We installed a Briggs & Stratton 26 kW generator on natural gas about four years ago.
You need to start with your reasons for wanting a generator, how often your power goes out, average outage duration/time to restore, how long a ride-through you will need, what loads in your house are critical and which are nice-to-have, the distance to your substation, overhead vs underground power lines, tree density, are power corridors kept pruned. Are you wanting to avoid extended stays in a hotel (if you can find a room) or just avoiding nuisances?
A HUGE consideration is whether you travel for extended periods and the risk of your place freezing up in winter.
We are in the north woods in North Idaho and there have been a couple of week-long outages the past 20 years. We get frequent big windstorms and lots of downed trees. I mean LOTS! The companies are always swamped for a month after a big storm. We travel a fair amount and the last thing I want is to come home to burst water pipes from a two day deep freeze and no power.
We are in seventies and travel a fair amount. I want to make sure we have power when family and friends visit, especially for Christmas and Thanksgiving. I sprang for the permanent whole house solution sized to run AC, electric oven, electric dryer, lights and everything else. We installed modules to stage the three big load; they come on line sequentially over several minutes to avoid overloading and tripping the generator.
We used it once last year for an 18 hour outage. It’s really nice to look out at a dark neighborhood when you are in a toasty, warm, well lit house.
I would love a whole-house automatic gas genny, but I just can’t justify the expense.
Our power outages are so infrequent and brief. We don’t have flooding where I live. We have outages maybe 3-6 times a year, most only lasting a few minutes, some up to 3-4 hours. The longest this year was about 7 hours.
I’ve got a couple little Honda 1-2kW quiet gennies and was just about to pull one out when the juice came back on.
It sounds like you can really justify your investment in your situation.