The Generator I Never Wanted to Buy (Until I Did)

I live in a part of the country where power outages are supposed to be a once-every-few-years thing, not a twice-a-season thing. The house is from the 1970s, the wiring is what it is, and the local utility company has a habit of sending out “maintenance notices” that never quite explain why the lights go out for six hours on a Tuesday.

But the 48-hour one in late August? That one I didn’t see coming.

It started as a thunderstorm—one of those fast-moving summer systems that rolls through, dumps an inch of rain in twenty minutes, and leaves you with a damp driveway and a clear sky. The power flickered twice, came back, then went out for good around 7:15 PM. I remember the time because I was halfway through feeding the discus. The lights in the fish room went dark just as I was dropping a cube of frozen bloodworm into the 75-gallon.

I figured it’d be back by midnight. It wasn’t.

And that’s how I learned what “I have no backup plan” actually means when you’re keeping a fish that dies if the water temperature drops below 78 degrees for more than a few hours.

What I Had vs. What I Needed

Let me be honest about what was in the fish room before that night:

A single UPS battery backup, sized for a home office router, powering nothing but a small air pump with a sponge filter.
A handful of chemical hand warmers I’d bought for a camping trip two years earlier and never used.
My phone, at 40% battery, with a data signal that worked about 60% of the time.
A half-empty tank of gas in the car. Two miles to the nearest open gas station.

That’s not a plan. That’s a prayer with a dented fender.

The UPS kept the air pump running for maybe three hours before it started beeping. I’d read somewhere that you could cycle UPS batteries by plugging things into a car inverter—which I also didn’t own—so that idea died pretty quickly. The hand warmers, once activated, raised the temperature of a two-gallon bucket of tank water by maybe four degrees over an hour. Not useless, but not useful for a 75-gallon tank holding eight adult discus and a pair of rams.

By 1 AM, the tank was down to 82 degrees. That’s still within range, but the loss rate was about half a degree every forty minutes. If the power came back by morning, I’d be fine. If it didn’t, I was looking at a 76-degree tank by lunchtime, and discus at 76 degrees don’t eat. They don’t move much either. They just sit there, dark-striped and pressed against the glass, and you can’t tell if they’re stressed or already dying.

The Thing Nobody Told Me About Discus at Low Temperatures

I’d kept discus for about three years at that point. I knew the general rules: stable water, high protein diet, big frequent water changes. What I hadn’t experienced—until that night—was what happens when they get cold. It’s not like a tropical community fish that gets sluggish. Discus get something closer to catatonic. Their colors wash out. They stop responding to movement outside the tank. They basically shut down.

And once they shut down, the clock on getting them back gets very short. Every degree below 82 that they sit at for more than six hours compounds the recovery time. I’ve heard numbers thrown around—”twelve hours at 76 is a death sentence”—but I don’t know if that’s true for every strain. What I do know is that I’d rather not test it.

2 AM at the Walmart Garden Center

At 2 AM, with the tank at 81 degrees and the air pump battery backup down to its last red light, I made a decision I wasn’t sure was smart. I got in the car and drove to the 24-hour Walmart about twenty miles away. Not because I had a plan—I didn’t—but because sitting in a dark house watching a thermometer drop felt worse than driving on wet roads in the middle of a thunderstorm’s aftermath.

The Walmart parking lot was mostly empty. A few cars near the entrance, a guy in a hoodie smoking by the cart return. I walked in and stood in the camping aisle for a solid five minutes, staring at the propane heaters. The problem with propane heaters in a fish room is the carbon monoxide. The problem with indoor-safe electric heaters is they need electricity. I was in a loop and I knew it.

That’s when a guy in a blue Walmart vest walked past. He looked maybe fifty, tired, carrying a clipboard. I asked him, kind of half-heartedly, if they had any battery-powered heaters. He stopped, turned, and said: “Not for fish tanks. You got a car? Get a generator from the garden center. It’s not on the floor yet, but we got them in the back. The little inverter ones. Runs on propane. You’ll need two tanks.”

I bought it, two propane tanks, and a 50-foot extension cord. Total came to about six hundred bucks. I didn’t have that money. I put it on a credit card I’d sworn I’d pay off by August. It was August.

The Generator in Practice

Getting it home was the easy part. Setting it up in the dark, in a light drizzle, while trying not to wake the neighbors—that was the part the YouTube tutorials don’t show you.

I put the generator on the concrete patio, as far from any windows as the extension cord would allow. The manual said to keep it at least ten feet from the house, which felt like a lot of space until I actually measured it. Eight feet was the best I could do. I ran the cord through a gap in the sliding door that I’d normally use for a dehumidifier hose.

The generator started on the third pull. That surprised me. I’d never owned a generator before, and I’d half-expected it to be a disaster of flooded carbs and dead batteries. But it fired up, idled rough for about a minute, then settled into a steady hum. The propane tank fogged up immediately—that’s normal, I’ve since learned—and the whole setup smelled faintly like a camp stove.

Inside, the fish room had power. I plugged in the heater first. Then the main powerhead filter. Then a second heater I’d never used, just sitting in a cabinet from a quarantine tank setup. The tank temperature stopped falling at 79.8 degrees. Over the next hour, it climbed back to 82. I watched it like a hawk on the digital thermometer, refreshing every five minutes even though the numbers barely changed.

The Noise, The Worry, The Neighbor

The generator was loud. Not deafening, but loud enough that my next-door neighbor—a retired guy named Pete who keeps a perfectly manicured lawn and has never said more than “hello” to me—came out at 6 AM in his bathrobe. I was outside checking the propane level, and he just stood there for a second, looking at the generator, then at me, then at the extension cord running into the house.

“You got fish,” he said.

It wasn’t a question. I nodded.

He said “Discus?” and I was so surprised I almost dropped the propane tank. Turns out Pete kept discus in the 1990s. Had a 125-gallon in his basement, bred them for a few years, got out of the hobby when he moved. He told me that the generator was a good call, but that if I wanted to be smarter next time, I should get a battery backup system that could run the heaters for at least twelve hours. “The little gas generators are fine for a night,” he said. “But they’re a pain in the neck to fuel.”

Then he went back inside. I didn’t see him again for three days. I still don’t know how he knew it was discus.

What Actually Worked (And What Didn’t)

The generator kept the tank at 82 degrees for the full 48 hours. The power came back at 6 PM on the second day. I ran the generator for two more hours after that, just to be safe—the power flickered twice more before it held steady. I’d used about a tank and a half of propane. At current prices, that’s around thirty dollars.

The discus were fine. They were a little pale for a day or two, but they ate again by the third morning. The rams never seemed to notice anything had happened. The sponge filter that ran on the UPS backup for those first few hours? It was probably better than nothing, but I don’t think it made a meaningful difference. The real work was done by the heaters, and the heaters wouldn’t have worked without the generator.

But here’s the thing I didn’t expect: the generator itself became the problem I hadn’t planned for. Running it for 48 hours meant checking the oil every twelve hours. The manual said it needed 10W-30, which I had to borrow from Pete because I don’t keep motor oil in the house. The propane tanks ran out at weird times—once at 3 AM, which meant I was outside in the cold, swapping tanks by flashlight. The condensation from the propane freeze left a ring of ice on the patio that lasted until noon the next day.

And the noise. I didn’t realize how much the constant hum would wear on me. By the end of the second day, I was exhausted not from lack of sleep—though there was some of that—but from the noise. It was like having a lawnmower running in the next room for two solid days.

One Mistake I’m Still Not Sure Was a Mistake

Around hour 30, I made a call I’m still not entirely sure was the right one. The generator had been running continuously, and I was worried about the propane freezing up—the tank was frosting badly, and I’d read that propane stops vaporizing below a certain temperature. I turned the generator off for twenty minutes. Let it cool down. Let the tank warm up. Turned it back on.

In retrospect, that twenty minutes probably dropped the tank from 82 to 81.2 degrees. Barely a blip. But at the time, every minute the generator was off felt like I was throwing dice. The fish didn’t seem to care. The tank temperature recovered within an hour of the generator restarting. But I still wonder if I could have avoided that whole episode by just keeping the generator running and swapping tanks on the fly instead.

I don’t have a definitive answer. Nobody in the fish groups I’m in has a definitive answer either. The consensus seems to be “don’t turn it off if you don’t have to,” but nobody can tell you what happens if you don’t. So I made the call. The fish lived. I’ll probably do it differently next time, but I can’t tell you what “differently” looks like yet.

The Stuff I Wish I’d Known Beforehand

This is the part where I tell you what I learned, but I want to be careful not to sound like I have it figured out. Because I don’t. I got lucky. The generator was in stock. Pete happened to keep discus thirty years ago. The power came back before the propane ran out. There were a dozen ways this could have gone worse.

But if I had to do it over, here’s what I’d have done differently, and none of it is particularly sexy or clever:

I’d have bought the generator in June, not August. It would have been cheaper and I’d have had time to test it.
I’d have bought an extra propane tank, because running out at 3 AM is not a fun experience.
I’d have had a longer extension cord, because eight feet from the house felt too close even with the sliding door closed.
I’d have had a dedicated power strip in the fish room that could handle the generator’s output without tripping anything.
I’d have told my neighbor I had fish before the emergency, so he wouldn’t have had to guess from the generator noise.

That last one feels the silliest, but it’s also the one that stuck with me. Pete didn’t need to know about the discus. But the fact that he did end up knowing, and that his first reaction was to ask if they were discus—that changed something in how I think about preparedness. The people around you might already know more than you think. You just don’t ask until something breaks.

The generator is still sitting on the patio, under a tarp. I haven’t moved it back to the garage yet. I keep thinking I should, but part of me likes knowing it’s there. The power could go out again tonight. The weather forecast says it’s supposed to be clear for the next week, but weather forecasts have lied to me before.

I checked the propane levels this morning. Both tanks are full.

📷 Photos: Hugo Carle (Unsplash), Penfer (Unsplash)

The Generator I Never Wanted to Buy (Until I Did)