I lived in Manitoba near Winnipeg (the coldest city in the world over 500,000 people) for 6 winters. I heated my house mainly with a pellet stove and I wanted a backup mainly to run the fan in case of a power failure (I did not want my pipes to freeze). I had lived in rural Wisconsin prior to that where power outages on the rural electric co-operative lines were a regularity. I bought a Coleman generator from Canadian Tire for about $600 that put out about 1800 Watts.

If I had to do it over again I would have just used an inverter plugged into the cigarette lighter of my car and left the car running. For one thing in my case, where we lived had hardly any trees to blow onto the lines so we never experienced an outage the entire time up there (yay Manitoba Hydro!!). My generator still sits in the box never used after 10 years. Another thing is the gas tank on my car is much larger than the small tank on the generator. Inverters for cars are also much cheaper.

Obviously this will not work on a large scale, or when you are not home, but it is probably the cheapest solution.

I use Google for most searches. I program in the newer versions of IBM's RPG (I hear the snickers - STOP IT!).

I use IBM manuals quite a bit that I have saved in .pdf format. But for quick questions about RPG or SQL I find Google has the best answer on the first page if I am even remotely specific.