For me and my household, we are OK as long as there is natural gas. We have a 14K generac that will run the whole house.
__________________________________________________________
I have a 16KW but you shouldn’t depend on the gas. You would be wise to get at least a 500 gal propane tank, it is easy to switch back and forth. Your genset will take over 2 gallons per hour. Get some big batteries, a charger that will take all 14KW you can give it and a good inverter. Then you should be able to get by with only running for 3 or 4 hours (charging the batteries) once ever day or two if you are careful.
Using natural gas will cost you just as much as the propane if not more. It gets pretty expensive, pretty quickly to run a generator 24 hours a day. You could easily pay $50 a day, that’s $1600 a month. A one week outage is not a big deal but if the SHTF and society crumbles NG won’t cut it.
Opinions vary on these matters.
Batteries are the biggest pain in the patoot I can imagine. I've got several acquaintances here in E. AZ who are off-grid, using solar and batteries and firewood. But they say batteries are a MAJOR commitment. Those batteries keep giving problems; and one day they're going to have to be serviced or scrapped. I'm just looking 5-10 years down the road, being that much older and having to deal with the darn things.
My plan is to run the generac, 3 hours on, 6 off. Tried that in the last outage and it worked well.
We don't get to use propane in my development; otherwise, the redundancy of having a big LP tank is not a bad idea at all.
I think it's all in what a guy thinks is most sustainable with the least hassle.
I genuinely appreciate your response; thanks!
You can’t use the same orifice for propane as you use for natural gas, you’ll overheat the unit and waste a crapload of fuel energy to boot. There is more than twice the energy per unit in propane as there is in natural gas (nat gas=1050btu/cubic ft, propane=2560 btu/cubic ft).
I have a dual-fuel propane/gasoline 7.5KW unit that can run my house just fine. It uses a 20 lb tank in 4 1/2 hours.