Gary, great suggestions- the natural gas idea is a good one and I thought long and hard about it, but the cheapest I could find was still 3.5X more money than the 6kw gasoline job I ended up ordering. Maybe an upgrade in a few years. Thanks for the Sta-Bil suggestion, I'll definitely do it. And I'm installing a manual transfer switch at the main box, for the entire house. The generator will stay inside the garage and I'm running the exhaust through the wall, into the back yard where hopefully it won't be too loud for the neighbors (who will probably be over at our house then anyway...). I have a 2kw inverter for things you describe, but as you pointed out, it's the furnace in winter that is the issue. That Christmas outage really kicked us hard- bad timing on top of the inconvenience and cold weather. Luckily my mom didn't lose her power so I sent the girls over there for the duration, and power came on here just in time to prevent pipes from freezing. But next time, it could be for far longer than 2 days, and much colder... Oh, BTW, I did find a 12V coffee maker at Big-5!
From: "Gary Liptrot" <n7zi@comcast.net>
Chuck, I often thought about a generator that runs on natural gas. You don't have to stock cans of gasoline. They are more expensive though. If you do go the gas route then be sure to add Sta-Bil to the gas cans so that the fuel doesn't turn to varnish on you.
I got through several blackouts with my solar AGM batteries that I took out of my car and just powered a small inverter, played movies on a laptop and had a few lights going. That works unless you want heat which can be vital in the dead of winter especially if it's an extended outage. Broken pipes and frozen kids are a drag. The best electrical setup in your house is a separate breaker panel that you plug the generator into that manually cuts over the circuits that you want to power such as the items that you mentioned like heat, refrigerator and maybe some outlets. It's not too hard to wire up and it makes the job so much easier.
__________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com
I just thought of a little story behind a generator that I have used, speaking of Sta-Bil. This generator is at an emergency communications facility. The "boys" and I have run it once a month regularly for years. The last few months we let the monthly running slip and we had to have it overhauled. The point being is that after each use we let it run completely dry and still the shop said that it had gummed up (and some seals had dried up). I am now keeping the full tank with Sta-Bil in it rather than run it down to "empty". It changed my thinking about how to store such things as generators, snow blowers, weed whackers etc.. Anyone have similar experiences, perhaps a story that would suggest storing it like I am trying is bad? 73 de n7zi Gary "Why buy something for ten bucks when you can make it for a hundred." JR ----- Original Message ----- From: "Chuck Hards" <chuckhards@yahoo.com> To: <utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Monday, September 12, 2005 12:19 AM Subject: [Utah-astronomy] Re: Generators
Gary, great suggestions- the natural gas idea is a good one and I thought long and hard about it, but the cheapest I could find was still 3.5X more money than the 6kw gasoline job I ended up ordering. Maybe an upgrade in a few years. Thanks for the Sta-Bil suggestion, I'll definitely do it. And I'm installing a manual transfer switch at the main box, for the entire house. The generator will stay inside the garage and I'm running the exhaust through the wall, into the back yard where hopefully it won't be too loud for the neighbors (who will probably be over at our house then anyway...).
I have a 2kw inverter for things you describe, but as you pointed out, it's the furnace in winter that is the issue. That Christmas outage really kicked us hard- bad timing on top of the inconvenience and cold weather. Luckily my mom didn't lose her power so I sent the girls over there for the duration, and power came on here just in time to prevent pipes from freezing.
But next time, it could be for far longer than 2 days, and much colder...
Oh, BTW, I did find a 12V coffee maker at Big-5!
From: "Gary Liptrot" <n7zi@comcast.net>
Chuck, I often thought about a generator that runs on natural gas. You don't have to stock cans of gasoline. They are more expensive though. If you do go the gas route then be sure to add Sta-Bil to the gas cans so that the fuel doesn't turn to varnish on you.
I got through several blackouts with my solar AGM batteries that I took out of my car and just powered a small inverter, played movies on a laptop and had a few lights going. That works unless you want heat which can be vital in the dead of winter especially if it's an extended outage. Broken pipes and frozen kids are a drag. The best electrical setup in your house is a separate breaker panel that you plug the generator into that manually cuts over the circuits that you want to power such as the items that you mentioned like heat, refrigerator and maybe some outlets. It's not too hard to wire up and it makes the job so much easier.
__________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com
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participants (2)
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Chuck Hards -
Gary Liptrot