I've been thinking of buying a generator for use with the Hi-Lo and the boat. Yesterday we had a windstorm in the Puget Sound area. The gusts in my neck of the woods reached 50+ mph. As a result there were a number of downed trees and power lines. We lost power at 2:00 AM.
We cook with gas, have a gas water heater, and a gas fireplace that does a good job at supplementing the furnace. Normally, power outages doesn't bother me much. Unfortunately, yesterday was the Seahawks/Packers game. We wanted to watch it and cook ribs in my Traeger pellet grill. Based on this it was important to have the priorities straight
1- I went to Cabela's and bought a Yamaha EF2000is.
2- As soon as I got it home, I fired it up and connected it to the Fios TV modem, the big screen TV, and the Traeger grill.
3- After the Seahawks/Packers game was over I disconnected the TV and connected the refrigerator.
I'm very happy with the Yamaha generator. It has a power-saving mode that varies the engine RPM with the required load. It ran at low RPM and was very quiet with the cable modem, big screen TV/stereo system, and the pellet grill all going at once. After I disconnected the cable modem and TV to connect the refrigerator, it was a bit louder, but not much. The RPMs went to max when I first plugged in the refrigerator and the compressor motor started; after that the generator RPMs went back down. A neighbor down the street had a Chinese copy of Yamaha/Honda 2000 watt generator running and it was definitely louder at all RPMs.
BTW, the ribs were awesome. We finally got power back at 10PM (20 hours without power).
Go Seahawks!!!!
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