Thanks everyone! I will stick to factory stringing. One of the issues I had was the cost of a string set here in Canada. It was well over $1000.
I did some more searching of the forums, and discovered I have several options, which include considering the premiere gut strings, which are offered in a set for the prelude, or just ordering from harp.com
Both these options lower the cost of a spare set of strings significantly for me, by almost half!