Yeah, our fridge has a top loading freezer. I think that stuff spoiled once during a particularly long outage. We do also have an upright freezer. We purchased

Yeah, our fridge has a top loading freezer. I think that stuff spoiled once during a particularly long outage. We do also have an upright freezer. We purchased that after getting the generator, so the advantage of it keeping stuff frozen longer was less important to us than the convenience of easier access. (And we were okay to sacrifice a bit on capacity too.) We also have a hot tub and we're in New England. We were worried about a multi-day outage resulting in the tub freezing in the winter. A low probability event, but one that was conceivable. Both the fridge and the hot tub problems can indeed be resolved with something less than our 16kW generac. The hot tub really just needs a small space heater to be put inside the cabinet to prevent the pipes from freezing. And as you say, fridges don't use much power. So powering those two things (and our upright freezer) would need a pretty small power source. So absolutely, we overdid it a little. But it's super nice having it kick on when we get an outage. Otherwise I'll be playing the, "is it really worth going out in the snow, lugging out a generator and getting it running if the outage is just an hour?" game. There's also the issue of maintenance, which I'm... not greatest at to be honest. (I have a 2 year old at home and time is just absolutely slipping by. It's hard enough to keep up with normal chores.) The standby generator does a weekly test, so we know whether it's actually working or not. Yeah, definitely a bit of a luxury, but worth it for us. :-)