Storm recovery

What I had in mind, when I was thinking about a genny, was a pony panel that all the emergency power loads goes throught and a big plug. for everyday use the important stuff ( fridge, furnace hall lights....) gets its power from the main panel. in a blackout you pull the plug and move it over to the generator output. Cost a pony panel, 2 welder sockets and a plug. When the pwoer comes back you know because the TV suddenly turns on. Pat

General comment, not directed at you.

Gunner

"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire. Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us) off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give them self determination under "play nice" rules.

Think of it as having your older brother knock the shit out of you for torturing the cat." Gunner

I wondered if that might be so. You are absolutely right, transfer switch or drop cords are unquestionably the right approaches. Transfer switches are undoubtedly well-designed, but I'd even want to inspect that before I trusted it. I wonder how much of the price is lawyerproofing, as in gas valves and ladders.

Yep, and I've got a spark plug from one of those Maytags in my goody box.

It comes apart for cleaning and uses a copper gasket to seal it gas tight. NPT threads where it screwed into the engine.

Says "Maytag" on it too. You can just see the "g" to the left of The "C" in Champion in the RH photo.

The serendipidous part related to this thread is that I "poisonally" gave Don one of the two I'd just found, as a gag gift, when we were in Fridley a few years ago. :-)

Jeff

Please don't do that!!! I prefer to see the Excel guys stringing wire, not swearing at folks back feeding power on them.

Not to worry, Roy. I'll not zap a lineman doing his job.

Matter of fact, they ground dead lines to avoid hazards from fools. I'll have visible air between genny contacts and grid contact.

My training as an electrical engineer 40 years ago included some work with thick wire and lab work requiring an overhead gantry crane. Computers were for grad students.

I'm probably not as smart as you are, but I can assure you that I won't be zapping any linemen.

I run my gen. the same way and there'll never be any linemen zapped from my place. Been a aircraft electrician for 40 yrs. and have got enough sense to energize and deenergize circuits correctly. Have trained both my grown sons to operate the setup just_exactly_the right way. There are some of us out here who understand the danger, run our equipment safely, and get a little tired of the safety fascists.

Well, the guys doing the line repair to the 8kv line in the last storm certainly didn't ground that line. They repaired the line by removing the tree that was on it, flipped in a new fuse and POW! right in the lineman's face. He dryly observed that there was probably another tree on the line that they should have checked for.

While YOU may do th> >

Can't speak for Mr. Foreman, but when I move, the generator goes with me. Along with the switch box and the short wiring run. If I tell you that there's never going to be a lineman zapped from my place, then there won't be. Get over it.

When things are idiot-proofed, they just make bigger idiots.

Or, see mr. fulton's reply below...

Jim

A nit. Linemen treat ungrounded lines as "hot", and routinly work with hot 8KV lines. Moot point because local gennys must never backfeed the grid.

Perhaps you should have phrased that more generically, as 'the wife" or "my (Roy's) wife". Mary is quite able to deal with situations that would customarily be mine to deal with. The converse is also true. Shit happens. Help is often most abundantly available when least needed.

YMMV. Feel free to worry.

A couple of lifetimes ago when I worked for the Canadian National Railroad we had a book. This book was called "the Uniform Code Of Operating Operating Rules (UCOR). This rule book was a distillate of several centuries of global railroading experience. In theory, if all the rules were adhered to nothing could go wrong. It was (unofficially) understood that if one knew *ALL* the reasons for any given rule and *ALL* that could go wrong if said rule was broken one could selectively break it. Any defect in your reasoning that led to a disaster resulted in (at the least) brownie points (get enough and it was bye bye job) and at the worst, jail time. When I was a greenhorn someone decided to break one of of those rules to save a couple of seconds. Rather than seem officious I went along with this. The result was I almost got six people killed. It was so close that, to this day, I break out in a sweat just thinking about it. And it happened more than thirty years ago!

The moral? Before you break/bend the rules think long and hard about ALL the possible consequences. This is not a 'the towers fell because of an engineering oversight' kind of thing. It is a 'the rule was there for a damn good reason' worked out by your betters. You might just get away with a non-code installation and you may just get someone killed, all for the saving of a few miserable dollars.

Regards. Ken.

Good advice.

>

And you feel gree to worry as well. Best case - you won't be around to see the results of your flaunting of the regulations.

Ken.

railroading

I'm trying not to belabor the obvious here, but the "damn good reason" Mr. Davey espouses is in place for those individuals without any understanding of electrical power, circuitry, and distribution. Those who don't know what's hot and what's not. And the people who write these regulations are certainly not anyone's "betters", they just understand the dangers to linemen from people without any understanding of electricity backfeeding the distribution circuits. I'm not one of them. Once again, a lineman will_never_get zapped from any current that I backfeed into the circuit. It's not going to happen. My circuitry will never be operated by anyone but myself or my sons, who know just exactly the dangers and the correct procedure. We know what we're doing, and judging from Mr. Foreman's posts, he does also. Unlike him, I just simply can't stomach safety fascists. And, yeah, feel free to worry Mr. Davey.

I note in your apology post the following words "damn good

My point is if one doesn't have a *perfect* understanding (and I doubt you do reading your posts) one shouldn't mess with the rules *at all*

Ken. (tough guy?)

Don't hold your breath, tough guy.

Apology? Worked as youth doing electrical work in a production plant with

440 3 phase and the control circuits for same. In the 35 yrs. since have been an aircraft electrician on Lockheed L-1011's, B747's, B707's, DC-6's, 767, Airbus, etc. etc. Been badly shocked several times when someone I worked with didn't see the "do not activate" placard I placed plain view in the cockpit and pushed in circuit breakers. 400 cycle, 220 volt hurts like a bitch. I can't imagine anyone more careful than myself about exposing a person to a hot circuit. It will_not_happen to any lineman working on my outage. Just exactly which part of my post led you to believe that I don't have an understanding of power distribution? "Tough guy" is a derogatory term used here on the flight line when you run across a particularly obnoxious know-it-all. Most people with any sense grow out of that stage.

It occurred to me today (now that there's a genny in my truck) that powering a whole house with 220 with or without transfer switch approved by "my betters" is probably not a good approach for practical reasons.

Most small gensets, with some exceptions, have current limit on each

110-volt phase. Given a 5 KW genny, you must use 5 KW of 220, or 2.5 KW on each 110. But there's no telling how the key loads (furnace, freezer, fridge, a few lights, maybe a TV and/or a 'puter) would be distributed between the two phases and certainly no guarantee that they'd be anywhere near balanced.

12-gage drop cords w/ powerstrips solve that because then I know exactly how loads are distributed and balanced. I'll need to make a transfer block for the furnace if it's hardwired, but it might even have a plug. Matter of fact, I think it does though it's been a while since I looked at it. If it doesn't have a plug, it certainly could have and will have.

I've had some interesting conversation about gennies with a neighbor at the lake in the last couple of days He has a bidness rewinding big 3phase irrigation motors, also sells and repairs gennys. That which might be a good genny for a building contractor (Honda) may not be a good genny for reserve power backup. He cited reasons: seen smaller Hondas unable to pick up even a furnace motor load.

I was skeptical about that for a bit, but after some thought it is plausible. Contractor tools mostly use series-wound universal motors for light weight, low-end torque and often variable speed. Universal motors don't have nearly the startup surge that induction motors have, which is often 10X rated run current. I noted that my

4-amp freezer did not like running on 170 feet of #16 extension cord; it overheated while trying to start and being unable to do so. #16 is quite ample for 4 amps, but it couldn't hack the start surge. The freezer ran great when I replaced the cord with 12-gage.

He said that Honda uses electronic voltage regulation while the Winco just excites the field with a bridge rectifier. Elex can be designed to do the job, but they're often used to cut cost: put an inferior generator inside a feedback loop. That can work well as long as things are within design parameters, but things go to hell fast when outside the envelope. Cited example: run out of gas while under load. Cited typical result: fried elex. New elex: $300. I could fix the elex under normal condx, but it would be a bit tough doing it by flashlight (even Luxeon flashlight) with no instruments save those that are battery-powered and only a butane-powered soldern' ahrn. Bridge rectifiers can fail too, but they're shit simple to replace. I have several of those little brix in my goodiebox.

The genny now in my truck is a Winco, made by a company in MN that has been making gennies since 1927. There's another MN company that mades good gennies too, in Fridley 2 miles from me: Onan. They're premium where cost is no object: military, industrial, marine and RV. Well beyond my need and budget. Onan is now owned by Cummins, has been for a few years now.

Gunner, I did note your suggestion about getting an Onan genny out of an RV. Some issues I had with that:

-don't know whether it has 10 hours or 1000

-don't know if it's been maintained or not

-a lot of such stuff get "sold" to the insurance company and then "junked". Ya gotta know the RV dealer to know when and where to go dumpsterdiving.

Roy, you can now park your worry beads on this one. The linemen of MN will be safe from Foremanian folly not codified by my betters.