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Home Generators (or How DTE Energy Ruined My Holidays)
We are among the thousands without power in the northeast. Day four actually, and we've decided to look into generators so that next year's New Year's doesn't involve fears of frozen pipes bursting and hypothermic babies and cats. At the very least we just need enough juice to run the furnace blower, but if we're going to lay down the cash I'd like to know what it would take to get a little more power ... like enough to run a fridge, router, laptop and lightbulb. I know nothing about this sort of thing, but figure there are more than a few experts out there so I call out to the wisdom of the mob. What am I looking for? How difficult is the wiring? What will it cost me? On the extreme edge, what would it take to get off the grid entirely? (And on a side note, thanks to DTE Energy for telling us we had power when we didn't, for losing the ticket for our neighborhood, for telling us it would be back every single day when it wasn't, and for the helpful DTE representative who warned us that our pipes might burst. Thanks.)
Home improvement stores, meijer, wal-mart, et-al are still open right now.
Go there, get one, get gas, bingo.
Why "next year"?
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How's your 'negligent homicide' insurance for when you fry a lineman when you forget and turn the main breaker back on with the generator running? Is it worth the extra $500 to get a real transfer switch? Plus, you'll know when the utility power is back when the rest of the house comes alive.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Much better, safer and easier than running wire to dedicated outlets (under the house, thru/inside walls etc)
The first thing you need to do is define your needs. If blackouts are only occasional, your planning is similar to planning a camping trip in your house.
My father has a professionally installed generator with all the bells and whistles - he lives south of Sarasota and has fairly frequent power outages due to the hurricanes. This was needed since the well water pump is electric. I first thought it was overkill, but he's in his 80's and can no longer deal with blackouts himself.
Unless you're need is both frequent and extreme, I'd suggest a decent sized kerosene heater and a 2000 watt gasoline generator. Both can be had fairly cheap. Kerosene keeps pretty well and two five gallon cans should be sufficient for your average blackout - and you can put a pot on top to heat food and water if you don't have a natural gas stove or gas service goes down. You can siphon gasoline from your car to keep the generator going - 2000 watts should be enough to run a refrigerator, some lights and maybe a computer. Water pipe heaters are fairly cheap and don't draw that many watts, but if you shut off the water at the main just as it comes into your house, you can drain the water from most of the pipes by opening all the taps.
So long as you make sure you have adequate ventilation, you now have an excellent opportunity to use up the canned goods in the pantry.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
If you want something permanently in place, you need an electrician, and no less. Because you need a huge On-Off-On lever switch to ensure you never attempt to power the house from both the generator and grid simultaneously.
This point is extremely important. Things like furnaces are usually hardwired into the house electrical system - so you can't just "unplug" it and plug it in to an extension to your generator. As a result, many people build themselves a "male to male" extension cord - a power line null modem, if you will - and plug one end into the generator, the other end into any house outlet. That reverse-powers the entire house.
However, it also provides entertainment when the AC power comes back on line.
If you're going to do this, then (a) turn off the house from the AC at the main breaker FIRST; (b) plug the male-male extension into the house first, then into the generator last (otherwise you're walking around with a power cord with a LIVE male end). But, it is still not recommended.
Also note that if you do this... you have no way of knowing when the power comes back.
I don't know how the grandparent poster expected the diesel fuel for the generator to be stored. Above ground in freezing temperatures diesel is useless. I'm not sure I want to know what the costs to use an underground epoxy coated tank are exactly. However, there are government permits, installation costs, and the cost of the tank itself to consider. I am going to guess that the hassle and cost of any underground tank, diesel, gasoline, or LP would all be high, and not worth the trouble.
Still, those costs would be lower than the final cost of having a large underground plume of diesel below your property and under your neighbor's property too. Bonus points if you or your neighbors end up with drinking water wells contaminated with diesel on property. This would almost certainly be the result of the low initial costs of improperly installing and improperly maintaining an underground storage tank.
For the submitter of the story, I would use local sources of information to determine what climate appropriate steps to take for your home when the power goes out again. In a suburban, residential situation I would not expect another power outage of this length for another 20 years. In the 25 years my parents have lived in their home in the suburbs, there was one power outage in January 1996 that lasted four days. There was no damage to the water pipes, however several plants were frozen and killed in below zero Fahrenheit weather. Other than that there have been no memorable power outages lasting longer than three hours.
Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.
First, I believe you mean double POLE, not double throw. If you're making a fundamental error like that, then you REALLY mustn't use a setup where a simple human error can kill people.
Second, it's illegal and irresponsible because it is way too easy for a simple human error to get people killed. If you're going to spend a few thousand on a generator that is even vaguely capable of handling a whole house (as opposed to a smaller emergency generator and a few heavy duty drop cords), $200-$500 isn't a lot to assure human safety.
Keep in mind too, that if your setup is discovered, you can be permanently disconnected from the grid. If a lineman hears a generator running and sees a power cord running in to your house, he will check it out. The fact that you did it right THAT time will not dissuade him from reporting you (it's HIS life on the line)! If your setup actually does injure or kill someone you will be charged.
This is one of those things that is technically possible but should NEVER be done in practice.
1) Your generator will simply cut out at the current limit. Welcome to current-limiting circuit interrupters -- you probably shouldn't be speaking in a thread about generators if you haven't heard of them.
2) If your cords fall out you're doing it wrong. Buy better sockets and/or increase the spacing between the pins to increase retention. Plus there's always the option to use twist-in plugs, which can't fall out even if pulled.
3) Electric water heaters don't have any (significant) additional startup draw. There's no rotor lock on a heating wire. And you can easily avoid overnight overcurrent issues by unplugging non-essentials at night -- the fridge will stay cold enough overnight while no one is using it. When only the furnace fan and sump pump are competing (and even then only when it's above freezing but below comfortable sleeping temperatures) I'm willing to take my chances on simultaneous startup, particularly when the "failure" mode simply involves me resetting a circuit breaker and restarting the generator.
4) Turning off the generator for 10 minutes every day (or twice a day) while refueling and checking fluids is hardly a big problem unless your household includes someone on a ventilator.
5) People have been able to, for the large part, successfully refuel all sorts of engines without major incident for about 100 years. Sometimes even while drunk and half asleep. I'll grant you that your car has better fuel storage isolation, but your lawn mower, outboard motor, or even motorcycle probably do not. Somehow we've survived; I doubt portable generators will be man's downfall.
However, I still feel the risk to linemen is minimal - as someone else pointed out, they know how to deal with live wires, because the other pair is live, and I'm certain they treat every wire as though it were live in any case.
Exactly.
Procedure:
1. Get hotstick out
2. Test to see if line is energized...nope
3. Put hotstick down
4. At the same time as step 3, some tool down the road fires up a generator
5. Grab line to start working on it
6. Die
Good plan.
There's no place like
While I don't disagree with ANY of your post, this statement is by far the absolute most important/best comment that will be posted to this thread.
Really, if you're asking slashdot about what you need, thats fine, get input so you can avoid the possiblity of being screwed by the electrician, but for the love of god DO NOT ATTEMPT to do it yourself, you don't know all the rules for your area for sure which can result in hefty fines if your lucky, or potentially the death of your baby and cat ... and the rest of your family. Some of those local rules are probably for the benifit of the electrical union, but the majority of them are for your protection.
There is a lot of misinformation out there about electricity. Its really not nearly as dangerous as its made out to be, however, there are FAR too many things that are not obvious that can really make things unsafe if you don't have the knowledge/wisdom to know about them or understand them. Theres a reason electricians have to be certified, and its a good that they are. The safety of your family is FAR more valuable than any money you are going to save doing it yourself rather than letting someone who knows the deal do it.
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Wouldn't the breaker trip or do they not trip when backfed?
I thought only GFCI/AFCI protection didn't work in reverse, but overcurrent protection did.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
and the power line guys test the lines before working on them.
Which works great, as long as the generator isn't powered up in the accidental misconfiguration AFTER they performed their tests and are already working (i.e. in contact with the wire at the moment the generator cuts on).
Thank you AC! I don't care what the rest of you have GOTTEN AWAY with. You _need_ everything that fyngyrz (762201)has indicated. Otherwise just stay away from you own electrical system and definitely out of MY neighbourhood! ... and I don't even want to think about the voltage drop in your "long extension cord" and the damage it will do to any electrical motors it is trying to feed.
The costs in danger to humans and damage to equipment much higher than your discomfort at not having power.
Just do it RIGHT!
No, because it's the governments job to protect my neighbors and the power company's repair crews from me. If I burnt my house down, it would at the very least damage my neighbor's house, if not catch it on fire as well. If I wire the generator into the mains, I could electrocute a linesman.
It's also a service provided to me to demonstrate to my insurance company that the job was done correctly. That way I can actually buy insurance.