5 reasons why you shouldnt count on a generator when TSHTF.

[Mortblanc]

Several years beck we had an inland hurricane come through our region. It enlightened us to several shortcomings of the local infrastructure, including the fact that our closest major urban area only had a 5 day water supply.

At any rate the power outage in my sector lasted for 10 days. Gas became a problem of one neighbor when he decided to run his genset 24 hours a day and after the first day discovered that none of the gasoline stations in our town was operating!

I was living on a lightly traveled residential street at that time and helped the neighbors through the event mostly by enlightening them to the resources they already had and how to use them. One neighbor almost lost $5000 in tropical fish before I reminded him that the same inverter he used to power the computer while in his car would run the fish tank filter! And that a propane grill would cook food even if there was no barbeque scheduled.

One of the things we did was to run electric cords between 4 houses and plug in the deep-frezers at each house. If we ran the genset for 1 hour each day we could preserve the frozen food at each of the 4 houses and no one lost anything. I saved half a beef cow in that effort and the neighbors did not even lose any icecream. I do not remember using a full tank of fuel during that 10 day effort.