The Loads You Skip

The Water Heater — You Already Have a Tank of Hot Water

An electric water heater draws 4,000 to 4,500 watts when its elements are on. Size a generator around that and you have bought thousands of dollars of machine; run it and you are burning roughly half a gallon of propane per hour of heating — to make hot water you mostly already have.

Because here is what the appliance actually is: an insulated 40- or 50-gallon thermos. The moment the power fails, that tank is full of hot water, and it stays usably warm for a day or more if you treat it gently. Short showers, no long hot-water chores, and the family gets through the first day on stored heat — the same trick as the freezer, wearing a different jacket.

• Switch its breaker off when the outage starts. Flipping a labeled breaker on the panel face is ordinary homeowner territory — the inside of the panel is not, and nothing here requires it. The reason: when power returns (or the generator comes on), you decide when that 4,500-watt load wakes up, instead of it deciding for you in the middle of everything else starting at once.
• If you must reheat, do it as an event. An hour of generator time with everything else switched off, then the breaker goes back off. One deliberate tank of hot water costs far less fuel than an element that cycles all day.
• Gas water heater? Many keep working in an outage with little or no electricity. Check yours before the storm — you may own the one appliance that does not care.

The Stove — A $40 Camp Stove Beats a 1,500-Watt Burner

One burner of an electric range is about 1,500 watts; the oven far more. Cooking dinner on a generator-fed range is paying generator prices for heat that a propane camp stove makes for pennies. The outage kitchen that works looks like this:

• A two-burner propane camp stove — used outdoors, only outdoors. Never in the house, never in the garage, never on a covered porch: camp stoves make carbon monoxide the same as generators do, and the same battery CO alarm rule applies. On the porch rail or the tailgate in open air, it will cook everything a range cooks.
• The microwave is the efficiency champion indoors. A thousand watts for six minutes is nothing next to a burner for forty — if the generator is running anyway, the microwave is the indoor cooking that earns its keep.
• Boil once, hold all day. A good thermos or two turns one kettle of boiling water into coffee, tea, oatmeal, and dish-washing hot water for hours. Depression-era kitchens ran on this trick, and it has not stopped working.

Run the numbers once and the lesson generalizes: in an outage you are not buying appliances, you are buying outcomes — hot water, hot food, cold food, water pressure. For each one, ask what the cheapest machine is that delivers the outcome for a week. Sometimes it is the generator. For these two, it almost never is — and unchecking them in the calculator will drop your generator size and your fuel bill further than any other choice on the page.

Working out what you genuinely need to run is also what stops you being sold twice the generator. Take that list to whoever is quoting, rather than letting them build it for you — there is more on getting generator quotes and what the number should be based on.