Use onboard Onan to power house in emergency?

If you want to, you can invest in a generator power panel. It's very common around here, most places have one. It's just a sub-panel with critical circuits wired to it, fed from the main power panel with three breakers mechanically linked so you can switch to the generator. It's a manual transfer switch, basically, that switches the two power leads and neutral to be fed from the generator. I use a Yamaha 3000 watt generator, which is 120V only, and just feed both live lines from the 120V (I have no 240 volt loads in my house, aside from the dryer which isn't fed from this power panel). The keys are: manual or automatic transfer switch for both live leads and neutral, generator must bond neutral to ground, and load management so you don't overload the generator.

Brian