Whole House Power with a Portable Generator

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[Shrapnel]

I have a 48KW Generac propane generator -- runs the whole house, including heating and air conditioning.

I live way to hell and gone back in the hills, and I'm an old Arkansas boy -- I know all about ice storms and power outages. When I built this house, I put in a fully-finished basement with a wood burning stove. For power outages, the wife and I would move down to the basement. We had a generator to keep the freezer from thawing. One year, we spent a total of 30 days and nights in the basement. It was an adventure!

But a while back, with my wife in such poor health, I sprang for the big backup generator.

48KW is a bit of overkill. How your house is set up with it?s breaker box and how you integrate the generator to the house is what is really important.

We put a Generac 10KW generator on our house, hooked up to natural gas. Propane will run out sooner than natural gas, so it is best to use NG if it is available.

The 10KW generator has a maximum output of 50 amps, so that does limit what you can run your house on and how many circuits your house can handle. We have 8 circuits and the 10KW generator will run the entire house other than the drier and electric range.

Plug ins and portable generators are better than nothing, but not much. If you have ever experienced a real power outage, you will understand the importance of an integrated system with a big enough generator to live as comfortable as you do with no power outage.

[Art]

48KW is a bit of overkill. How your house is set up with it?s breaker box and how you integrate the generator to the house is what is really important.

We put a Generac 10KW generator on our house, hooked up to natural gas. Propane will run out sooner than natural gas, so it is best to use NG if it is available.

The 10KW generator has a maximum output of 50 amps, so that does limit what you can run your house on and how many circuits your house can handle. We have 8 circuits and the 10KW generator will run the entire house other than the drier and electric range.

Plug ins and portable generators are better than nothing, but not much. If you have ever experienced a real power outage, you will understand the importance of an integrated system with a big enough generator to live as comfortable as you do with no power outage.

You are correct. The no mess no fuss no bother solution is a whole house set up that totally eliminates the inconvenience of power outages but peoples individual requirements vary as well as the amount they're willing to spend. Our cost, excluding the breaker and meter boxes which we were going to buy anyway, was $850.00 for the electrical work and about $650.00 for the replacement generator, $1,500.00 drive out for our current plug in set up.

Of course it all depends on the original purpose of the generator was. In our first hurricane after returning to Houston we lost hundreds of dollars worth of food. Compounding the loss of the food was the mess of disposing of it. Our old 4,500/3,800 watt generator was bought only to keep the refrigerator and freezer cold we could also plug in the TV or some individual lights. This of course involved juggling extension cords.

Our house also has 10 circuits that would be powered by the current set up. That excludes the dryer and the A/C - central heat.

We anticipated some sort of whole house set up when we decided to replace our completely outdated breaker box (and ageing generator.) The set up we now have in addition to ending the need for juggling extension cords, when running will also keep the lights on as well as the TVs. We have a gas appliance house so we would be able to cook on our gas range. Our hot water heater is also gas but I doubt we'd take a bunch of hot showers. For those purposes our 7,500/6,250 watt 30 amp generator should work just fine. Again, we would only be running it 4-6 hours a day during real emergencies. On hand fuel should last 8-9 days before I'd have to go on a gas hunt. We'd just have a lot more stuff functional with less hassel during that time.