Forced air heat, well, two freezers, lights, hot tub… in dark and cold Alaska winter. Never any problem with my Honda 6kw. I’ll test my TX house’s AC with the generator next week. According to the spec sheet I shouldn’t have any issue with running AC and the rest of the house on 6kw.
What kills mine is not the running load, but the starting draw when the old AC kicks in.
Depends on the type of generator. A 24K watt Generac is about $6K installed, often including the auto-transfer switch ($700). A Harbor Freight Inverter generator at 9.5K watts is $2,500. So, the price per watt isn't wildly different. The 22.5K (15K continuous) Generac portable that I have currently is about $3K new, but it's not an inverter generator and as I mentioned, is LOUD. Kubota makes some "Lowboy" portable diesel generators that run much quieter, but they are $$$$ (like $8K for 10K watts).
That is a heck of a system, lol. I'm surprised that size gas line is enough to feed an 80kw generator (assuming the line in the first pic was the feed line coming off of the regulator).Thought I'd weigh in here. Here's a couple of pictures of my power setup...
The top picture shows the two solar inverters, a small subpanel to combine the two, and the solar disconnect (you can see the other end of the generator at the far right).
The next picture shows the 80KW Generac liquid-cooled generator, the electic meter, my service disconnect, the Geenrac automatic transfer switch. From there it goes to a large panel in the hangar which in turn feeds seven subpanels around the house.
Agreed, a few UPS units make quick power flashes a non-event as well.
You should zoom in on his avatar pic. That house looks to be about the size of a small village.
I only learned it was a Chicago thing a couple years ago.
That and sideways outlets. And the people who live there don't know there outlets are sideways.
My computers, modem, router are all on battery backups. I even have a lamp in our living room on battery back up. No searching for a flashlight in the dark.
At my last house, we had a 38kw water-cooled Generac. I wanted automatic transfer and all circuits. For such a setup, code here requires capacity off 80% of connected load. Generac makes automatic load-shed modules, which we put on circuits we were really unlikely to need, but that's what we were left with.
This is what I have now:
Yep. Mine are all horizontal as well. It's all I've known
I seriously doubt that. I hear this nonsense all the time, but the NEC doesn't say that. What the NEC says is that for optional standby systems (which your home generator is), it must be sized at 125% of the expected CONTINUOUS load (that is things expected to run non-stop for three hours or more) plus 100% of the non-continuous load. The code says that if your cutover is automatic, then it has to be sized for whatever the automatic system is going to transfer (obviously, if it's automatic you can't really do otherwise). If you have a manual transfer, it's allowed that you will throw breakers to shed the excess load prior to throwing the switch.
