Blizzard power outage: 2/23/26
Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2026 10:06 pm
Damn, this one was insane. Got something like 35" of fairly wet snow. Things were going fine and dandy until 1030 this morning. That was it. By the time I actually mobilized myself, went outside and cleared a (large) spot in the driveway, I think I didn't get the generator running until around 1230.
Shut it down for an oil change and refueling around 9:30pm. Oil changed and refilled and back a bit before 10pm.
I changed the oil at 51 hours so I wrote due at 75 on a piece of masking tape on the machine.
Probably had a quarter tank or less when I shut it down but still that's somewhere around 3.5 gallons for 9 hours of daytime use. Pretty impressive.
Forgot to snap this so this is 10 minutes into a new tank. 10.5 kWh for the first run, for an average draw of 1.17 kW. And 0.39 gal/hr ish. Slightly more efficient than my previous general day time estimate of 0.45. Extrapolated, that might be more like 8.5 gal/day instead of 10. However, budgeting for 10 seems like the way to go for worst case purposes.
Shut it down for an oil change and refueling around 9:30pm. Oil changed and refilled and back a bit before 10pm.
I changed the oil at 51 hours so I wrote due at 75 on a piece of masking tape on the machine.
Probably had a quarter tank or less when I shut it down but still that's somewhere around 3.5 gallons for 9 hours of daytime use. Pretty impressive.
Forgot to snap this so this is 10 minutes into a new tank. 10.5 kWh for the first run, for an average draw of 1.17 kW. And 0.39 gal/hr ish. Slightly more efficient than my previous general day time estimate of 0.45. Extrapolated, that might be more like 8.5 gal/day instead of 10. However, budgeting for 10 seems like the way to go for worst case purposes.