Well my diesel generator will run for a week on 15 gallons of diesel. if i cut it 10 to one with one gallon of unleaded, it will stay good to under -20.
My gas generators were using 10 -15 gallons a day when we built off the grid.
If you live in an apt, it would still be easy to tap in a fifty gallon water tank... if not, then add fifty or so one gallon jugs in the closets. buy two a week, drink one, save one, adds a buck to your grocery bill in a year you have a month supply extra.
We live in a suburban house at the end of the loop for our grid, if power goes out, we are the last to get rehooked, after the second lenghty power outage, wife and I sat down and figured what it would cost to do it right. I had gas generators but in the case of no gasoline available, I knew that keeping a 100 gallons of gas around was simply not happening. I looked at up grading the appliances (deep freezes with cold plate technology or super insulated boxes) and decided that adding a NG powered generator was the most cost effective LONG TERM that we could manage. In the past four years, ours has run 27 days. We have not lost freezers full of food nor have I have had to stop working for those days when no power was available to run my tools. I wrote it off as a business expense.
I have added 6 inches of insulation in the form of Blue ext Poly board to the freezer and the basement fridge. Our summer electric bill dropped 17% in the first month we did that .
My poly pro water tank was less than $200 bucks, fitting included. 6 or so feet of 3/4 inch copper and maybe ten fittings sweated the whole thing together. in size it is not much bigger than a fifty gallon water heater.
My home modifications were mostly paid for by you. The generator was a tax write off, so the feds paid for it over three years. The water tank in the basement was done on a night when the family had gone to the water park in the summer and I was home and no one needed water. Took me less than an hour to plumb it in.
I still have a Yanmar diesel genset and a chinese copy of a Onan that I bought at an auction that are used when we build homes off the grid or when we are doing work before the utilities are tied in.
The Yanmar will produce about 90 amps of 240 or 180 of 120 or some combination. It will spike to about 140 amps of 240 for a short time during some start ups, (the big compressor or the cement mixer will often draw 50 amps at start up, but only for a few seconds) New it would have been about $2K but used it was about 500 at a liquidation of rental equipment. Seeing it only had 50 or so hours on the meter I figured it was worth the risk....I have 1500 hours on the meter now and all i have done is change the oil and replace the original outlets with marine grade twist locks.
The chinese Clone was bought at an farm auction. So far it has 200 hours and runs fine.
I do a lot of home repair of storm damage and I am amazed at how little people prepare for these events. Yet in almost every community there is someone who has spent a little money and thought on disaster prep and is living comfortably while all around people are in a tizzy over basic lack of utilities.
I have spent about 4 grand over all updating my house for these sorts of events. My house is market valued at about $320K, that seems like a lot, but in 1999 when I bought this house, we paid 160. But even at the original purchase price, putting 2.5 % back into the house has paid off immensly. I am also positive that when I go to sell this house, the added improvements will DOUBLE their value in resale dollars. We usually beef and pork in bulk from the co-op and losing a thousand dollars of meat is a pretty costly thing.
Loosing a couple of days of work in the shop can be even more costly. Really we have not spent that much when you sit back and look at the benefits in daily life for us.
