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Is this for seldom-happens, short duration outages?

Or anticipated, frequently happens long duration outages?

Do you want to run the house? Or just a few critical appliances and lights?

Will you want a portable generator so it can be used for jobs as well as household backup? ( I have a large portable that can power our vacation home as well as provide power for lotsa tools on a construction site)

Do you care about how quiet it is?

Are you planning to go "off grid", co-gen, or sell power back onto the grid?

Tell us more about how you plan to use the generator.

If it's just to run the fridge and a few lights when an ice storm knocks out power, then run down to Home Depot/ Lowes and buy an 8500W Honda powered gasoline 'portable'. That's my recommendation. 8500 watts can run our 3 bedroom vacation home if we are judicious about consumption. Ran that sucker for nearly three days straight once. AND it has helped build many a structure. No maintenance worries at all.

We want to run the furnace, frige, water pump, and a few lights. Sometimes we have outages in the winter as long as three days. We have a fireplace, as a back up, but it gets smokey.