Bob wrote:
I put in a back-up gen two years ago because we were getting 5-7 day power outages every second or third winter. As often happens, now that I'm prepared the outages aren't happening.

We did the same in 2004 and haven't had an outage over 5 hours since. My wife said it was the best money spent, just to ward off those lengthy outages. A similar happened in 1996 when I got tired of shoveling snow and bought a 48" wide snow blower for my tractor. No more blizzards for 4 years, and only had two since then. Sometimes you just have to invest some money to get real life rewards.