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I'm sure many people have worse stories than mine, but the longest mine was out was Dec of 2006 for just over 4 days. After 36 hours, I moved my desktop PC to a hotel 30 minutes away that had power and internet. My youngest son, then 18, refused to leave his reptiles. He put them all in plastic storage boxes or aquariums and put them in my family room in front of the fireplace insert. Luckily I have natural gas for my cooktop, the water heater, and the fireplace insert. He and his GF stayed here with all the critters the entire time. Late in the day on day 3, I managed to get a 5600watt gas generator from Sears (truckload came up with some because they'd been all out). The generator ran the fridge in the house (tossed most everything out of it along with all that was in the fridge in the garage), a few lights, and a couple of small electric heaters.
I was back and forth during all that time but we'd closed off parts of the house like my bedroom, etc to try to get the little bit of heat generated more centralized.
Three months later, I had a 35KW, 1800rpm, standby generator installed. It's plumbed into the natural gas line and has an automatic transfer switch. We have it wired to run everything except the a/c and the pump in the pond and the rock water feature.
Longest outage we've had since then was 9 hours late one evening and into the morning. It was interesting watching cars slow down as they drove through the dark neighborhood and saw my lit up landscape and house.
Now when the power goes out we count to 15 and have electricity again.
PK
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