On 2/11/2014 9:16 AM, (PeteCresswell) wrote:
Per The Daring Dufas:
That little generator might run a furnace blower motor. What have
you used it to run? The largest generator I installed for a home
was a 40kw Kohler and it would run everything in the house. I got
my late friend GB to build a doghouse that matched the home as a
cover for the big genset.

Somebody else observed that there are two extremes in home
generators: "Cruise Ship" and "Lifeboat".

We went "Lifeboat".

Our house cruises on 800-1200 watts depending on how hard the
natural gas furnace's blower is working.

That gets us:

- All the hot air heat we want.

- Couple of PC's, a NAS box, and various LAN stuff

- TV

- Lights in almost every room of the house.


It does *not* get us:

- Toaster - Coffee maker - Microwave - Electric stove - Washer &
Dryer.


I have a little screw-on stove burner that works with a 16-oz
propane bottle and it is extremely effective. Just ordered 2 more,
in fact. That's good for coffee, and whatever else can be made on a
stove burner.

We have a mini-propane grill (about 10" x 18") that also works on a
16-oz bottle. That gets us toast, store-bought pizza, and
so-forth.

I have been obsessing about a second 2KW generator (these things are
made to run in parallel) to run intermittently around meal times to
pick up the slack for microwave, coffee maker, toaster....

But we're older than dirt and the wife has become adamant about
getting a natural gas powered auto-transfer setup against the day
that one or both of us are too sick or too feeble to manage the two
"manual" generators.

That would be full "Cruise Ship" except, maybe, for the central AC.

I have not priced it yet, but am bracing myself for sticker shock.

OTOH, I don't want our survivors to have *too* much fun..... -)

But the bottom line for me is that 2KW works if you don't want the
sun, the moon, and the stars.... or central air...

It's also good on fuel: about six hours per gallon. My little hoard
of gasoline in the garden shed got us through 5 days with plenty to
spare. OTOH, my neighbor was driving heaven-only-knows-how-far and
standing in lines to feed his Home Depot monster.

I've installed a lot of natural gas powered automatic transfer switched
generators in grocery stores and homes, I've even converted some
contractor type gensets to natural gas and installed a manual transfer
switch. My favorite genset is the old Onan air cooled four cylinder 15kw
natural gas fueled gensets because they're very reliable. Every single
one of them I've installed was a used genset from a retail store and
restaurant salvage company. I've made repairs to the engines and
transfer switches when I installed them but all they needed was an
annual oil change and rarely needed spark plugs that tended to last a
very long time especially if I put platinum plugs in them. I'd like to
have one for the house because it would run everything. The largest
genset I installed in a home was a used Kohler 40kw. I've installed a
lot of new Generac 8kw to 20kw gensets in homes and I setup many of them
with an alarm system circuit board inside the transfer switch that would
dial in to an alarm system monitoring company to report whether or not
it had exercised on schedule or had a fault condition. ^_^

TDD