Transfer switch/interlock, come learn me something

I have a 3 month old and just had an electrician out Friday to quote me. My house already had a 30 amp inlet to plug my generator into but it wasn’t hooked up to the panel (previous owners rigged everything). Anyway, same situation as you. Freezers full of breast milk and I need AC for the little guy. Either of those solutions works. My electrician is going with an interlock which I assume is likely the cheaper route. I’m just not comfortable enough with electricity to do it myself. Even if the install went smoothly and I didn’t electrocute myself I’d always be worried I did something wrong and it would fry sometime or my house.

Will depend on your panel. Get an electrician to come out or post pictures of your outside and inside panels here and someone can point you in the right direction.

My house has a weird panel/sub panel setup where the “main” is outside and houses main breaker and ac breaker, the subpanel is clear across the house inside and has all the appliance/light breakers. Electrician had to add another panel that branched off my main outside, left the main breaker in its original location and added a secondary main with the ac breaker and an interlock to switch to generator power + a 50amp input. Cost me right around $900 installed.

With this setup I can run lights, fridge, etc and 2 5000btu window units on a Firman TriFuel running natural gas. I’m right around $2k all in.

I bought a firman tri fuel generator from costco and had a plumber add a quick connect gas outlet and an electrician add an interlock hookup. got it all done about 3 years ago and last week was the first time I had used it and was quick and easy to get going. easily ran everything except central AC but I had a window unit in a bedroom so we were good.

I would go with a natural gas setup if you can since you won't have to add gas to switch propane bottles. Although it has less output, we were fine with just the nat gas.