Living in the sticks in Austria we sometimes suffer from power cuts when there is heavy snow or storms. Each cut can last up to 2 days. Never bothered us before but now we have a 4 month old we are installing a backup generator. I think somewhere around 3-5kWh. Any tips on brand or type? Diesel or petrol?

AFAIK 99% of standby generators are diesel, unless it’s a tiny portable one for running power tools or emergency pumps. Whatever you get, you need to get it “whisperised” meaning enclosed in a soundproof case. A small domestic genset would sound about as loud as a car engine running outside your house.

The biggest name in gensets for export to Africa is FG Wilson: https://www.fgwilson.com/

at around that capacity , and although expensive the the Honda EU30i and EU70i are very compact and very very quiet. Despite the compact size they’re astonishingly heavy though

If you want to run electronic equipment (telly, PC etc.. perhaps even these days things like electric cookers a quite high tech) rather than just keep the lights on then anything thats a ‘sine wave’ type of generator (sometimes called digital) helps with that. Standard gennys have an alternating current but its a square wave, sensitive equipment often uses the mains sinewave for reference to function properly. Even my circular saw won’t run off a generator unless its a sine wave one.

Are you going to link it to the house? If so you need to also install a switch to isolate the house from the grid otherwise you’ll be backfeeding power into your local lines and could fry someone working on them.
Chances are it will need to be an automatic changeover switch to ensure the house is isolated whenever the genny is running.

Electrician is coming next week to install a switch. Thanks for information so far.

The switch doesn’t need to be automatic, unless you really want minimum interruption. We have a manual switch, so if the power goes off you go out and start the genny, let it settle for a minute then flick the switch. What is significant about the switch is that it has to be rated to take the max power the house can take, for when your on mains, not the power of the genny – in our case, the 190A switch cost half what the genny did.

If you have mains gas you could opt for a small gas engined generator.