Hurricane Season 2022 and We're Ready

 When we moved to Covington five years ago, there were five things high on the list of importance:  House, which we had built, Outdoor Kitchen, which we had built,  Elevator to the attic, which we built ourselves, Good doctors who were close by, and a Whole House Generator for Hurricane Season.

We could not afford the generator, so it was the last detail to happen.

Thanks to a friendly neighbor who wanted a new generator, he gave us his old one.  A 22 KW Generac that had been under a service contract the entire time he owned it, and was in excellent condition.  Considering the number of times the power is to for an extended period, you might say it has low miles on it.

All we had to do was arrange for the natural gas line to be run from the meter, and the electrical switchbox be hooked up.  Neither comes cheap, even if you can find someone to do it.  Most generator companies are so busy after Hurricane Ida that they are backed up for months to do the installation, assuming they can even get a generator.  "Backordered three to six months" is the typical response when we called.

But one day a lady posted in Facebook that her Plumber Husband was seeking some extra weekend work and is available immediately.   We called him, yes, he has experience hooking up gas to generators and can start the following weekend.

When he arrived, he happened to be one of the plumbers who plumbed our house for water and gas.

And he knew an electrician who could do the electrical work on weekends.  The electrician worked for the company that wired our house.  And he had considerable experience in and help to do the complicated wiring.

They finished up two days ago.  We now have automatic backup power that can keep everything in our house working during an outage.  We won't suffer next time.

Yes, we could have gone with a portable generator and got by quite easily, but at our ages, we just didn't want to do that .  And the timing turned out perfectly.

Now we can tackle the other things we wanted to do in our final years - relax, enjoy, and breathe normally.

I think the generator looks nice beside The Coop, one of the other priorities.

Follow-up 6-1-22

This morning my Sweetie set the generator to "Exercise" at 9:00 weekly.  It was almost 9:00 so we waited.  At 9:01.50 the generator started right up, 'exercised for exactly 5 minutes, and shut down. Three hours later we were headed out the door and the generator started back up.  We didn't even notice bu the power in our area suddenly went out.  The generator noticed it before we did, and fed the house and everything in it all the power it needed to keep life normal.

We feel very confident that we're going to be comfortable during any kind of outage.  That makes us feel good.