We've had 5-6 day long power outages from snow twice in the past 6 years at the Wa. place. Sucks big time. Biggest problem with even having a portable generator is how far you have to go to find a station that has power to refill your fuel cans. Fixed that problem a while back and put in a natural gas fueled backup generator. Of course now that I've gone through all that we'll probably never have another long term failure...........