Electricity is a luxury that works most of the time. In the thunder and lightning storms of the midwest, where we’re from, outages were rare. An outage lasting more than two hours caused people to consider hoarding resources for survival. Here, an outage is just an outage, and when the electricity will come back on is anybody’s guess. Folks who grew up in rural America seem to think electricity is a bit overrated anyway. Last winter the electricity was out in Cocolalla for 3-4 days in some areas. It barely made the newspaper. Chicago would have the National Guard patrolling streets by Day Two.
If you need to have electricity for, say, running your business out of your home or running your well pump, and if you have electric heat for your house, you might have a different opinion of this resource. Thus a secondary power supply such as a generator is not uncommon. To that end, we’ve just purchased the first piece of our new house: a 16Kw generator that will enable us to keep things going during an outage.
I forgot to mention the other luxury – natural gas. When you live far from nowhere, getting natural gas piped directly into your house is uncommon, so folks get propane tanks delivered. Rather than having to play with gasoline tanks to fuel our generator, this one will be fueled by propane from a tank in the back yard. If all goes well, when the electricity goes out, the generator will kick in and can run for quite some time.