New-Vegetable-1274 t1_j8cd5rc wrote on February 13, 2023 at 6:36 AM

I was living in Sturbridge then and we didn't have any problems to speak of the roads were good and the power never went out. Parts of Worcester, Holden, Rutland, Hubbardston, and Princeton got hit pretty hard, trees and power lines were down. You couldn't buy a generator anywhere in Worcester county. I had coworkers that didn't have power for six weeks. One of the good things that came out of it was a real American thing. Everyday on the way to work I'd see power company trucks from all over the place, from places like Missouri, Nebraska, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. Over a few months it had to have been a few hundred. We got a lot of the same help when the tornado hit us in 2011. We lucked out with that, no damage but neighbors up the road got wacked.

dpceee OP t1_j8cosge wrote on February 13, 2023 at 9:16 AM

We managed to get a generator, somehow. I do not remember how my father did it. It was only enough to power the fridge, freezer, and the pellet stove.

Luckily, we have a gas stove, so we could still use that without the electric starter.

New-Vegetable-1274 t1_j8e329d wrote on February 13, 2023 at 5:06 PM

I think that anyone who owns a house in a vulnerable area ought to have a generator. You can have a portable generator hard wired into your home with it's own circuit breaker panel. The size of the generator depends on your house. Any generator, portable or permanent needs to be started once a month and run for awhile. The other option is home standby generators, also called whole-house generators, they are permanently installed by a pro and have insulated weatherproof housing that keeps them relatively quiet. The advantages? They kick on automatically when the lights go out, and they can power everything in your home at once. They also self start and run once a month. These are expensive but convenient and last about 15 years before they need to be replaced. There are also solar options just coming on the market, I'd wait on that to see how that technology progresses.

dpceee OP t1_j8ecmcg wrote on February 13, 2023 at 6:12 PM

You've described exactly what we did after the storm, except we went with the more simple option. The hookup is on the outside of the house and there is a four switch panel in the basement that controls that.

However, we've not gotten it so sophisticated, since our generator is in 80-90 year old garage. The generator we got still needs to be plugged into the outside of the house, but that's better than snaking an orange extension cable through the house.