[drfloyd]

My advice to anyone looking into a standby is to assess your power needs carefully before you buy one. For instance, my mom's home is heated and cooled with an electric heat pump. She has a gas insert in her fireplace so she can stay warm in an emergency. The standby runs on LP as does her insert. The standby is ample enough to run the compressor portion of the heat pump but not the 10KW heat strips. So if she were in normal winter mode and had a power outage, she would be attempting to run the strips with the standby and would obviously trip a breaker. The ATS has several spare contacts so I wired a lockout contact on her heat strips so when the ATS is in standby mode the strips won't run but the heat pump will. Then she can fire up her insert and stay warm. Things like this need to be thought out or either buy a unit large enough to handle the entire load.