Consumer Reports says to keep in mind that the generator must be at least 5,000 watts to easily connect to a transfer switch and to handle the load of several appliances.

To calculate how much fuel a generator will use during the various stages of load-shedding, we used average estimates of energy consumption per month for different household sizes.

We calculated how much it would cost households with varying energy consumptions to run petrol generators during stage 1 to stage 8 load-shedding.