ok so forget the power strip...its not even close to the task at hand, what you want to do is hard wire the generator with romex as long extention cords are a bad idea, so what you are going to do is run the romex from the generator to the room and install a small sub pannel, complete with breakers and all then just wire the rest of the room up like you would normaly, its pretty simple really, basicly what you are going to do is run 2 of your 1k lamps off the generator so you are not pushing it to its full potential all the time, i used to use a little honda generator for a grow years back, the way i got it to turn on and off was there was a connection on it where you would wire to your house current and when the power went out it would kick on the generator, so with a simple light timer you can fool the generator in to thinking that there is a power outage and it will kick on, very simple and cheap, so next thing, if you convert it to run on propane or lp you can vent the exhaust in to the grow room for co2, after all thats what a co2 burner does, of course you still need to vent the room regularly to avoid carbon monoxide buildup but its very effective method