alt Hacker NewsIm not sure AC is the sort of thing most people are thinking about needing power for in an emergency or disaster scenario, its one of the most power hungry things you can use.
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During the last outage my neighbor had to leave his house because of the temperature. He had a generator running for days (off of the natural gas line) so I thought he was fine, but his old AC wouldn't start so he texted me as he was leaving to stay at a hotel.
This is important enough to me that I researched slow start AC units ~8 years ago when replacing my AC. I learned that almost any heat pump will do, so that's what I have.
In large areas of the US if your AC goes out during the summer you can be dead within a day or two. There's many deaths of elderly people annually when their AC failed and they didn't have the mobility to leave for a cooling center before they passed out.
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/heat-waves-and-annual-death-ra...
As a person in the deep south where summer temps are over 100F and RH is in the 80s, having a generator powered window unit in our smallest room is more necessary than even the fridge. Thankfully the window units only pull 400-500w or so, so even a small dual-fuel running propane would run all day on a 20lb tank.
This is a common enough occurrence in rural Louisiana, at least. And I think almost everyone I know has a 200gal or larger propane tank in their yard, specifically for multiday outages. My father-in-law doesn't have a single propane appliance, but he does have a 250gal tank, for his generac.
We don't we have a single 100lb tank, but that will run the little AC for 3 or 4 days.