I have fed my entire panel through a hot tub hookup outside the house once when in need, but shut off the main before doing so. A 5000 watt generator had us up and running quite nicely. It is not to code, nor probably legal to do so but it got us through in a pinch and I was careful enough not to backfeed the lines.
Since then we switched to a 12kw GE whole house system with a dedicated 320 gallon LPG tank. The setup worked great during the 4 days we were without last week. I did stall it out 3 times while running 3 zones of AC plus the oven and 3 refrigerators (and everything else in the house) but a simple reset and power down of a few items and we were good.
I still keep the 5000 watt in the shed. I also uses a 2000 watt generac portable (suitcase style) at the island to run the 2 refrigerators when the power was down last week.
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