Hurricane Milton post #13: I haven’t put away the generator yet

Here’s “Lil’ Red,” a generator we bought from a friend of the family a few years back, which I have lovingly maintained for the past couple of years. We finally put it to use during Hurricane Milton to keep the fridge and freezer cold, to power cooking appliances and provide that tiny bit of power that our gas-powered tankless water heater needs, and to power wifi (our Frontier fiber connection stayed up almost the entire time) and laptops and charge phones.

I haven’t put Lil’ Red away just yet because no power restoration is perfect. We got power back on Saturday afternoon, but lost it later that evening due to problems with a nearby tree falling on a power line. We’ve got it back Sunday afternoon, but there’ve been reports of occasional hours-long outages, which is understandable considering the scope of Milton’s damage. I’ll put it away this weekend after first running the engine dry to remove the remaining gasoline — gas degrades over time, and storing a generator with gas in the tank is asking for a lot of cleaning and repair later.

I’m also looking at this bad boy pictured above for future use, as this one can be hooked up to our natural gas line, and I’d like to be able to use the additional watts to run a couple of fans and recharge our EcoFlow power station…