Just wondering if anyone here has a home standby generator, and, if so, what part of the country you live in?

When I lived in New Hampshire, I had a 5000 watt Coleman generator and a 6 circuit GenTran set up. When we lost power, which we did every winter for a few days at a time, I would fire up the Coleman, plug it into the GenTran, and then switch the GenTran to take the house off the grid and into the generator power. It was a great convenience and this ran the well pump, oil furnace (which covered the hot water too) and the kitchen, den, master bedroom and master bath. The Coleman is with me in Florida now, in case we get a big blow!

coleman

gentran

I have 5 lawncare customers with generators that kick in automatically and they are convenient. I just have a Honda portable one that we use extension cords to the range or freezer as needed.

BIG BUSSINNES here in South Africa now. With our power utility basically on the brink of complete meltdown we have rolling blackouts each and every day for at least 2 hours at a time. People are buying these things like crazy at the moment.

That's not good, I thought SA was the "Developed" part of Africa.
You have a nuclear power station and everything.

Here in the UK, everything seems normal....

When I lived in Caithness, most northern part of the Scottish mainland we had 2 standby generators, a 6kVA and a 4.5kVA.
The 4.5kVA powered the two bars in the hotel and the 6kVA powered the kitchen, dining room and the guest bedrooms.
For the house we had a small 2kva one that kept the house going.

In Caithness we could be without power for a week or two at a time during the winter, snow and wind would bring down the overhead powerlines. About 10 years ago they started a project to put the powerlines underground and eventually the powercuts got less frequent. Cooking in the hotel was done by gas as was the dryer for the laundry. We also had a separate isolation breaker that fully isolated the hotel from the power grid so we would not back feed into the supply. Most winters we were an oasis of light in a dark town and we would supply food and warmth to those that needed it.


In the house we always had a box made up with matches candles and a torch and everyone knew where it was, we had a two burner gas cooker and later when we moved to gas central heating a tap was put in the kitchen so we could use the two ring cooker with it too if needed, the small genny kept the heating pump working so the house was warm.

In the back of my 4x4 truck it had a 12kVA generator which being twin cylinder diesel fed off the main tank for the engine.

The ruling party, called cANCer by most around here, never or rather not properly maintained the current infrastructure and it's now coming back to bite them in the ass. There's powerstations going offline almost every day hence they loose generating capacity and hence need to load shed to keep the grid up. They fallback on diesel generators which also because of poor management runs out of fuel and then also go offline until it's refueled a couple of days later. The level of incompetency is mindboggling.

Maybe you should pitch biogas?
All you need is a herd of cows, a food waste collection service, a digestor or 2, and a CHP and or gas cleaner.
(and £8 million in start up slush funds, Oh, if I won the lottery.....Maybe I should become a shrewd investor?)
And your German ancestors have Biogas sewn right up, 8k plants in Germoney alone. Last I heard

I have a 3500W Hyundai portable generator in the (detached) garage. It has a 2 x 120v outlets and a single 240v 13amp outlet. I have the garage on a 30amp 240v breaker from the house. In the case of a power outage do the following:

Shut off main breaker to the utility
Shut off all electric heat breakers and the hot water tank breaker.
go about the house and shut off all unneccesary lights etc.

Start up the generator and connect it the the garage and then I have (limited) power to the house. I can run lights, fridge, freezer, TV (if the cable happens to work), PC etc. I can run the stove if I make sure most everything else is off.

The MAJOR issue with this is MAKING SURE the main breaker is cut to the utility. IF not you can injure or kill utility workers and ,when the power comes back on cause damage to the generator and/or house panel.

THis sort of thing should NOT be done by anybody who is not absolutley sure of what they are doing.

This cannot be stressed enough.

Before we got the breakers installed we had to pull the three 100A fuses for the hotel supply BEFORE connecting the generator to the hotel.

Ya, the automatic standby generators have a transfer switch with open transition so when the gen kicks in, the electrics are completely isolated from utility. Manual hookups without a transfer switch can be dangerous.

good ones are rather expensive and you don't need them unless you're living in an area that experiences several consecutive days of complete power outages per year or many single days of power loses during the course of the year

That is true. It is tricky to quantify the value, however... even a single day of lost power in a home that relies on a sump pump could result in damage many times the cost of an installed stand-by unit. They are very popular in the south and east coast and along hurricane alley, and seem to be growing in popularity in the southwest.

we lost power here for several days during Hurricane Ike but with all the large trees that fell i suspect more then one home power generator would of been sitting underneath a pine tree

I keep mine in the shed near the house.
When power goes out, I can get everything I need running, within five minutes.
When running a wood stove for heat, you need that, as the fans would melt in a short time without the electricity to run them. I also have a 12v battery and converter for that, takes about 2 minutes to hook up.
Then I start up the generator, if the electricity doesn't come on within a hour or so.

I've used it about once every year or two, during the last 20 years.
Great for keeping the fridge cold, or keeping the house warm in winter, or cold in summer heat, during an outage.
You can also watch TV, it doesn't take much to run the 'tube'.

When storms show up, here in the forest, trees fall over the power lines, you lose electricity.
Sometimes it can take a couple days to get it back on, if a big storm blows through the state.
So at least a small generator, is a good investment, IMHO.

But if you live somewhere that doesn't ever lose power, I suppose you wouldn't need one.

Mine is a 'DeVilbiss', 5000/6500 surge, watt generator, powered by gasoline.
If I had it to do over again, I'd get one powered by propane, which we have, or natural gas if we were hooked up, which we are not. But when you use gasoline, you need to keep the gas fresh, with an additive, or change it yearly.
Propane/natural gas, powered generator, would eliminate that problem.

With the solar panels I have at home they produce slightly more electricity than I consume over the year, it's a pity they can't be used at night...

This year we were facing the prospect of losing the mains electricity for about an hour per evening due to there being a shortage of generating capacity in Belgium - or was it that they rely on gas from Russia and were expecting to get cut off?

Anyway we all got information leaflets from the local government about it last autumn but so far it has not been implemented. There were a lot of people getting quite frantic about it casting doom and gloom to all and sundry. The only hard part to it is if you rely on mains for medical devices at home or such, but for us it would have meant having to reset the clocks after the power comes back on again. Not too bad but if the wife missed her soap during that hour.....

The propane idea sounds good but I've never seen a conversion kit around here. My generator is gas powered and I keep about 24hrs worth of (stabalized) gas in the garage during winter. Come spring I drain the generator fule tank and take the spare fuel and pour it into the cars to use it up.......then start over in the fall.

I don't start the generator unless the utility projects that the power will be off for more than 4-6 hours. They are relly good at these sorts of projections and have a very efficient telephone update system.