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The Daring Dufas[_8_] The Daring Dufas[_8_] is offline
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Default Lessons from Sandy

On 11/4/2012 8:52 PM, Mark wrote:
On Nov 3, 7:41 am, The Daring Dufas the-daring-du...@stinky-
finger.net wrote:
On 11/3/2012 4:43 AM, Gunner wrote:



On Wed, 31 Oct 2012 21:33:18 -0700, Larry wrote:


In article a843e813-2d97-4a4b-b171-
, says...


On Oct 31, 8:40 am, Frank wrote:
On 10/31/2012 8:31 AM, Stormin Mormon wrote:


For me, they include:


* Run the generator every year
* Boredom is a terrible thing
* Candles don't put out enough light to be useful.


Christopher A. Young
Learn more about Jesus
www.lds.org
.


Things you should have already known.
Family here learned also that you should not run your generator indoors.


My neighbor who came over for water an outage or two ago was complaining
that they could not find any D cells for their portable radio.


Some people never learn.


A inverter is a wonderful thing, just connect to your car battery and
let engine idle. for a 100 bucks you can get a thousand watt inverter,
for lights, radio and a tv if the load isnt too heavy


A thousand watts is 85 amps at 12 volts. Most automotive alternators will fry
if you try to run them at that level, though some heavy duty truck
alternators will handle 1000 watts continuous. Your typical car alternator
will put out 50 amps at 14 volts at 4000 RPM, which is above engine idle. You
can retrofit a heavy duty 150+ amp alternator with a small pulley to make it
spin faster, but modern cars with their tight engine well and serpentine
belts make that a PITA. It would be easier to just get a 3 hp lawnmower
motor, mount a heavy duty alternator and a battery, which would give you 1000
watts easily while running the engine at moderate speed.


Actually..you are better off snagging the complete front end from a
Honda, or other small car, pulling the engine, mounting it on a stand
and adding a set of pulleys and a gen head.


http://www.harborfreight.com/engines...or-accessories...


As an example. A regular automotive small engine will simply idle and
drive that gen head quite nicely. Anything bigger than 20 hp will be
more than enough. Hell..a motorcycle engine from a 450cc or bigger
should drive it nicely


Gunner


--


If you can set up the pulleys correctly to get a small liquid cooled
engine to run at 1800rpm and spin the generator at 3600rpm, you will
wind up with a very quiet, reliable genset. A heavy flywheel could help
but I suspect the mass of the armature would be enough to keep power
output steady.



if the load varies, you will need some kind of a governor to adjust
the throttle to keep the speed and hence voltage and frequency
constant.

Mark


True, that's why I asked about his friend's homemade genset and what it
used for a speed governor to regulate the frequency of the output
voltage. ^_^

TDD