The question most South Louisiana homeowners are actually asking
The real choice down here is rarely “generator or no generator.” After Ida left parts of the region dark for weeks in 2021, and after Laura and Delta hammered the southwest parishes in 2020, most people already know they want backup power. What they are weighing is whether a portable unit from the hardware store is enough, or whether it is worth putting in a permanently installed standby system.
The honest answer depends on how long your outages tend to last and how much of the house you need to keep running. In a place where a single storm can knock out power for a week or more in August heat, that math looks very different than it does somewhere that loses power for a few hours in a thunderstorm. Here is a straight comparison, oriented to how outages actually behave in this region.
How each one works
A portable generator is a gas engine on a frame that you roll out, fill with gasoline, start by hand, and run outdoors. You either plug appliances into it with extension cords or, if it is wired properly, feed a few circuits through a manual transfer switch you flip yourself. When it runs low, you shut it down, refuel, and restart.
A standby generator is bolted to a pad outside and wired permanently into your electrical panel through an automatic transfer switch. It runs on natural gas or propane, not gasoline. When the grid drops, it senses the loss, starts itself within seconds, and carries the circuits it is sized for, usually before you have found a flashlight. When utility power returns, it shuts itself back down. Our how a standby generator works guide walks through that cycle in detail.
Runtime and refueling: the part that decides it here
This is where South Louisiana’s long outages tilt the decision.
A portable running on gasoline burns roughly 12 to 20 gallons a day depending on the load. During a multi-day outage, that means repeated trips to find fuel, often while every station within thirty miles is either sold out or has no power to run its pumps. You are also babysitting the machine: shutting it down to refuel, restarting it, and doing that around the clock, including overnight.
A standby generator sidesteps all of it. Wired to a natural gas line, it can run for as long as the gas keeps flowing, which in most cases means indefinitely. On a large propane tank it can typically run for days before a refill, and it does so without anyone touching it. If you want to size the runtime for your own situation, our guide on how long a standby generator will run breaks down the propane tank math.
Carbon monoxide: the safety gap that matters after a storm
Portable generator exhaust contains carbon monoxide, an invisible, odorless gas. Nationally, portable units cause roughly 100 deaths a year, and those deaths spike after major storms, when people run generators too close to the house, in a garage, or under a carport to keep them out of the rain. That risk is worst in exactly the conditions we get here: a hot, humid, days-long outage where the temptation is to bring the machine closer for convenience or security.
A standby generator vents outdoors by design, sits a fixed, code-compliant distance from the home, and runs without anyone opening a window near it at 2 a.m. to check the fuel. It removes the human error that causes most generator poisonings.
Cost, and where a portable still makes sense
A portable unit is far cheaper up front, often in the several-hundred to low-thousand-dollar range, with little or no installation cost if you are only running a few appliances on cords. A standby system is a real investment: the unit, the pad, the gas line, the transfer switch, permitting, and startup testing all add up, and totals commonly land in the five figures depending on size and site. Cost varies a lot by home, so treat any single number with skepticism until the installer we connect you with has seen your panel and your gas situation.
None of that makes a portable useless. A portable can be the right call if your outages are usually short, if you only need to keep a refrigerator, a few lights, and a window unit alive, if you are renting, or if you simply cannot commit the budget yet. Run it well outside, downwind, with a working carbon monoxide alarm inside, and it is a legitimate stopgap.
Two extra wrinkles after a hurricane
Two things people forget: a portable left running in the yard is easy to steal in the chaos after a storm, and it depends on a gasoline supply chain that is often the first thing to break during a regional outage. A permanently installed standby tied to a buried gas or propane line has neither problem.
Which one is right for your home
Lean portable if outages are short, your needs are minimal, and budget is the deciding factor. Lean standby if you have medical equipment, a home office you cannot lose, small children or elderly family who cannot tolerate days without air conditioning, or a history of week-long outages, which describes much of New Orleans, Houma, and Lake Charles.
If you are still on the fence about whether a permanent unit is worth it, our guide on whether you need a standby generator works through it without a sales pitch.
When you are ready, Bayou Generators is a free referral resource, not a contractor. We connect you with one vetted, licensed local installer who handles the standby generator installation and the ongoing maintenance that keeps it starting when you need it. Start on the home page or request a quote and we will route you to them.