I’m wondering about what’s involved in having some sort of cutout switch installed between my meter and breakers that would allow me to manually disconnect from the grid during an outage and connect to a generator that would then power the whole house. I would have all the work professionally done, but I'd like to be able to discuss it intelligently with the contractor. Can someone point me to some appropriate resources for getting up to speed on the subject (e.g. right ways and wrong ways to implement the cutout, disadvantages of multi-fuel generators, how to size a generator, how to evaluate a generator, etc.)? I'm an electrical engineer, so I'm not completely unfamiliar with electricity, but my expertise is low voltage, DC.