Area man bases all decisions on the first popular media example that strings to mind.
Ha! That was the backstory of the watchable but still marginal "The Colony" -- an attempt to geoengineer climate goes haywire, inducing a planet wide ice age.
...is asking them for an opinion really meaningful?
Why couldn't Henson even be bothered to respond to the request for an interview, much less be interviewed?
For fuck's sakes, man. You're now fully employed for OpenSSL. Would it kill you to do an interview?
Any sufficiently sophisticated Chinese security security product to be of any use will either be compromised by the Chinese government "in the interest of domestic social harmony" or for national security/military/espionage.
We're power pigs at this house due to all the DVRs, computers, etc, something like 33kWh per day based on the month's total consumption.
With some extensive re-wiring of the power panel to move high-load devices (AC, washer/dryer, dishwasher, possibly even the gas furnace blower motor) to another panel, the 10kW unit MIGHT be useful to keep the fridge and lights going during a short-term power outage. Sadly I think the computers would have to get shut off to even get 12 hours out of it.
With the rewiring necessary, I'm not sure it's even cost competitive with a natural gas generator. 16kW units with automatic transfer switches are around $3600 and will run the entire house, including high power stuff, indefinitely.
Where I live, it's all kind of moot. I can count on one hand the number of outages we've had in the last 16 years on one hand and only one was long enough to even justify a trip to the dry ice store to keep the fridge from melting.
If it was even remotely more common (1-2 times per year, 24 hours) one of the Honda suitcase generators would probably be more effective just to keep the fridge going or maybe the gas furnace blower. Beyond that level of frequency or duration I think a natural gas generator would be useful.
First, none of these things move forward without some enthusiast buy-in. Loads of things are stupid from a strict dollar-efficiency perspective but people still do them anyway. Computers held fairly low value in terms of dollar efficiency for decades, but enthusiasts found them worthwhile and helped move that industry forward.
Second, you confuse cost and value. You know the cost of the utility power and the off-grid generation and storage components but you don't know the value to the consumer of being off-grid. What you see as a splurge they may see as some kind of inherent value.
That the best you could come up with?
If A = B and B = C, then A = C, except where void or prohibited by law. -- Roy Santoro