Anyone use a generator or a power station? Do you prefer one over the other.

Have a 14K Generac NG whole house.
Works awesome, and have had no issues in 3 years.
Still have the Generac 10K portable gas that was used with a transfer switch that was manually started and plugged into the meter.
Misses got tired of it with me working out of state all the time.

I use a generator a lot because our power company sucks, outages about every month. Last one was two days ago.

We have been considering an emergency generator wired to the house to run off our propane tank. I have a gas generator that will do all we need (but not all we want) but is a PITA to set up, run extension cords all over, etc. I don't want one that auto starts because we have frequent repetitive short outages, often only seconds or minutes and the starts and stops will kill a generator. I want to be able to start it up when power has been off for 10 minutes or so and let it run until I decide to swap back to the utility.

Chukar, does that 14K run an electric dryer, heat pump, water heater in addition to the toaster, lights, TV, etc?

Runs everything, be it we have NG dryer, on demand water heater and NG high efficiency furnace.
We mostly heat with wood, but have the furnace for backup.

You should take your start up and running wattage to figure out what you needs are, I'm just a simple concrete worker and it wasn't hard for me.
Working with Generac was easy.

I had a 3500 sq ft beach house, three stories, and two HVAC units. Hot water and cooking were propane. I could power the house provided I only used only one HVAC unit. Since cold air sinks, I usually ran the upstairs unit and not the 2nd floor unit. Everything was fine. I did not run the clothes dryer. If I needed to use the microwave, I turned the HVAC off.

Following hurricanes, I might have operated the home on the generator for three days before power was restored.

I had an electric elevator. Surprised that when the elevator was used, there was no detectable load on the generator. The microwave oven pulled more amps than the 240V elevator.

My generator was on wheels. I stored it in my workshop away from salt air. When needed I had to roll it out onto a sheltered deck and plug in the pigtail. Then I threw the transfer switch and powered the home. Often, the home was surrounded by three feet of tide for a half day.