JOHN D wrote:

I'm not an electrician but here's my 2 cents.
You can't ever let your generator feed back down the power lines. The main
breaker must be off and must stay off. It doesn't matter if your generator
can't possibly power the whole neighborhood or the whole grid..If people
hook up generators to their house wireing, even for a few seconds, without
isolating the house from the line,.sooner or later, somewhere, the right set
of conditions will exist to electrocute a lineman. You can't take that
chance. The main breaker must be off. There must be no chance that anyone
will turn the main breaker back on before the generator connection is
removed. I can see a lot of ways for this to go wrong.

I don't see where there's risk of back feeding through the neutral line any
more than there would be if you have a proper generator transfer switch.
Does a transfer switch isolate the neutral?

I've not seen any transfer switches that switch or isolate the neutral
and I've seen many transfer switches.

Pete C.