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To avoid that pitfall, some products are now taking their cues direct from frat culture. Witness the new morning-after Rescue Gel produced by Nickel, a men’s skin-care line that has evolved into a chain of spas. This blue-tinted cream loaded with caffeine, coffee extract and soy protein was designed as the beauty equivalent of a hangover cure.

In Greenwich, Conn., some chilly residents shivered while their neighbors’ mega-units (the whole-house kind that kick on automatically and emit a sound hardly louder than a cat’s purr) powered not just furnaces, washers and dryers, garage doors and electric gates, “but the mood lighting on their trees,” Leslie McElwreath, a broker at Sotheby’s International Realty there, said wonderingly, impressed by her neighbor’s generator prowess (and his spotlighted trees).

Indeed, in a town like Greenwich, where the accouterments of the high-end houses are super-sized, generator power is now a selling point, as home theaters, heated driveways and wine grottos were in years past, said Robert Bland, the brokerage manager of the Sotheby’s office in Greenwich.

“You can’t even open your garage door or your electric gates if you don’t have a generator,” he said. “And with the weather so unpredictable, it’s become a required amenity.”

But Mr. Peacock has well water, and with not enough power for the pump, his family grew not just colder but grubbier as the week progressed. On Wednesday, he; his wife, Jayne; and their 11-year-old son fled to Cape Cod, where they have a summer house.