A 2200W inverter generator + 2000WH battery can carry most households for a week before you need to do any serious maintenance on the unit. About 3 gallons of fuel per day and a mid-week oil change is all you need during operation. You can often run off the battery alone while everyone sleeps at night.
The battery you can keep charged, and the generator you can keep new in the box until you actually think you'll be in a prolonged outage. You can run fridge, internet, lamps off the battery for a solid day. The #1 thing that screws people with the small engines is maintenance after some initial amount of usage. Gasoline turns into jello in the fuel system after a ~year in storage. Oil needs to be changed frequently. Don't run gas through that small engine unless you really think you'll need it. LP/LNG is much cleaner, but can be harder to obtain and use.
I think of these small inverter generators as a one use/emergency item. Once I fire it up, it's on a 200 hour death timer. It only costs around $600 for a brand new unit. Catastrophic, multi-day outages don't happen often.
The battery you can keep charged, and the generator you can keep new in the box until you actually think you'll be in a prolonged outage. You can run fridge, internet, lamps off the battery for a solid day. The #1 thing that screws people with the small engines is maintenance after some initial amount of usage. Gasoline turns into jello in the fuel system after a ~year in storage. Oil needs to be changed frequently. Don't run gas through that small engine unless you really think you'll need it. LP/LNG is much cleaner, but can be harder to obtain and use.
I think of these small inverter generators as a one use/emergency item. Once I fire it up, it's on a 200 hour death timer. It only costs around $600 for a brand new unit. Catastrophic, multi-day outages don't happen often.