So how do you know which is the best portable generator? You have to have some way to judge it, do you go on price or how long it will last? After all if you pay a low price today, let’s just say $300 for the sake of argument, and it gives up the ghost in 3 months, that could well leave you feeling pretty sick. If you only needed the generator for one job, or a short amount of time you’d hire one.

Of course even if you want your portable generator to last for years the amount you spend on it is going to depend on your budget, I’d like a Rolls Royce but I can’t afford one. So your choice is going to be a compromise based on a variety of factors such as how much you’re willing to spend, what you need from your generator.

Maybe the best way to start is to decide exactly what the top limit of your budget is, that way you make your search for a generator a lot simpler, if you’re on a low budget you won’t need to waste time looking at thousand dollar products. Likewise if you’re on a mid price budget you don’t need to start wading through all the cheap generators on sale.

If you’re going to do your shopping or research on line, such as at Amazon.com,  then you can obviously go to the search engines and type in a search phrase such as “Low cost portable generators” or “$300 portable generators” or maybe “$1000 portable generators”. That obviously narrows the field to your price range and save a lot of time.

You should also make a list of the features you would like a generator to have, for instance how many outlets does it need? This depends on what you will be using it for of course, if it’s for camping and fishing trips then you might only need a couple of outlets. The same thing applies to the size of portable generator you need, if you need lots of power then you know it’s going to be a big generator; do you need to move it around? How heavy will it be? Should it have wheels?

To sum up, before you go looking at generators on line or off, make a wish list, how powerful, how heavy, how quite and so on., and set your budget, it could make your search a lot easier. You could also check out this in depth review of the Briggs and Stratton 10 HP portable Generator