I live in South Alabama, where I even run A/C in the winter some days. I hate being hot and sweaty in the house. It is the one luxury I splurge on myself, keeping the air at 71 degrees in winter and 73 degrees in summer.
When hurricane Ivan came thru here it really stormed bad, and I thought all my big pecan and pine trees would snap off with the steady 80+ mph winds, but thankfully the survived. The storm took about 8 hours to pass through from tip to tail until the sun came out and our power stayed on the whole time. And then, with the hot tropical sun beating down the power went off, and stayed off for a week.
I don't care about rotted meat, or not being able to see at night, or watch TV, wash clothes or myself (hell, this a creek on my property), but lying in bed with 99% humidity and in the 90s in the house just sucks too much.
So, like you, generating power is all about air conditioning. Yankees can talk about heating needs, but nothing consumes the watts like A/C in old Dixie. How DID those people live thru summer back in the day?
Sometimes I think about actually putting a generator IN the outside air exchangers. I long exhaust pipe to keep from breathing it and then give my cool, dry air!
I can do without TV, and I can pay $5/day to have my cell phone be a hotspot, so I could at least keep up with the news on my tablet. No big deal there.
After hurricane Matthew passed by last Fall we did spring a leak in a water pipe under the bathroom floor. At first we assumed water blew into the roof and got into the walls, but turned out to be a tiny crack in the pipe under the floor but inside a wall. But... having the juice to run some fans for a few days to dry out the drywall and baseboards that got soaked was fortunate. Without that, we would have been dealing with mold issues.
1. a 27kw Generac (water cooled) - $26K
2. a 30kw Kohler - (water cooled) - $34K
3. a 24kw Kohler (water cooled) - $19K
4. a 20kw Kohler (air cooled) - $15k
5. a 16kw Generac (air cooled) - $13K
All the vendors seem to check out... have decent reviews and a solid history and have the licenses in-house for the mechanical, electrical, etc.
We narrowed it down to options 3 or 4, and decided on 3 because that unit is more fuel efficient than the other and should run much quieter (water cool vs. air cool).
With the 24kw we should be able to run at least one, if not two of the three A/C units, fridge, and handful of other things at once... keeping us fairly comfortable during a prolonged outage.