Guide to living well: I've been too inconvenienced by the occasional long term lack of electricity during snowstorms, thunderstorms, and hurricanes, etc. It is particularly bad since my CPAP requires power and I really need CPAP.

Consequently I've been on a crusade to ensure backup power for the house. I've already acquired a $50 old gasoline generator now under repair. Brian helped adjust it with this really neat voltage and frequency measuring tool for generators called a Kill-a-Watt. The Kill-a-Watt instrument is less than $30 bucks and I, like every other generator user, highly recommend it. I just changed the governor spring on the generator so it needs yet more adjustment. I don't have the strength to start it myself because it lacks an electric starter.

That brings me to my second generator purchase. There was an ad on Craigslist for an Onan propane fueled 5 kilowatt generator. It had been removed from a house owned by a lady who was upgrading to a bigger generator. It has an electric starter. Propane is highly desirable for a backup generator because it stores indefinitely unlike gasoline or diesel. Onan generators are the top-of-the-kind brand. They are extremely expensive new. I got it used for only $300 and that is quite a bargain even used. The downside to all this is that now I need to build a generator house for it and install a transfer switch for the generators.

Now, for those of you who are into the art of living well, you might superficially think that I'm not living well at all what with all these repairs on used generators. That would be an incorrect conclusion. Actually I think all of this mechanical and electrical stuff is a great deal of fun. For those of you who don't think it is fun, just buy a new generator for thousands, buy a transfer switch for a few hundred to a thousand, pay an electrician 2k to install it. It takes a lot of ducats to do that. Only an MBA with an indentured servant could afford it.