The thing I found out about propane is they eat a lot of it and you can't count on getting a delivery anytime soon. I am a week out on a request with no truck.Fortunately my power came back in 8 days and I still had about 4 days of fuel left (gasoline and propane). Gasoline was getting easier to find by then so I was not really worried. I like the convenience of propane but it is expensive at 0.85 GPH on a 5.5KVA generator. I suppose I would run gasoline during the day and propane at night if I was doing this again for a while. A full tank of gas would get me through the night tho. I was still refueling in the dark and I don't like doing that. I suppose I really need some kind of battery powered light beyond a flashlight in my mouth, out there at the generator location. I also found need of 12vdc a few times when we were outside by the pool and not running the generator, just for our tunes.
I have a whole list of things I can do to make life easier on gen power.
One is to put a switch in my water heater to put the elements in series so the draw is more reasonable. It will take longer to heat the tank but it won't be 100% of the generator capacity. I even thought of putting smaller elements in it. We do not really use that much hot water so a slower recovery is not an issue.
I also need to balance my phases better with the required 120v equipment. For one, both fridges are on the same phase. That is just a breaker swap in the panel.
I am thinking about walking around with a 100' extension cord plugged into what I will call phase A and checking the outlets I use against that as a sanity check.
I was able to keep all of my general lighting breakers on and we just used some discipline in what we used.
My problem was always with too many locked rotors hitting at once.
I did put a breaker interlock in my panel years ago so I am not depending on LOTO. That part was pretty slick.
I will be better prepared next time.
Maybe when things really slow down I will make an enclosure for the genset. It is under cover in the location I use but not really enclosed so it was pretty noisy. I found hanging mover blankets over the block walls and between there and the neighbor cut the noise way down for them. With an enclosure I would be looking for a design that blocks noise but allows sufficient air flow. I would still want the exhaust going straight out so I will still need an external sound baffle system of some sort. I also want it up off the ground a few feet.
The biggest complaint I heard from my neighbors was that their generator would not run the AC and that is mostly a night time problem (sleeping). For the kind of money you will spend on a generator to run a big central air system, you could install a small mini split in the bedroom and have money left over. They are so efficient that you could get that money back by turning the central system off (or way up) at night. I never even saw the lights dim when that unit was running. They use an inverter design and start very "soft".
