Historically when there is a winter power outage here I have to first hope that the outage will not last long enough for the house temperature to drop too low, and second make sure I have enough boxes around so that if it drops too low I can bring the reptiles into the room with the wood-burning stove (which provides a very dry heat and is not very good for them). Luckily I have only had to resort to that once when we had a 4 day outage during an ice storm, but I was thinking about the possibility of getting a generator for these situations.
Obviously the best scenario would be a standby natural gas generator that would operate the appropriate circuits, but who can afford that? I was doing some research on portable generators (in the $500-600 range) and it seems as though it would be easy enough to plug one into the house and turn off all of the breakers except the fridge and the thermostat (and other circuits necessary to run a natural gas furnace), and just fire it up when the temperature in the house goes below 60, and turn it off when it reaches about 68. I could also close all of the registers except those in rooms with reptiles (the basement and two bedrooms).
Does anyone else do this? I know that you can usually plug the generator directly into a clothes dryer outlet, and I have also seen some people install an outlet on the outside of their house specifically for the generator.
The hope is that we would very rarely need to use it. I mean, in the summer we would likely only ever need it to run the fridge (because the fact that the heat lamps and the air conditioner are both off usually cancels each other out), and in the winter it would only be necessary when the power is out for more than 12 hours, and at that point it would probably only be necessary to run it for 30 minutes every once in a while. It definitely seems like the more economical option than installing a standby generator.
Darn my climate.
Obviously the best scenario would be a standby natural gas generator that would operate the appropriate circuits, but who can afford that? I was doing some research on portable generators (in the $500-600 range) and it seems as though it would be easy enough to plug one into the house and turn off all of the breakers except the fridge and the thermostat (and other circuits necessary to run a natural gas furnace), and just fire it up when the temperature in the house goes below 60, and turn it off when it reaches about 68. I could also close all of the registers except those in rooms with reptiles (the basement and two bedrooms).
Does anyone else do this? I know that you can usually plug the generator directly into a clothes dryer outlet, and I have also seen some people install an outlet on the outside of their house specifically for the generator.
The hope is that we would very rarely need to use it. I mean, in the summer we would likely only ever need it to run the fridge (because the fact that the heat lamps and the air conditioner are both off usually cancels each other out), and in the winter it would only be necessary when the power is out for more than 12 hours, and at that point it would probably only be necessary to run it for 30 minutes every once in a while. It definitely seems like the more economical option than installing a standby generator.
Darn my climate.