In the light of morning, I was relieved to learn that we had escaped the wrath of Hurricane Sandy. The yard was covered in small branches and clumps of leaves but nothing beyond that. By contrast, my commute to work took me past no less than half a dozen downed trees and power lines. Our main inconvenience was the loss of power for about an hour. When the lights went out, I initiated a mental countdown. 15 seconds for the standby generator to confirm a total black out, 5 seconds to auto start, 10 seconds to stabilize engine speed and voila…. and voila…… and…… nothing. After a minute elapsed, I went outside in the gale force winds to determine what went wrong. I tried a manual start. I tried resetting the controller. I verified the natural gas supply, still no joy. Having spent a good bit of time and money installing this generator it would be an understatement to say that I was not a happy camper. The unit does a self test every week and has started perfectly every time. I was perplexed and irritated as I read every detail of the owner’s and installation manual for a second and third time, searching, to no avail, for some kind of answer. About 5 minutes after our power was restored, I developed a failure theory and made a quick modification to confirm my hypothesis. I postulated that the only difference of consequence between the last successful test and the current conditions was the intense wind (gusting to 50mph). I used duct tape to cover the intake baffles which were fully exposed to the wind. The generator started on the first attempt. Mystery solved! Severe winds were entering through the intake baffles and either throwing off the gas-air mixture or pressurizing the chamber in such a way as to prevent combustion. Hard to imagine that an emergency back-up generator design would fail to consider this possibility. I will have to wait until the next big storm and power outage before I can feel any satisfaction with this generator and will be making a call to Generac, the manufacturer, to share my disappointment with them in the mean time.