On 17 Jan 2005 06:38:06 -0800, Charles wrote:

In the two years that I have lived here, I've had about 20 power
cuts. Some are only a few minutes and a nuisance,

UPS's are great for preventing your computer(s) throwing a wobbly with
the short ones.

I have lots of space outside, and a space ready for a power
generator (petrol/deisel etc).

Take a look on eBay, the biggest up there ATM is 800kVA, comes in an
acoustic container with arctic trailer base. 5 figure price tag though
and fuel might run a bit expensive but you could flog the excess to
the surrounding villages...

- How do I calculate the power (watts) that an appliance requires?

Look at it's rating plate. But be aware that things with motors need 2
or 3 times the rating to start, especially induction motors (fridges,
freezers etc)

- Is there a device that can measure the power requirement for an
appliance,

Maplin and Machine Mart have plugin power meters. The Maplin one
seemed to get good reports recently (in here? try google).

or my entire power requirement (I have an economy 7 dual dial
meter)

How is space heating achieved, electric storage, oil, gas, other? I'd
forget about trying to run storage heaters of a genny as the size of
genny required would be rather large compared to your base load.
Better to find an alternative emergency heat source, wood burner,
portable gas fire or similar.

- When my power is initially connected after a power outage, all of
the outside floodlights come on and create an initial surge. How
would a generator cope with that?

Things with motors probably give a bigger surge unless you have
several kilowatt of external lighting. The easy solution to the to
these surges is to pull the fuses or trip the MCBs them whilst
starting up on genny. Then put the required ones back in one by one
letting the genny recover between switch ons.

I would be happy if the generator would power a lighting circuit,
and maybe a few appliances (heating pump, boiler, television, radio
etc).

Don't forget the freezers/fridges... Assuming that that "lighting
circuit" doesn't include you 10kW of exterior floodlighting then a
smallish 3 to 4kVA generator should cope with all that load fairly
easily.

Do take care of how you connect it into the house. Not only does it
have to be totally fail safe in disconnecting the incoming mains when
you are generator but you also need to think about earthing
requirements. The former to stop you electricuting some poor linesman
fixing the original fault. The latter so that you installation remains
safe but how you achieve that varies on how you normal "mains" earth
is derived.

Google is your friend, there have been many and long discussions in
here on this subject in the past.

--
Cheers
Dave. pam is missing e-mail