Emergency Power Generation

The following feature relates a recent experience we had deciding on the installation of an emergency electric generator.

Florida 2010 gave us some scary predictions regarding the  hurricane season so we decided to bite the bullet on a generator.

(Update late fall of 2010  Florida had 19 named storms this hurricane season and missed the bullet on all of them and the fact that we didn't need the generator did not bother us one bit.)

We are going to confine the information to the specific features we used size etc.  Example this feature will deal with a natural gas application, versus propane or gasoline. 

First there are small generators that are designed to do any of the 3.  They are called Tri fuel.  This type of generator is versatile, economic but limited in power.  If you just want to serve a few plugs in the house a relatively small room air conditioner just be prepared to run some wires through the house being very selective what you are running at the same time and this could fit the bill for you and your wallet.

There are the conventional gasoline generators, similar to the ones used by  the  construction industry that are similar to the tri-fuels described above.  Perfect to keep an oil burner running, a small appliance and perhaps a modest room air 110  air conditioner.  There are humongous generators that you will see in some of the supermarket rear lots that were recently mandated here in Florida to keep the food supply safe.  Take note how high off the ground they are.

The portable applications described requires hauling fuel and hopefully in case of a power outage the fuel supplier (gas station) has an emergency generator of their own to supply you.  I have been told a small generator will burn about 1 gallon of gasoline an hour.  We would assume a small generator would not be used constantly, but just keeping a house warm running the oil burner or small air conditioner all day long could amount to a considerable amount of gas cans and fill ups let alone costs.   If you are living in an area that has minimum down time this could be bearable.  If you are in a hurricane alley, weeks could be involved.

In the case of propane, there are small tanks for small needs, there are large tanks for large needs.  Some folks even bury large propane tanks.

We have natural gas into our property installed previously for a pool water heater, so we did not have to deal with a natural gas line installation.  Installation of gas lines can be expensive but one would have to check with their natural gas supplier to see first if gas is available and would there be an installation cost.  Pool heaters are used regularly and gas suppliers are anxious to gain the business.  How they would look at a power generator service only I am not sure in determining whether they would eat the installation costs as they did with our pool heater a few years back.

With Natural Gas installed we only had to run about 8 ft. of pipe from a joint next to the meter.  About an hour and half and some know how the gas fitter went home with a hundred and fifty bucks in his pocket.    He was happy and we were happy.

The generator we purchased was a Generac 10 kW.  (Shop around, prices vary) Start with Home Depot and Lowes and play one against the other, in another words be a bastard about it with them.  The 10 kW we bought weighs about 500 lbs and we decided to put it on a concrete block and concrete capped stand.  (Filled the inside of the box with blocks as well).  We stuccoed the outside of the block.  If you are fortunate to have an area with a slab you may be able to build a stand on top of that.  The code in our Florida area calls for the bottom of the  generator to be at the floor level of the new code requirements.  In our case our main floor level when our house was built in the 60's was built at the required 4 feet above mean water level.  This level has been changed to 7 ft. above mean.  The code calls for older homes to conform to the new codes regarding new installations.  Our stand of block and concrete cap was 4 courses of block high with a 4" inch cap.  About 4 inches high.

There are stands for air conditioners that are aluminum, but I am not sure if you can find a structurally sound stand especially for the perilous leak potential of gas,  compared to the security of a solid block and concrete stand.  We have heard of generators placed on wood stands.  We think this is insane, especially in areas that are flood prone.  Remember after a very serious storm the first thing you need is electrical power,  and your  generator  doesn't want to be floating down the street.  In addition a gas leak because of a settled unit that compromises a line could really cost you.  Air conditioners that are lighter and wired are a lot less troublesome.

We installed the stand  ourselves with our farm back ground, but my guess is if you have to hire it done I am not sure whether 1000 bucks would do it. In a 30 " by 72 " structure we used 56 blocks, 32 bags of concrete mix and 8 bags of mortar for the block and stucco.  This included a 9 inch footing pad as we put block inside the cavity.  We did stuff the holes in the top block with concrete empty bags, capped that with poly and we installed re-bar in the cap. 

Placing a 500 lb generator about 40 inches off the ground was a challenge if you GC the project.  We rolled the generator out of the garage where it was drop shipped on a pallet on pieces of plastic conduit.  That worked pretty well moving it on a concrete walk to the stand.  The challenge was to get the generator up on the stand and thanks to a very bright electrician who brought a ramp with him we slid the generator up the ramp and on to the stand with a lot of bull work.  My guess is a fancy contractor would use a crane and tack the cost on to the deal.   There are portable mini cranes that they use for heisting air conditioners that is a consideration.

Costs

Again you have the option of being the General Contractor  or getting a contractor to do the whole smear from soup to nuts.  It all depends on your background and getting the sub contractors on the same page with you.

We are not going to get into the cost difference of being your own GC or soup to nuts but we will explore the cost of the unit as it applies to the size of it as well as the cost of installation to some degree.

This is where we will explore 2 options, the Automatic option and the Manual option and this gets detailed.

Manual System

We decided to go with the Manual route for a number of reasons and there is no question it is debatable, primarily based on how deep your pockets are and even if you have deep pockets how conservative you are.  There are well healed people that are not mechanically inclined that will not deal with a manual system that we will describe shortly.  It involves flipping breakers on and off, starting the generator (Our unit has a battery and trickle charger) and it involves pulling a large lever to switch from power company to your generator, again to be detailed below.  50 years on a farm, I personally have no discomfort (selectively) flipping switches that are accurately marked by the electrician and especially if it would save me big bucks in the size of the unit, and the extra cost of the automatic installation and operational costs etc.

Automatic System

With an automatic system the cost is increased dramatically because you are compelled to size the unit to carry everything that could be on at the outset of a power outage.  Automatic systems do just that, when the power goes out, it fires up the generator automatically and turns it back  on when the power is restored.   In the case of a house in the 2500 sq. ft. range this could mean a 16 kW unit.  If you get into larger homes with multiple air conditioners and multiple 220 circuits you need a generator that goes into the 20's or more kW wise because the generator has to be prepared size wise to handle whatever is running at the time of a power outage.  This is a huge consideration.  Personally I didn't want to be compelled to run my entire house and costs involved versus the occasional chore of flipping some switches etc.  I sacrificed luxury for being the boss of my finances. 

There is one hidden factor in these large generators and that is the cost of operation that is astronomical especially in the States like Florida where the price of natural gas is stiff.  They say Texas and the oil states  is much less but I had no reason to investigate the cost difference living in Florida.  I would strongly suggest before a decision is made to sit down with either a contractor or power source rep and have them estimate the cost in your area for different sized units.

We were given rough figures of anywhere from 5 to 10 bucks an hour when running the 10 kW that we chose and 10 to 20 bucks an hour when running the 17 kW.    Someone could dispute these estimates as general as they are and we would welcome any input on this cost issue.   These figures are spread out from idle to full load and everything in between.

There is a question regarding idle time and we were surprised after writing this feature that a  new technology generator runs very efficient in the idle mode and in fact we were given an estimate that there would be approximately 190 cubic feet of natural gas burned with our 10 kw Generac unit.  If that is accurate and the rep that we talked to said their engineering department verified this usage figure.  Hypothetically if the generator ran on idle for most of the day the cost would be less than 20 bucks.

Now assuming these estimates are any where near close this doesn't take a brain surgeon to come up with some pretty hefty cost  figures each day and really astronomical if you are enjoying the luxury of a full house of juice 24/7.  I can tell you one thing, on our first outage experience I am going to be the cheapest piker on usage than you can imagine as an untethered usage could result into thousands of dollars per week, and one of the reasons we leaned heavily to the smaller unit and application.

When we powered up our bedroom air conditioner that is in the 2 1/2 ton range we discovered that after the initial surge (When starting, each time it starts now, you do have a surge for a few seconds)  and then the generator leveled off to 50% power.  At that time we were running some fans, the TV, a distiller and some lights. 

We have recently installed a new 2 1/2 ton air conditioner for our bedroom areas.  We had quick start capacitor installed.  Capacitors store juice when a machine is turned off and is used when starting up, to help in the low voltage issue that can damage equipment especially electrically sensitive devices like certain fans, computer etc.   In the case of a fairly good sized air conditioner that would be carried quite well after startup such as our 10 kW generator, again the initial surge must be considered.

There is no question we will not even attempt to use the main house air with our 10 kW unit and that is fine.  We can eat our meals out on the patio with a fan going and that will be the extent of our luxury, other than night time where we would use the unit for our 2 1/2 ton air unit. 

But just think of it, if our rough figures are anywhere near accurate and assume that we will be operating at 50% power on average we could go for 5 bucks an hour at night with the  fridge keeping cool and that could be an overnight 50 dollar bill. 

Installation

We had a great electrician that allowed us to semi General Contract the affair.  I am not going into his charges but he was fair in fact more than fair after we had to enlist him into getting that generator on top of the concrete stand, that was a monumental task.

At first we thought we would go with the conventional approach were a line is run directly from the generator into the main interior panel box, most of the time depending on where the gas supply is and where  the inside panel is.   In the Automatic system a transfer box is installed with a minimum amount of circuits usually around 8 and that is what you would live with.  8 circuits is quite a bit but doesn't blanket the house.

Instead it was decided by the electrician that a line in conduit would be brought around about 60 ft.  on the outside of the rear part of the house and  under the soffit with a simple on and off transfer box switch  installed next to the outside panel.  The electrician merged the transfer box with the main outside panel and the transfer box has one large handle that serves either the main power line or in the alternative position to serve the emergency generator.  We have also installed surge protector at the inside main panel box.

Now in this case it easy to see that the power would then be directed to the interior panel when in generator mode and every circuit would be potentially active if desired by flipping switches.  Flipping switches do not involve in the majority of cases anything other than the heavy 220 circuits.  I do have a little question regarding our 110 distiller circuit and will be cautious when we use the distiller.  We are hopeful that we can run the air in the bedroom at night, keep the refridge going and run the distiller, so that we have the ability to run our essential stuff during the day without the extra load of the distiller.

So in this application (The manual) you have power anywhere you need it as long as you do not use more than one 220 circuit at a time and in particular when using the 220 circuit that controls the bedroom air conditioner that in our case  (10 kW) would be at bed time.  At bed time again we would have the comfort of air with the  2 1/2 ton unit, the refridge and perhaps a light or two.  To repeat with our bedroom unit it appears from our initial test 50% power from the generator would do the trick after initial surge.

For those who do not have a separate air conditioner for their bedroom, one could purchase a room unit either 110 or 220.  There are new ductless units as well as units that stand alone and cool.

In the case of heat needs.  Electrical strips in air conditioning systems are big time consumers.  The new air conditioning unit we purchased has a strip that will use about 8 kw so with our 9 to 10 kw generator you can easily see where we would be really pressing.   We will be considering a simple low power 1 room electrical heater for our bedroom, perhaps in the 1000 kw range and put on an extra blanket.

To give you a chronology of "flipping switches upon an outage"  In sequential order as follows.

Shut off main wall switches of the sensitive fans that have these delicate microprocessors in them if you have the like the  Intellitouch Casablanca's for instance. They are affected with power outages and surges.  We have 4 of them, no big deal.  Just flip them off before you do anything.  You can use them once you switch over, just make sure you turn them off when power is restored.  Unplug your computers unless you have a real good surge protector.  I have surge protection for my computers but I still will unplug them.

Go to main interior panel and shut off all clearly marked major 220 breakers. Make sure your electrician does this for you.

Go outside to the generator and crank that up.  Remember this generator can just run at 50% power without anything drawing on it.

Last go to the transfer box next to the outside panel and pull the handle down to the emergency generator setting.  You will then be feeding the inside panel in the house from the generator.   With this concept it is impossible to feed the electrical panel inside the house with both feeds.  It is either one or the other.

From that point on you will decide how many circuits you can use at once and again only one 220 circuit at a time if you choose a minimum size 10 kW unit as we did.

Once power comes on, just flip the outside transfer switch to the power company line, turn off the generator and go inside and turn all the switches that were off to on.  If the power comes on during the night when you are sleeping, you will of course be running off the generator.  If you get up during the night a couple of times as I do, you can glance out and see if the street light is on or off that could indicate that your power has been restored.  There is a possibility that your house power and street light is not on the same line, but this can easily be checked on your next outage.  Just make it a point of noticing whether your street light is on or off during and outage to your house.

Red Ants.

After about 6 months and testing the generator about every 10 days simply by turning it over and running it for 10 minutes or so, we went to turn it over and it was dead as a door nail.  We tried jumping the battery and that didn't work and in fact the electrician said we should not have jumped the battery as it could have voided the warranty.

Speaking of warranty we contacted the manufacturer and they had a service company just a few miles from our home.

The service man came out, checked the battery and found it to be fully charged.  He checked the master control and found that to be defective.  He unscrewed the master control and all of sudden we got a surge of Red Ants like hundreds of them coming out from inside and around this control.  It was apparent these ants shorted out the control.  In fact they had transported mulch that we had in our gardens to create this rather large nest affair.

The manufacturer stood in back of the warranty, but the service man said it would be the last ant affair that they would eat and this was the customers obligation to keep the ants from invading the control.

Interestingly we found the ants had migrated to the hot side of the control.  Now this generator has a trickle charger and there is a good chance that this electrical activity is what attracted them and would attract ants to other similar controls.

We used an ant spray and an ant powder in the areas that the ants would have to travel to this control.  The combination of the powder and Home Depot spray we believe will take care of the problem as with the powder being soaked with the liquid which appears to be petroleum based, is a perfect medium for the ants to pick up the mix on their feet and that would do them in.

Don't rely on a warranty as you may have a problem with some companies honoring an ant invasion.  Spray the devil on the areas around the generator and inside the container being careful you do not wet the control and contacts.