Power Generator

It's difficult to imagine how different our lives would be were it not for electricity. When all is well we carry on with our lives using innumerable electric and electronic implements without a thought. It is only when things go wrong, or we find ourselves away from home comforts that we realise how much we miss, and indeed need mains power.
Many parts of this world of ours experience sometimes extraordinary levels of climatic upheaval that can result in extended power outage periods. These periods of extreme weather are just one reason to own an emergency power generator. Lower down the scale of 'need', is our requirement for home comforts when we are boating, camping, working away from the grid or having a weekend away in an RV or caravan. Even when away from home, much of the equipment we will use will have delicate electronic components that will require a 'clean' electrical supply to operate in a satisfactory manner.
My reference above, to 'Digital Inverter Power Generator' and 'clean' electrical supplies is no accident. Many generators currently available, work by using a small petrol engine to drive an electrical alternating current (AC) generator. To provide the correct electrical frequency (Hz) the engine has to run at or around the same speed all the time. Not only is this wasteful of fuel, but the electricity itself is not as 'clean' as a normal household supply. Your home electrical supply is best described as being 'pure sine wave'. This wave has a rolling and clean profile. The generator just described has a 'modified sine wave'. Your electric drill will not care about the type of sine wave it gets, but many electronic components in some TV's and similar equipment are very sensitive and will malfunction or fail if connected to the 'wrong type' of electricity. Many automatic washing machine program controllers will refuse to work with anything but a pure sine wave.
The easy answer to this problem is to use a generator that is designed to only supply pure sine wave 'clean' electricity. The good news is that these machines are directly comparable in price to the 'old technology' and are in fact generally cheaper to run because they do not need to run continuously at a relatively high speed when not under load.
Unlike traditional old technology the digital inverter generator produces 'direct current' (DC), not AC current. The DC current produced then passes through a digital inverter. This not only converts DC to AC but the output has a pure sine wave. This type of current is safe to use on even the most delicate equipment that uses mains AC power. Similarly, as the electrical frequency is also controlled by the inverter, the generator does not rely on a constant engine speed, and this makes these machines more economical to run.
Generally speaking, most of the small (up to 2KW) generators produced now by the major brands are by default of the inverter type. Beware though. There are many cheap Far Eastern imports that do not meet our inverter preferences.