On 11/29/2011 10:37 PM, Jeffrey Angus wrote:
On 11/29/2011 9:27 PM, Bill Horne wrote:

Right now, I'd settle for any genset that won't break my budget
and will serve the purpose for three years.

I would suggest the Honda "really quiet" series and then size it
at the minimum requirement for the heaviest load (by itself) then
select what runs at any given time instead of that.

(This is based on the serious bugaboo of cost/hour for fuel.)

Fuel costs aren't cheap, but that's less of a factor than you
might think: after all, when the power /is/ out, the cost of
fuel is balanced against the chance of freezing pipes or
spoiled food. Plus, frankly, there's more than a little bit
of "lookit me" factor: during the recent outage, even though
I was making do with a tiny 2KW set, the XYL was more than
happy that /her/ lights were on when everyone else's
were out.

Fuel consumption figures for gasoline gensets range from
0.5 gal/hour up to 1 gal/hour for the range of sets I'm
looking at: not cheap, but not a deal-breaker either[1].
Natural gas would run about $1/hour for my area, but the
gensets I've seen which will run on that fuel have
extraordinarily high noise ratings: one is 84 dba at
23 feet away!

This whole exercise reminds me of a public debate about
the appropriate size of a breakwater for a seaside
community: a Category-5 hurricane is "maybe", and
"someday", but the cost of cement is /right/ /now/.
The hardest part is figuring out how likely a power
failure is, and whether it is likely to last long
enough to cause a major loss.

73,

Bill, W1AC

1. If anyone knows how to get "off road" gasoline, where
the price doesn't include road taxes, please tell me. They
have "off road" diesel fuel, but I don't know about gas.

--
Bill Horne
(Remove QRM from my address to write to me directly)