Generac Guardian Generators

--Stay the heck AWAY from Generac! Had one in my RV; you can NOT get parts for 'em. The company stinks for tech support too. Fuck 'em.

The newer gas doesn't store well at all untreated, but if you always treat it with a suitable stabilizer it will store a year adequately. If you ensure that you put your gas stock into your vehicle and replace the stock with fresh every six months you should be fine.

Propane *is* a liquid fuel, hence the LP designation. It takes a rather large LP tank to give you any reasonable on-site fuel supply, a good deal larger than a comparable supply of diesel or gasoline.

Probably the ideal setup is a larger NG fueled genset, auto start and transfer, and large enough for normal operation of the house, and a small (smallest you can find, 5KW or so) diesel portable generator and a moderate diesel supply in the shed.

It is far more fun to continue your day normally, warm and comfortable, while the unprepared are freezing their butts off in the dark.

Then it won't do what she wants. Some people don't want to be outside in the dark, in the rain or snow to start a generator, or to run cords. Some need autostart & a transfer switch becasue they can't be without power when they aren't home.

I wonder if he has a small plastic pipe fed inside an old rusted out iron pipe? In some places they don't dig up bad drops.

You had an 18 KW Generac in your RV?

We used them at mountaintop radio relay sites, mostly near the border with you guys.

jsw

That's really interesting. Can you tell me more about them? I have not even picked it up yet. How long do they last? Are they really loud? How do you start them in winter, with glow plugs?

I'm kind of surprised that there's so much piped-in gas here in earthquake land (LA county area, CA). I'd think that in a serious quake, the gas lines would be the first to go, or maybe along with the water mains.

Cheers! Rich

Yep, it's certainly at risk, but consider the fact that without that piped in NG, your already overloaded electrical grid would completely collapse trying to handle that extra load.

I have a Gererac 14KW unit. It works well but they absoulutely need to be properly installed , set up & broken in by someone who knows what they're doing. Also make sure you have good dealer support, the factory absooulutely *will not* deal directly with owners & Generac has a history of dealers coming & going. I bought mine used & the local service rep woudn't touch it because he hadn't sold it. I had to figure everything out myself, took a while to get the bugs worked out.

Other than that it seems to work flawlessly.

Do a search on the web for the owners & service manauals, they'll give you a good insight into what you're looking at.

What are the fuel storage rules for gensets, anyway?

Notably absent is your comment here.

-- "A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government." --Edward Abbey

Rated fuel consumption on a Generac 14kw is 240 cu.' per hour @ full load, 150 @ half load. I'm running mine on propane which is 2.8/2.2 gal./hr. Around here the price of natural gas & propane are about the same per BTU-

At "half" consumption nine days running time would set me back ~$650 bucks. Of course shutting it down when not needed wouud reduce that by a goodly amount.

I suggest your neighbours get thier meter checked, seems to be running a bit "high".

H.

It looks like the best deal around here is to be found at Home Despot and I will be sure to nail down who does their servicing/warranty work and talk to them b/f purchase.

Thanks, Laurie Forbes

Depends on location.

I think that Obama is a great president, doing his best in difficult circumstances.

He can put a coherent sentence together, so that alone puts him light years ahead of his predecessor. I certainly don't agree with him on everything, but I think he's doing a decent job given the pile of crap he has to deal with.

We just finally got our gen set hooked up. Ancient Onan 12.5KW 1800 RPM Single Phase - 4 cylinder engine with NG/Propane carburetor.

Ran it for a while on 5 gallon propane tanks. Not enough run time for any realistic emergency.

We first looked at installing a 250 gallon propane tank, believing the sales guy who said the tank was $65 a year to rent. That sounded very reasonable - found out later (but before signing the contract) that we also had to pay for a full tank a year whether we used it or not. $500 or so... Yikes!

We already have a natural gas service and use it for heating, water heating, cooking, etc. so hooking up to the gas line made sense. The only reason we looked at propane in the first place was the cheap tank rental and having power in the event of a natural gas interruption.

Realistically, the only time the NG line would fail would be an earthquake. So, going with the propane option we'd have electricity but likely an earthquake would reduce our 1920 vintage house to sticks and kindling. Kinda defeats the purpose.

We tapped in a 3/4" line at the gas meter and ran it about 40 feet to the gen set. It uses about 133 cubic feet per hour with no load, so probably about 175 at half load, which is about what we need. (We really should have downsized the genny to about 5 KW to cover all our emergency needs, but this unit came up at a good price - an oldie but a goody.)

If we run it continuously it'll cost about $50 a day. More likely if we need it we'll just fire it up a couple of hours to keep the essentials going - or get the neighbors to chip in when they bring their extension cords over and plug in. The fireplace insert will provide enough emergency heat with no electricity at all and we can light the cookstove with a match.

We did our own 'brute force' power transfer switch instead of buying the $275 commercial panel. We installed a 50A dryer outlet from our main panel and a small sub-panel with breakers to feed all the emergency circuits. The generator output stubs out to another dryer outlet near the sub-panel. When needed we will manually unplug from the main panel and plug into the generator receptacle. Cost about $30 for the whole shebang.

Neither gasoline nor Diesel were even considered - the ethanol gas goes bad too fast and diesel would turn to jelly before we got to use it.

Awaiting the first power failure of the season to try it out.

Carla

"But there's still a problem. Yes, Biden is occasionally a truth-teller. But, just as often, he's explaining how FDR spoke to Americans on TV, years before they had television sets or ? give it time ? how squirrels would taste more like ice cream if goats were only taller. And again, whenever he punctures the politics as usual with an inconvenient truth, the administration forces Biden to recant, not the other way around." - Jonah Goldberg

My thoughts exactly.