, leaving some without power for up to a week, but a day or so (enough to ruin your refrigerated and frozen food) was typical each time. A generator would have paid for itself by the end of that summer in terms of not having to replace food, for many people.
That being said, to the OP: generators are (generalizing here) loud, fuel hogs, emit toxic exhaust that will sicken or kill people if you have it parked too close to your residence (think: running car in attached garage), and if you want to wire it into your house current (rather than just running a couple extension cords), you need to have a skilled professional wire it in or you could screw things up and/or risk killing someone due to (IIRC) “backflow” when they’re working on the supposedly dead lines near your house.
As a suburbanite, I’ve been thinking it’d be nice to have something that would run just the fridge (on and off, even) and maybe the AC a few times a day in hot weather, but sadly those are probably the biggest energy consumers in my house.
I’m inside the Beltway in the DC area (that means close-in suburbs). I would guess that something like 2-3% of the folks in this neighborhood have generators, but they seem to be the permanent things like Xema is talking about. I’ve been in this neighborhood for about 10 years. We lose power several times per year. Most of those are short-term, but I can think of four occasions that we’ve lost power for more than 24 hours. I have no plans to get a generator, but I really wish it were feasible to have a back up battery for the furnace. I can live with heat, but I don’t care for it when the house gets below 45 degrees.
In Manhattan, where about 300,000 people are without power, everybody lives in high-rise apartments. Where would one put a generator? On top of that, because the power lines are buried, outages are quite rare, so buildings tend not to have them.
My building has cogeneration, which would run one elevator and the hallway/stairway emergency lights in the case of an outage. We haven’t had one since the cogen system went in last year. (I live in Upper Manhattan, which was probably the best place to be in the entire NYC region during Sandy. We’re much higher above sea level than Lower Manhattan, so no flooding of either ourselves or our power stations, and still have those buried power lines.)
In the cities, as as GilaB noted, there’s no place to put a generator. High-rises have the extra issue of people literally being stuck in their homes simply because of a power outage - if you’re on the 20th floor, and the elevator is dead, getting in and out is a real issue. Out, not so much of course, but getting back home is a problem unless you’re in pretty good shape.
I’m in a suburban area, fairly densely populated (suburb of Washington DC). Very few people around here have generators. Power outages do happen, and they can be somewhat extended - on the order of days to a week or more - but they aren’t common enough that most people would truly need one. For example in the 10 years we’ve lived in this house, we’ve lost power maybe 4 times (not counting blips of a few minutes). The worst that would happen to most households is a spoiled fridge full of food, and being uncomfortable for a day or two. I would guess that most people in the suburban areas of NJ and NY are in about the same situation.
As an ironic aside: I know person who has a whole-house generator in their new-to-them house (the kind that’s connected into the natural gas line and comes on automatically). The house they used to live in, shortly after they sold it, the new owners managed to make the news by nearly killing themselves by improper use of a portable generator. :smack:
Beside the grid being pretty reliable in the cities, there’s no need for the average person to have a generator for other things. Maybe in the country you want to plug in an electric tool or other gadget in hundreds of yards from the house, but in my suburban lawn there’s no where I can’t run an extension cord.
What if you want to run the satellite TV and the kegerator at your tailgate?
Connect 'em to the outlets in the Hummer, of course! Just run the engine to keep the batteries from running down.
I live in the Exurbs, about an hour north of Boston in NH. We were out two days due to Sandy. In the first 10 years there, we didn’t lose power for more than an hour or two at any one time. And even that was only once or twice per year.
In 2008 we had the Ice Storm (5 days). I was lucky. I wake early, saw the Armageddon, and called a friend outside the affected area and said “Be at Home Depot when they open. Buy me a generator and bring it here. This is going to be a while.” Smartest $1000 I ever spent, because in 2010 it was two days (unnamed wind storm), 2011 was four days (Halloween blizzard), and now Sandy was five.
5500 watt continuous running powers my well (220V), furnace/hot water (one unit, 110V), refrigerator, a few lights, TV, charges all the assorted modern wonders continuously. In addition, it easily handles a coffee maker, electric griddle, washer & gas dryer one or two at a time. In practice, I burn about 5 gallons of gas every 10 hours which I consider a small price to pay in such a situation.
Operation is simple, inside the house the noise is a non-issue, and the electrical installation is well within the capability of a competent DIY homeowner ($350 for manual switchgear).
I sort of resent the frequency of use in recent years, but along with the chainsaw I consider it essential to living in the woods. If ever I need a new one, I would probably go to around 7000 watt and be able to run everything. I do consider the permanant 10kW+ installations overkill, but I wouldn’t say no to one if someone is offering.
My only complaint is that sometimes you don’t know whether to roll it out or not. For Irene, I got the gas, set it up, put temporary shelter over it etc., and we lost power for about 4 hours.
Out in farm country, quite a few farmers have generator units without a motor – they are run by the power takeoff on the tractor. They are much cheaper, because they don’t need the motor half of a motor-generator unit. You have to leave the tractor idling for it to work, and need fuel for the tractor. But farms generally have a lot of fuel on hand.
Providing electricity this way is quite a bit more expensive than that from the utility company. But it’s necessary – modern farms are very dependent on electricity:[ul][li]for the well pump that provides water (and animals need a lot of water, more than can be reasonably hauled).[/li][li]for the heaters that keep the animal water tanks from freezing.[/li][li]for the conveyor systems to get feed for the animals from the storage bins.[/li][li]for the automatic milkers in dairy operations (cows get sick if they aren’t milked twice a day, and most operations are too big to do that by hand – and most modern dairy farmers probably can’t remember how to do it by hand).[/li][li]for the heating systems (heat lamps, etc.) needed for newborn animals to survive.[/li][li]for the lights needed to be able just to see to feed & water the animals.[/ul][/li]So for a farm, loss of electricity is not just a matter of being uncomfortable for a day or two – they will start to have animals suffering & dying within 12 hours, and the major economic loss that this entails.
My son lives at the top of a hill in Redmond, WA and he had a gas-operator generator installed several years ago (they have frequent power failures). It cost over $10K and has to be run at least once a month. It was sold as a system that would start automatically when the power fails (after 10 seconds, to be precise). It mostly doesn’t and there is no pleasure going out in a blinding snowstorm to start when it doesn’t (I had to do that, cell phone in hand for instructions, once when he was at work). The neighbors are not happy with the noise when he runs it once a month. They are less unhappy when he invites them in during a power failure. I don’t know what its capacity is, but it operates everything except the electric oven (the stove burners are gas) and, before he switched to a gas operated one, the clothes dryer. And since it operates on the gas supply, there is no fuel question.
If I had gas coming in to the house, I would be tempted. At least have enough power to run the fridge, freezer, oil burner, and a few lights. Maybe a kW would do it. Certainly 2kW.
You know, portable solar units aren’t that expensive. True, you’d have to be very careful what you leave on, and they don’t work at nite. But you could easily keep your freezer going during the day and then use battery powered (or perhaps solar charged) LED lights at nite.
Gas supplies are always scarce after disasters. They are reporting 4 hour and longer waits in NY. Cops are at gas stations controlling upset crowds.
Anyone with a generator needs a good siphon hose for their car. Try it out and make certain it works ok. My van has a 30 gallon tank. Thats a nice fuel supply for the generator in an emergency.
Fuel is a big pain in the butt. I get 5 hours per gallon with my small Honda generator. Every 5 hours I have to refill it. I wish it had a 2 gal tank.
I was out of power three days right after Labor day this year. Storm’s winds knocked down trees and power lines. Very thankful for my generator.
I’m a bit dubious that solar would be competitive with a $1K generator. But even if it were, most of the power outages in this part of the country are due to ice or snow storms which, naturally enough, happen during the times of the year when solar energy is not abundant. It certainly hasn’t been reliably bright and sunny here since Sandy came to town.
Well, factor in these costs: no fuel costs, no fuel storage, and can use even when there’s no outage to reduce electric bill. Certainly, during storms there’s less solar energy than during bright daylight, but it’s still there.