hello all, i live in new york and last year went without power for about 10 days after Sandy got done with us. Anyway i use a small honda eu200i generator in power outages and it does a GREAT JOB! during the aftermath of the storm my neighbor came over and wired my oil hw heater with a pigtal so that i was able to plug it in to an extention cord and turn it on. we had hot water the whole time :) Being an oil powered HW heater, it doesn't need much juice (not like elec hw heater) and my little honda was able to power it easily.
when the power returned, he came over and restored the hard wiring before i had a chance to label the wires he used. i wanted to be able to recreate it in the event of another power outage. can anyone tell me what he did? there is a box with an on/off switch for the unit right there, and i know he wired it through that switchbox. i THINK he took the hot wire out of the switch and hooked it to one of the plug wires and then hooked the other wire on the plug to a white wire. i am curious which wire that is, is that even correct? does anyone have experience doing this?