Since our house needs to pump sewage up hill we have a sewage ejection pump, and that pump only has a small holding tank. No power means no flushing toilets, no letting much water at all go down the drains.
I thought Sandy might have been the occasion when our new generator was first going to kick in, but we didn't lose power at our house despite the high winds, even though a few other people in southern NH did.
The last time we did have a blackout we had our first portable gasoline generator standing by, ready to go, but our electrician had never gotten around to installing a hook-up panel (we kept being told there were delays on the parts), so when the power went out he had to come by and do a temporary direct-wired hook-up.
After blowing out the transformers on both of our furnaces when the power from the generator sputtered after a restart (my rookie mistake, reconnecting the generator before opening the throttle), we didn't even get the benefit of heating our house during most the blackout. We ran out of gasoline twice and had to get into half-hour gas lines to refill.
We actually ended up without full power for a few hours longer than our neighbors because we needed to have the electrician come back to our house to undo the temporary generator hook-up. And then there was waiting another day to get heating back up and running, and the $230 bill for fixing the furnaces.
I decided that experience sucked badly enough that I sold the generator almost immediately to someone else whose power was still out, deciding that I wanted an automatic full house, natural gas fueled generator. Because of various delays and screw ups it took about six months to get the damned thing installed after making the decision to buy it.
But as least now we're fully ready for the next ice storm or blizzard or hurricane, and the D+ power grid.
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