At 2 a.m. the storm line passes, the block goes dark, and the rain is still falling. That is the moment someone wheels a generator into the garage, cracks the door for the cord, and goes back to bed. Carbon monoxide does not care about the cracked door. It is colorless, it has no smell, and it does not wake you up.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission repeats one instruction every storm season: never run a portable generator indoors, in a garage, in a basement, or in a shed, and not even with the door open (CPSC portable generator safety alert). An attached garage is not outside. It shares a wall, a ceiling, and usually an air handler with the rooms you sleep in, so exhaust migrates through the door frame and the ductwork. The CDC attributes more than 400 American deaths a year to unintentional, non-fire carbon monoxide poisoning, and generator placement is one of the leading causes.
Twenty feet. Ready.gov puts generators and their fuel outdoors, at least 20 feet from windows, doors, and attached garages (Ready.gov power outage guidance). Four details decide whether that distance is real: point the exhaust away from the house, keep it out from under eaves and away from window wells, the outdoor condenser, and any fresh-air intake, and keep it dry. A generator sitting in standing water is an electrocution waiting for someone in wet shoes. Use one heavy-duty cord rated for the load instead of chaining three household cords, and let the unit cool before you open the fuel cap, because a splash on a hot muffler lights off.
Battery-backed carbon monoxide alarms belong on every level and near every sleeping area, and they belong in the house before the generator comes out of the box. Test them monthly and replace them on the manufacturer schedule, which the CDC puts at five years. A model with a digital peak-level readout tells you what actually happened overnight instead of only whether the alarm fired. If anyone wakes with a headache, nausea, or confusion during an outage, get everyone into fresh air and call 911. Do not open a window and go back to bed.
Most households buy capacity they cannot use and skip the load they actually need. The honest starting point is a watt-hour budget for one night:
| Nightly load | Draw | Watt-hours |
|---|---|---|
| LED area light, 6 hours | 10 W | 60 |
| Two headlamps, 5 hours each | 1 W | 10 |
| Four phones, one charge each | 18.5 Wh | 74 |
| Handheld radio, 10 hours mixed use | 3 W average | 30 |
| CPAP, no humidifier, 8 hours | 30 W | 240 |
Lights and comms alone come to about 174 watt-hours. Add a CPAP and the night costs 414. A 1,024 watt-hour station, after roughly 15 percent is lost in the inverter, delivers about 870 usable watt-hours: close to five nights of lighting and comms, or barely two with a CPAP in the mix. That gap is why medical equipment, not the fridge, should drive the purchase decision.
These are not competitors. They solve different halves of the problem.
| Battery station, 1 kWh class | Inverter generator, 2 kW class | |
|---|---|---|
| Indoors | Safe to run inside | Never, because of CO |
| Noise | Silent | Audible to the whole block |
| Fuel | None, recharges from wall or solar | Gasoline, stabilized and rotated |
| Runtime | Hours, then a recharge | As long as fuel holds out |
| Best job | Lights, phones, radio, router, CPAP | Fridge, well pump, furnace blower |
| Upkeep | Cycle the pack a few times a year | Oil, plug, carburetor |
An EcoFlow DELTA 2 is a fair reference point for the battery side: 1,024 watt-hours, 1,800 watts of AC output with a 2,700 watt surge, and a lithium iron phosphate pack rated to 3,000 cycles (EcoFlow DELTA 2 manual). A fridge compressor can spike past a small station surge rating even when its running draw looks modest, so compare the appliance label against the surge number rather than the rated number.
A gun is not a power plan. In a multi-day outage the layers that actually protect a household are light, locks, and neighbours who know you, which is the argument in our weapon lights and handhelds guide: a light you can hold beats a rifle you cannot find in the dark. If a firearm is part of the plan, it is the last layer. The four rules apply exactly as they do at the range, the gun stays secured and out of reach of children even when an electronic lock has no power, and nothing about a dark street changes the law on when you may use it. The staging and storage tradeoffs are covered in our home-defense long gun piece, and a humid week without air conditioning is its own storage problem, covered in storing ammo through heat and humidity. If the plan includes buying a firearm before the next storm, buy it through a licensed dealer and understand the transfer: find an FFL dealer in Texas.
None of this needs a forecast of the grid failing. It needs accepting that outages are normal, that the dangerous hour is the one right after the lights go out, and that the cheapest life-safety gear in the kit is a carbon monoxide alarm and a tape measure.