I love my Generator.
When I moved up here to the rural woods of New Hampshire, my biggest concern was electricity. Closer to Canada than Boston, it’s pretty rural, and the wind and ice and snow take the power lines down, more frequently than in a more urban area.
I planned my new house with a GenTran switch (It’s basically plug near the circuit breaker, that allows you use an alternate power source/generator), tried to calculate the house requirements. These switches are wired into the circuit breaker, and typically cover the essential power needs — well pump, boiler, refrigerator, and maybe a bedroom.
Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance.
We had rented a similar house, and guestimated we were using about 1000 KWh a month. So i figured that was 33 KWh a day or 1.4KWh an hour. I recognized the math trap here, realizing that it’s not equally distributed over the day. So I used 33/8h or 4.1KWh/hour. Connected to 6 circuits — well pump, boiler, refrigerator, 2 bedrooms and my Office — I figured I was well within the 5 KW of my Honda EB5000 gas generator.
Incorrectly believing you are prepared, when you are not, is far worse then not being prepared at all.
The first real outage happened at night, after about 2 feet of wet snow took down the lines. Luckily, I wasn’t on the road, but things didn’t really go as planned. Getting the on-wheels generator out of the garage and started took quite a bit of effort. I had grossly overlooked what conditions would be in play when this alternate source would be needed. But I got it out, and started, and flipped the switch. Pop. Pop. Pop. I had seriously underestimated the impact of startup amps on the total draw.
Unable to keep the planned circuits up, I resorted to a power bar and extension cords to keep a few things working. Since I thought I had it covered, I hadn’t really considered the flashlights, kerosene heaters, and other non-line power options that my unprepared neighbors had. All in all, a long night.
Not just a matter or more amps, I needed to consider how my family would deal with this when I was traveling or the under severe conditions.
Power to the People
After a some research, I found a much better solution. A whole-house-covering 15KW propane generator with an automatic transfer switch.
When the line power drops, a timer starts, and 30 seconds later the generator starts. 10 seconds later, the transfer switch trigger closes, and the power is up to the house. When line power comes back, the transfer switch triggers open, and the house stays on — seamlessly. The generator cools for minute and shuts itself off. It even does an automatic exercise (for 5 minutes or so, weekly). A “full” 500 gallon tank (they will only fill it to 80%, so full really means 400 gallons) will keeps everything running for 8 to 10 days at roughly 2 gal/hr.
It cost me about $5000 at the time, the 15K model has been replaced by a 17KW model. The real hassle was getting the propane take installed and the line run.
Having the power doesn’t mean you can use it.
While the single minute in darkness isn’t scary, I still would rather not have to deal with servers and networks going down. I have UPS’s for this brief interruption on all of my equipment, computers, and TV’s. While they took up the slack, I kept getting alarms, and resets, and even had a few completely discharge.
Generators put a distorted sine wave that a UPS interprets as sub-standard. Newer UPSs have controllable setting that can be tweaked to overlook this. A power conditioner would be the best solution, placed between the generator and the transfer switch. That’s TBD.
The second challenge is that at low amp usage (as would happen at night), normally stable frequency goes out of tolerance (60Hz is line power; I normally see 63-65 Hz on a 20Amp load but 50-100Hz on a 10 Amp). This takes out even the higher end UPSs. The unfortunate outcome is that I need to have more things running than I really need — lights, heaters, and the like. I’m in the process of designing/building a monitor that will open a circuit to charge batteries in this case, that should draw enough amps to smooth out the frequency.
