Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Generator recommendation - home backup

oh yea......farm store right here in Podunk has 'em

8' long......gate or corner posts about $9 a pop.....nice & fresh

takes two guys to load them.....line posts a buck cheaper

locally.........line posts.......

https://classifieds.ksl.com/listing/57659520

I don't have the generator yet but I planned for it when we built the house. We installed a manual disconnect at the panel outside. We have a 250 gal LP gas tank and it feeds through the wall near the disconnect. I plan on putting a pad there and placing a Generac on that running off LP gas. It will be a manual start because I want to keep it as simple as I can. We don't loose electricity much but when we do it's for a long time. The Generac will be large enough to run the whole house. They're expensive and something you don't use much so it hasn't been a big priority.

I went with a 8,500 watt model. It will run anything in the house, just not everything at the same time. Using the microwave, coffee pot, oven, dryer, etc is all OK. You can generally pick up a good one at Costco for $800 - $1K. I only use nonethanol gas. Just the other day checked my records and found out it has not run for almost 2 years. It fired right up and ran it for 30 minutes. Then I removed 3 gallons of gas from the tank and added fresh to it.

Yep, inverters are the Cadillac and most efficient with electronics. but I'm not sure how high a wattage is available or affordable. About 7KWatts is around $4500. If you have a compact tractor, you used to be able to get a 15Kwatt generator for around $1500. I bought one and installed a receptacle on front standard and plugged a Hertz meter into it. I set tractor RPM to achieve about 60.1 Hertz to allow a little bog on inrush and let small diesel eat. It won't use as many dollars running as that large air cooled gasoline engine will use on Gen-set will.You have one less gasoline engine to maintain year round and worry about stale gas when you need it.

I strongly considered getting a standby generator for the house. But when I thought about it, we seldom lose power, and only for a few hours at most. The last time was due to what the power company guy called "another damn smoking squirrel" incident at the transformer behind our house. The longest outtages here come in the winter, due to extreme winds. When they happen, we just go to a hotel. The food probably won't spoil (it's winter) and occasional hotels cost a whole lot less than a generator.

Our neighbor had a really nice standby generator. It disappeared. Drag marks in the lawn out to the street, and nothing else.

We got something similar to this at Costco.



Got an outlet plumbed from our house propane supply to a quick disconnect and run it to the generator. The breaker panel has a lockout switch a 50amp breaker and 50amp plug. This allows us to scale it up if we need to in the future.

This set up runs most of the house with the exception of the oven. We could use the propane grill if we really need something out of the oven. All our electronics and appliances seem to run fine on it over the four plus hours I've tired it.

Only downside is it is a bit noisy. Need to build something to dampen the sound a bit but allow airflow and access. We're in the woods and the neighbors haven't bitched, though.

The folks I know of around my area who use PTO drive gen sets are mostly all farmers and always keep big tanks of non-highway use diesel fuel on hand anyway for farm equipment, the benefit of the PTO gen set being tax advantages.

C

How does two 3500W not equal one 7500W?