I'm new to this too. Just what I've been finding out recently. I went with the portable only because our power has been pretty stable. This last outage was the longest I can remember. Usually it's maybe 1-4 hours at the most.Right. You select the things you definitely want to be able to run and then it will tell you how big a generator you need to do that. Portables will only do so much. For true "whole house" power (as if nothing happened), a standby generator like Generac is probably the way to go, but they're much pricier.