I can only look at it from the viewpoint of a country-raised Texan in a rural area-but if you want total convenience all the time, you buy a generator, as some of the posters suggested, or live in a city or town of good size. CT just doesn’t sound like the kind of “rural living” I’m used to. It sounds more like a city person’s idea of “roughing it”.
I didn’t see heat mentioned, but in an area of snowy winters, that is a real concern. Winter is mild here compared to CT, but everyone I know has at least one woodstove or fireplace, and buys a cord of firewood each Fall or gets permission to cut storm downed-or-dead trees on someone’s ranch.
There was no furnace in our ranch house, but there were a couple of fireplaces and a woodstove, and a space heater in the bathroom.
I’ll be building my next home to be off-grid-with solar power, and all of that stuff-not something I imagine would go over well in CT.
Yep, not much actually “rural rural” in CT at all. It is overwhelmingly suburban with different degrees of rural-to-urban feel.
Many comfortably-off house owners have got generators here over the past several years, as the frequency of outages seems to have gone up throughout New England. Others simply check into a hotel when there’s a storm coming.
Power companies will say it has to do with local limits on their chopping down or severely trimming trees; residents, on the utilities scrimping on repairs.
The idea of solar would be popular in purple-to-blue state CT, but the days of full sun here are limited.