Posted on 12/02/2011 10:27:02 AM PST by martin_fierro
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The whole generator thing isn’t just one consideration...it’s a near religion. There’s the fuel storage & security, the disconnect/changeover, the noise, the security of the genset itself, grounding. Lotta things. I have not personally installed one, never mind ten, so I am reluctant to advise..hence my referral to a discussion of generally intelligent folks who have them.
It’s not a topic I am fervently interested in at the moment, but what I have skimmed so far leads me to think that as you say, a gasoline-fueled gen is the for kind of the lightest of lightweight applications, those applications being much less of an emergency than “bad as it can get”.
I do know that storing gasoline is somewhat problematical. Yes, it can be done, but it has some gotchas that cannot be ignored.
+1 on the Kohler. You get what you pay for. Our Kohler has been nothing but reliable.
I read somewhere that the generator should be in ‘inverter’ to run electronics. True?
BTTT!
BTTT!
If you do any welding, might be a good excuse to look at something like a Miller Bobcat. They are at least 10kW.
>>Yes, that works fine, but it's not a legal installation since it's *possible* to forget to throw the main switch.
My understanding is that opening the main breaker isolates the hot wires but doesn't isolate the neutral. Any voltages appearing on the neutral (like during an electrical fault) could still feed back to the grid.
I've considered doing the same thing, but don't want to take that chance. ;-)
It all depends if you wired the house right. I walk into places ready to catch fire, wiring wise, at a moments notice and they held up for 60 years. I knock of the main with everything else and slowly add things off the panel to start up. Got a $300 Harbor freight POS and it does just fine to heat and light.
I think there is a confusion of terms.
A generator is a rotary mechanical/electrical device and it is either a AC or DC current source.
To take an DC power source (like a battery) and make AC current requires an electrical device called an inverter (inverts the wave form positive to negative and so on using power transistors).
Generators produce rather "dirty" power due to speed fluctuations and so forth. It used to be to get the cleanest power you'd have a DC generator charging a battery stack. The DC power would then be chopped by an inverter to clean AC.
The electronics that accompany modern high quality generators use things like digital governors make the direct output suitable for home electronics.
About 12 years ago I got an Onan 6kw generator, with a Cummins gas (yes... Gasoline, and Cummins. No, I didn’t know they made small gas engines either) engine. It was sold, delivered and hooked up to a new house panel by our local power company. I live out on the very fringe of the grid, and when out power went out, it was out for a week or more.
This is NOT something you can get at Home Depot. While rated for 6kw its actually very conservative, and would be more like 10kw if it was rated like theirs are. A few thoughts:
— Don’t underestimate the usefulness of gas. When you have exhausted your three or so days of stash on hand and need to run into town to replenish your supply of fuel cans... Gasoline is almost always easier to find than diesel or propane. Just a thought.
— my genset runs my whole house with the exception of the oven, which I can live without. Lights, computers, TV’s, hot water... All else is good.
— Not all generators (in fact, few) are designed to run ~constantly~ day after day after day. They’ll burn up. Especially the ones you get at the big box stores. The Onan is designed precisely for running days on end. Weeks even. It matters.
— definitely get a professional installation with a separate panel and a master cut-over switch. Sending power back out to the grid by accident when the lineman is working your segment of the grid... Is bad.
Anyway... My .02
That's not exactly true... Generators (good ones, anyway) actually tend to provide far cleaner power than the utility service could ever do. The main problem with home electronics are with cheaper UPS units that have difficulty with generators-- but its not because of the quality of the power. Unless you have some kind of massive and intermittent draw on your generator, like a fire pump or something that browns-out the whole supply... There shouldn't be any trouble running most computers and electronics direct on the generator. Utility power is notoriously unreliable for sudden lulls and spikes. Much worse than the lulls and spikes in only one house on a genset. The genset can more instantly react to changes than the grid can.
marty
Mine is Generac that provides me 15,500 W. That’s right, fifteen THOUSAND watts. Don’t mickey mouse around, the little ones will let you down.
My Generac, “Sparky” just ran for three straight days, runs 3 living units if necessary, and our only complaint was that Comcast was out the whole time.
I know the installer very well, and will give you his number, just FreepMail me.
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