I bought a GE machine and its been hooked up to auto kick on if the power goes out for oh, four or heck it might be five years now. Its been a good quiet machine and runs on nat. gas. 11k on ours. I think they still make a 10k and a 13k and bigger. My 11k runs everything without a problem, even my heat and air unit providing I watch what we turn on while its kicking up.
So long as we shut down big draw items in the house when we want A/C it runs the big Train and cools our 18,000 sq. ft. home. I read the reviews. Each review I found from guys in my area was quite negative for the unit I thought I was going to buy first. The Generac just is not doing well for people I've spoken with that bought one recently like within the same time frame as my own. What I found was that even the dealers would in hush tones make it clear they were afraid to sell me the Generac and had far less trouble with recalls and problems with the GE. I called finding people that offered contact info and talked with several owners of the same unit I bought. They lived in Arkansas, and Tulsa and the same area these same guys install but not all of them were installed by the guy I used.
What I found was the majority of the installers were rip offs big time! They wanted extreme amounts of money just to run a line through an attic for example! Something I did in about an hour in the morning when it was quite comfortable, one guy wanted 1500 bucks to do! Then he hooks up the transfer switch and you are good to go. I got it all prepped and had the wires hanging there for the electricians and had it done for $300 and some change just to wire it up and do it the way the power company wanted it with the tag plain and visible and its been that way since.
