because it’s a fun toy ....... I’ll give you that, as long as you didn’t get a tax break just for buying one.
As for your risk mitigation, it would be irrelevant during rolling blackouts and when power shuts down like it did last winter in Texas.
So, you can afford a toy that others can’t. I don’t care. But, it seems a bit pompous to have a ‘great feeling of risk mitigation’ when the pipeline went to sh*t last year because this country has ZERO leadership and corporate America is pretty much incompetent. Not to say that you have to feel the pain like everyone else, but I don’t see it’s anything to be doing cartwheels over.
As for the polarization.....Easy Peasy....it’s being rammed down our throats - tax breaks as an incentive to buy one when the same incentives aren’t available to anyone else for anything else(Ga was giving rich folks who could afford a $100k Tesla a $5k tax break..I’m not about giving a guy who can afford a $100k Sunday Driver tax money) - it’s places like California more or less outlawing gas engines in the future - they’ve outlawed 2-cycle engines, cars and trucks soon to follow.
I have a question for you or anyone else that cares to answer: Ford is really pushing their EV F150. It shows the truck powering up a house during a power outage. Just how much electricity is stored in that truck? Folks who have standby generators have to do some serious planning and math if/when the power goes out and they turn to a generator, unless they have one so big it’ll power the whole house. And if that’s being done, I’d say they’d have to have, at least, a 15k generator running on gas, diesel or propane. How long will that F150 last? They’re making it out like you can drive it home and then run your house for a while with no juice being generated.
We live in an area where the power goes out frequently. Fortunately we have natural gas which currently costs less than a third to run a generator than gasoline. When our power goes out it often stays out for days and sometimes weeks. We have a 30 year old Generac with a Briggs/Stratton IC 10HP engine. I have no clue how many thousands of hours it now has on it. It is getting a little tired but because natural gas runs cleaner it keeps going and going. We do have a backup in storage but it has never had to be used. It puts out 5000 watts and we can run our entire house on it, but it does take a slight amount of planning.
It puts out 240 volts and if you try to run two high wattage major appliances on the same 120v side of that it will cause problems. Most frequently if you have the 1200 watt microwave or washing machine going and you try to use the toaster or hair dryer plugged in on the same side it will cause the generator to sputter and start browning out everything. It happens immediately so you just turn off the hair dryer or toaster and plug it into a different circuit. Other than that there are no other real issues.
The bigger the generator the more fuel that you are going to be using while it is idling away, I use a watt-meter and other advanced metering devices and it adds up to a substantial amount of extra fuel.
We typically use around 48 kwh in a day. Just check the electric company's meter a few days in a row to find out how much you normally use. It will vary depending on the time of the year. We run fridges and freezers on our generator but only smaller air-conditioning units. Most F150 lightnings have a 98kwh battery. Theoretically that would mean 2 days worth of power for us. But in reality you should not charge that big battery to more than 80-90% or discharge it to less than 20%. So you can see that it really only can provide closer to one days worth of power for my family.