The standby generator takes, I don't know, 15 seconds or so until the power comes on.
It's great. Gives you time to do something, or nothing.
Because I'm cheap and think it's wasteful to run the 22kW standby when not necessary, I fill the tub with water (we're on a well), take showers, microwave, etc, and then break out the little Honda 2kw inverter.
Anyway, this time we did not lose cable along with power.
The TalentCell batteries took over very nicely through the initial short break in power for hub, modem and router.
Seamless internet and voip phone before the standby kicked in.
Also, no break in service during the transfer over to the little genny.
All automations worked fine with electric power of either generator source. Except for that one dimmer...darn it.
Even if I won't have to use it remotely for a long term outage, not having to think about shut downs and start ups during the power source switchovers is very helpful.
Hope you get power back soon. I went around 2 weeks once when we had a terrible ice storm. Brought most overheads wires down and my Honda generator was a life saver, along with propane stoves, candles and battery lights. Living in a very rural area you get used to being prepared for these times.
I’m dealing with a power outage too and restoration not projected until 11pm tomorrow. Powering essentials with my electric F150 power including Internet. Both HE hubs working great but most lights are wall switches and are still dead. The few Lamps I have are working fine though. Local for me is far less important in a power outage because without backup power nothing else works anyway and the first thing I power is the Internet router and then the fridge. Now if Comcast barfs that’s a whole different story. In those cases the local nature of HE is priceless.
My outage is a fair weather outage. Nothing widespread.
You'd think if it was something minor they'd have enough people to fix it, even at night.
It almost seems as if they're waiting for daylight.
Another beef of mine is that they never tell customers what the cause of the outage was.
The fridge just kicked on and bogged down the little Honda 2000eu. I think I measured that at a certain starting point in its cycle it draws 1000w for a moment. I had some other stuff on earlier and the generator choked. Can't beat the fuel economy though.
My wife was complaining about losing food in the fridge, I'm cheap and don't want to burn up the propane in the 22kw standby, so now I'm on the couch listening to the soothing sound of the little Honda, purring away.
Oh don't be cheap. Fire up that 22kw. When I put mine in the guy said "well you really only need 14kw" and I said "Listen. When the whole neighborhood is dark I want to be that guy whose house is lit up like a christmas tree and I'm in the hot tub with an ice cold martini."
At the beginning of COVID I stocked my freezer with steaks. Sure enough the freezer died. I think I had something like 24 beef tenderloins I gave away.
It was right after that I put a freezer in the basement and installed the generator
Here in Northern Illinois, we recently had an ice storm. There were over 100,000 power outages, but they were scattered. Some folks a mile away never lost power; but I was out for about 18 hours. All my computers, cable modem, router, and home automation hubs and bridges are on UPS backup, so I was able to power them down in an orderly manner.
I did lose a couple of my Tuya based smartplugs due to power surges. Everything else survived.
I do have a gasoline powered generator and I was making plans to get it out of the garage and running when the power came back on. I have a couple of freezers with meat stocked, but the temperature never got above 5 degrees F, so the meat was fine. If the temperature had gone much higher, I would have gotten the generator running.
We have lived in this area for 23 years. Up until this ice storm, the longest power outage we have experienced was 4 hours when an underground transformer went out a a block away. It took the power company 3 hours to replace the transformer. Other than that outages, most have been 30 minutes or less. Thus, I have never seen the need for a permanently installed generator. Although I have a portable generator, the only time it has run is when I am starting it up for testing purposes.
