Thanks, everyone for the comments.
Remember things like fridges, AC, and many other appliances with compressors/certain motors will draw a large amount upon start up. With this in mind you'll need to give some extra wiggle room in your calculations. Yes, I noted that in my original posts, lol.
How often and for how long does power usually go out? The longest interruption this year was about 5 hours; however, I'm caring for my 95-year-old mom, so I have to make sure I can keep the heat going in cold weather. We can get by with lanterns and without TV, but furnace, fridge, deepfreeze, are the minimum; a toaster oven, coffee pot, or microwave would be useful as well. A generator with enough headroom to start the furnace should have spare capacity to run these other appliances, however.
If the fridge and freezer are frost free, the defrost heaters probably account for the high amp rating. The fridge is frost-free, of course, but the freezer is not. I suppose it could draw as much as five amps in warm weather with a lot of room temperature food, but I haven't seen more than 2 amps on the Kill-A-Watt meter.
I'm interested in this too. Our new house has a tankless gas water heater that requires a 120v connection to operate. I'm used to at least having hot water and a working land line when the power goes out. I can live without the landline but hot water not so much. We'll have to depend on our tank-type water heater. I don't think it would be worth it to get a genset big enough to power an electric tank-type heater.
we have Ooma voip and basis Internet. The Ooma box and router are on a med size UPS and the last long power outage we had was nearly 2 days. The UPS lasted and we had phone and surfed from tablets. Do you not need a separate internet service? We have At&T U-Verse triple play. The phone never works when the power is out.
Remember when the power goes out and the generator kicks in it will have to restart everything all at once. Compressors don't like to restart that quickly. With my setup, the generator will not be automatic-start, so I will restart each circuit separately.
best bet is to switch off all refrigeration when the power goes out, allow the generator to run 15 minutes or so to stabilize, only then start turning the refrigeration back on, and wait a minute or two till you turn the next one on. This allows for the start surge when the compressor first starts. It will take me at least 15 minutes to get the generator started and hooked up, so this shouldn't be a problem!
You should always shut off all refrigeration during a power cut, and wait at least 15 minutes before attempting to restart, regardless whether you have a backup power supply or if the mains power has returned. Sounds like a good idea. Sometimes it does come back on after just a few minutes. I always turn the AC off, but not the fridge.
Regarding the Generacs -- my neighbor is having a 22,000 watt unit installed, which will run off natural gas (she has a heat pump instead of NG heat, however, go figure) but I'm not thinking we will have enough prolonged outages to justify the cost. She's an elderly widow who doesn't want to fool with extension cords and so forth, so I don't blame her, but I think we can get by with a cheaper option.
