Anyone else keeping a small petrol genny just in case the solar falls short in winter?

Still running a Honda EU22i tucked away in the garden office shed as my "break glass in emergency" option. Three winters in now and honestly it's only done proper duty twice — both times during that miserable grey fortnight we get every January where the panels might as well be decorative.

My setup is a Victron Multiplus with a bank of Fogstar Drift cells, and the generator ties in via the AC input beautifully. Victron's ignore/accept AC settings mean it only kicks in when I actually want it to, rather than cycling on and off like some kind of anxious robot.

The thing is, I could have just oversized the battery bank instead. Ran the numbers. For the frequency I actually use the genny, it probably wasn't the most cost-effective choice long-term. But there's something deeply reassuring about having a mechanical backup that doesn't care about battery chemistry, BMS faults, or whether my Renogy MPPT has thrown a wobbly.

What I will say — don't neglect the fuel. Learned the hard way that petrol left in the carb for eight months turns into a varnish that a Honda dealer finds deeply amusing and you find deeply expensive.

A few questions worth discussing:

• Has anyone gone propane/LPG instead to avoid the fuel degradation headache?
• Are any of you using automatic transfer switches so it actually fires itself up unattended?
• And for those who've binned the genny entirely — genuinely curious what your winter SOC looks like through December/January

Reckon there's a solid argument on both sides here. What's everyone running?

@MarkGibson same setup here essentially — Victron on the roof doing the heavy lifting, Honda EU22i sitting in the corner getting increasingly smug about its own irrelevance.

Mine's basically become a very expensive spider hotel at this point. Fired it up last February during that miserable grey fortnight and it took three pulls to start, presumably out of protest

Really interesting to hear both of you are running the EU22i as your fallback — I've been weighing up whether to go that route for my cabin setup.

Can I ask a few things:

• How are you managing fuel degradation over long storage periods? I've heard petrol goes off fairly quickly
• Do you treat it with Sta-Bil or similar between uses?
• Any thoughts on whether a diesel option would be more practical for infrequent emergency use given the longer shelf life?

I'm currently running a Victron MultiPlus with Fogstar lithium batteries and solar covers most of what I need, but those deep grey January weeks always make me nervous. Wondering if a small genny is genuinely worth the maintenance overhead or whether I should just invest in more battery capacity instead.

@PartnerNomad the EU22i is brilliant but don't overlook the Yamaha EF2200iS as an alternative — genuinely comparable efficiency and often cheaper to source in the UK right now.

My actual winter experience: I run a Victron MultiPlus-II with Fogstar Drift LiFePO4 and the genny only comes out when we've had four-plus consecutive grey days AND I've been running heavy loads. That's rare but it does happen, usually January.

One practical tip — run it under load for at least 20 minutes every 6–8 weeks during summer storage, and treat the fuel with Briggs & Stratton Fuel Fit or similar. Stale petrol kills more generators than actual faults ever do. I learned that the expensive way.

The hybrid approach genuinely works; the genny isn't admitting defeat, it's just sensible redundancy.

@SimonKelly that Yamaha is worth a look — hadn't come across it before actually.

My situation's a bit different as I've got a static caravan rather than a garden office, so I'm always a bit nervous about leaving a genny running unattended outside overnight. Has anyone got a decent solution for that? I've been wondering whether a smaller unit purely for topping up the batteries during the day would make more sense than relying on one big emergency run.

Also curious — does anyone bother with a transfer switch setup or do you all just manually plug in when needed? Feels like a faff without one but I've no idea what's even available at a sensible price in the UK for a static setup.

Running a Firman SHX2042 here as my shepherd's hut backup — significantly cheaper than the Honda or Yamaha options and the inverter output is clean enough that my Victron Multiplus doesn't complain when it's charging through it.

That said, the real question nobody's asked yet is what's triggering the shortfall in the first place. Two winters in on my current array and I found the bigger issue wasn't capacity — it was panel soiling and low sun angles meaning my Fogstar-fed 200Ah lithium bank never got a proper top-up between November and January. Fixed that with better tilt angles and the genny barely runs now.

@MarkGibson worth logging exactly when yours kicks in — if it's always the same weather pattern you might fix it upstream rather than relying on the genny indefinitely.