Put in a lot of the Generac units. All the below is about the Generac/Guardian units. They had their problems but for the money what do you want. My bigest issue was dealing with the manufacture and the dealer agreements.
We would scrap out all the factory flex and prewired transfer switch and start over with pipe. The flex natural gas hose was always hang up until we chucked that too.
For these figure buying a car sized battery, gravel, gas pipe, and a 2 pole for your panel.
IMO if your going to have a generator for your home get an auto transfer sw and auto start unit.
Everyone is always worried about the noise. Unless it is an aproval issue with the city who cares. Would you rather have hot/cold, dark, nothing working in the quiet, or a noise outside like a lawn mower. I forgot the spec and it changes with the models. The models change yearly just to make it harder on the installers, sales, & service people. I want to say the spec is 68-72 db. The catch is it is measured 20' away. Like said a few liguid cooled units run quieter at 1800 RPM while the air cooled are 3600 rpm.
An option for a few of the air cooled units that are around 15 KW and above is a quiet test mode. All that means is once a week when it does an auto start up, it will run at 1800 rpm which is quieter. It will not generate power in this mode. A neat feature, but you can set it to run any time each week. So if you set it to run when your not home for 5 minuits it does not matter on the noise to most people. My thought is it is just a dip switch setting on the board that does this and it's disabled on the lower models. I forgot which switch it was. But I never got to test my idea out.
People have told me they had problems getting fuel with gas generators when the whole area was out. All they had to do was drive to the next town but because many traffic lights were not operating normaly it took almost as much time to fill up their can as the generator burned.
As much as I hate Home Chepo they were selling units about the same as it cost to ship one from the manufacture at a dealers price. Unless you ordered a few units or got some special.
Also don't expect any manufacture support on the product.
If it's broke you'll find a list of dealers that are sometimes pushed to provide warrenty service, but are no way set up for it.
If you have a question the manufacture does not have an end customer help line or tec support. The best they will do is provide you with one of their unfortunate dealers. You will be calling another EC that has no intrest in providing free help for someone elce to install or repair the unit. At least I never did. I would get calls asking what terminal should I put the purple wire on model #... If I was at my PC my guess is could take me an hour to find that information & figure that out, but why would I. All I would say is "would you like to schedule a service call with min charge of". That would get rid of them.
