At 08:39 PM 12/17/2006 -0800, Jack Brooks wrote:
>We have natural gas at our home and I will be looking at a generator
>conversion to natural gas, since that 8000 Watt generator was sucking down
>about 5 gallons each day and many local gas stations were already out of gas
>within a day or two.
> That's my reason for wanting to go to a diesel. I have an 8KW gasoline
generator, too, and I was using at least a gallon an hour, maybe a little
more, and putting at least a five gallon gas can in the tank every
day. Even with 20 gallons laying around that's a lot of gas over a few
days. An 1800 rpm diesel would use roughly half that.
>I'd love to see a thread on how to tie a generator into the home electrical
>system, as the four long extension cords I ran snaked through the house were
>a pain to have underfoot.
I have a big manual transfer switch on the pump house, and a transfer panel
on the house. Both were installed by an electrician. The transfer switch
on the pump house switches the incoming power over to the generator, so all
the loads in the pump house transfer. That's the well pump, pressurization
pump, light in the pump house and duplex. The house transfer panel is
essentially a smaller sub panel with the kitchen, master bedroom, master
bath and 1/2 living room lights, kitchen duplexes, and furnace motor run
through it. These loads were disconnected from the main panel and then
hooked to the transfer panel. The incoming feed to this panel can be
switched from normal to generator by throwing a couple of 2 pole breakers
that are ganged together so when you open the main you close the generator
feed. The power gets from the transfer panel via a long home made
extension cord made out of the biggest SO cord I could find, and I remember
I did size it for the load. It plugs into the front of the generator with
a big 50 amp range-type four prong plug, then it splits to two SO cords,
one going to the pump house and the other to the house, both via QD
plugs. In the winter I leave it hooked up and ready to go, but the rest of
the year I coil up the cords and hang it in the pump house. When I go with
the diesel it'll be hardwired to the main feed right below the meter.
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