3,200 watts, and the answer was no

The generator across the street started at 7:40 this morning. It is an open-frame unit rated at 3,200 W, and from my kitchen window it sounds like a lawnmower in a bucket. At 7:55 I walked over and asked him for one cord. He said no before I got to the end of the sentence.

Three thousand two hundred watts

I read the plate on it while he filled it: 212 cc, 3,200 W continuous, 4,000 W surge, 15 L tank. It sits on a concrete pad 9 m from his back door, exhaust pointed at the fence. The rule is 6 m from windows, doors and attached garages, so he is on the right side of it.

The number to hold on to is 3,200 W against the 24,000 W that a 100 A service gives a house. His machine is 13% of a normal house supply, and it does not divide evenly. Loads fall into two kinds. A motor takes three to seven times its running watts for a second or two when it starts. A heater takes its nameplate and holds it.

• Fridge: 150 W running, about 600 W to start.
• Chest freezer: 200 W running, about 800 W to start.
• Sump pump: 800 W running, 1,600 W to start.
• Furnace blower: 400 W, plus about 100 W for the board and the draft fan.
• Phone charger: 10 W. One LED lamp: 9 W.
• Range element: 1,200 to 3,000 W. Kettle: 1,500 W. Baseboard heater: 1,500 W each.

One baseboard heater is 47% of his machine. A kettle, the freezer, and the sump starting at the same moment is how a generator trips its breaker, and the breaker is on the machine, outdoors, in the dark.

I got one thing wrong before I knocked. On Day 12 I told my partner that a cord across the road would give us heat. It would not. The furnace is hardwired to a circuit. There is no plug on it. Even with 400 W of spare capacity and a cord long enough to reach, I cannot plug a furnace into an outlet, and I am not opening a panel in a house with no fire service. What I could actually have run was the fridge and two phones, 160 W. That was the honest ask. It was still a no.

Four hours, twice a day

The thing people get wrong with a generator is running it for one appliance at a time. An engine-driven generator holds 3,600 rpm to hold 60 Hz. The governor opens the throttle to keep that speed whether the load is 160 W or 1,600 W, because most of the fuel is going into turning the engine at all. A phone charger on a 3,200 W machine is close to burning fuel for nothing.

He does it the other way. 7:40 to 9:40, then 5:10 to 7:10. Four hours a day in two blocks, not continuous, and in each block everything goes on at once: freezer, fridge, the sump if it has cycled, his battery radio, the two lamps he uses. He staggers the one big load, a kettle.

His tank is 15 L and he says four hours a day gets him a bit over three days. That is his number, not mine, and it is on the card that way. I have not measured it.

The worst part is how little of that he would have had to give me. My fridge draws 150 W, and the kitchen is 9 °C, so the compressor is already most of the way to off. But I was not asking for watts. I was asking him to run his machine for my benefit, which is a different request, and he heard the difference.

The no, and seventy-nine litres of snow

He said: "I have one machine and one basement."

That is the whole argument. His sump runs in a basement that has taken water twice in eleven years. If it floods he loses the furnace, the water heater and the floor. When he pulls that cord he is not keeping a freezer cold. He is keeping his house. Nine houses on this block, one generator. If one cord goes across the road, the next ask is a different cord, and the one after that is a man at the door at ten at night who is out of options and does not want to hear about his basement.

I spent something at that door and I knew it while I was spending it. He gave me 8 L of water on Day 10, in two 4-litre jugs, unasked, the afternoon the can was taken. It is in the ledger. I had $0 and nothing he needed, which is why it came out as a request and not a trade. Asking again turned a gift into an account with a balance in it, and I am the one who opened the account.

Then the part I did not enjoy writing down. On Day 0 I told him that a barbecue in a closed garage would kill him. I was right. Then we carried it out to his driveway together and put a tarp over it, and it is still there. He has not asked me for anything since. And there are two propane cylinders in my garage, both full, that I have not touched in thirteen days and have not offered to anybody on this street, including the woman two doors down who is drawing 2 L at a time from a 12 L barrel.

He counts things out loud. On Day 6 he counted 8 D cells into my hand. This morning he counted his hours, out loud, at me. I have a card inside a cupboard door with 8.6 L a day on it and a pencil line for every litre I have spent. We are the same man with different equipment.

I melted snow in the afternoon, because we were at 7 L and the card does not care how the morning went. 79 L of loose snow, ten loads in the 8 L pot, 2 hours on the borrowed stove: 11.6 L of water for 184 g of gas. That is 16 g a litre, and it is five times what the hot meal cost on Day 11. Half of the melt went to the bucket and the rinse. I ran an expensive engine to serve a small load, forty metres from a man doing the arithmetic properly, and I was angry at him for it.

Water at the end of the day: 10 L. Four tablets left in the bottle, which is four mornings.

The dog barked at it for the first ten minutes of the morning block, then slept through the evening one. My partner said about forty words all day and one of them was that the house smelled of the stove. The bell two blocks up has not rung since the storm. I have stopped listening for it on the hour and started listening for his engine, twice a day, which is a smaller thing to hope in and I am doing it anyway.

I prayed for him at the door at 7:55, with my hand still on his storm door handle. It came out as a list of what I wanted, in order of how much I wanted it, and his name was not on the list.

What I should have had on day zero

• A 30 m 12-gauge outdoor cord, $74 in October, with a tag on it saying what it is for. I priced one and did not buy it.
• A load list in watts taped inside the panel door: running watts and starting watts for every motor in the house. I wrote mine on Day 13 from memory and got the furnace wrong.
• A transfer switch and an electrician's number, so a generator could feed the panel instead of a cord feeding a fridge.
• One thing my neighbour actually needed, so that asking on Day 13 was a trade and not a request.