Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire whole house generators??

I have had a Generac 15K LP generator for 21 years. It has been flawless. As long as the thing is maintained, just like anything, it works great. Had minor parts wear out over the years, but I expected that. Don't know about the newer units, but my tech likes servicing mine. Not many parts to go wrong on the old ones. The newer ones that talk to your phone and other electronic devices seem more service prone.Just my 2¢.

How so? Both would be delivered by a truck.

Just curious

Why do you need 160 gallons of hot water?

I thought I was overkill with 2 - 40 gallon heaters for 4 full bathrooms and 5 adults under one roof.

I'm cheaper than most of you. I have to manually throw a breaker, plug in the generator and hit the electric start. Pain in the ass but considering I only lose power maybe 3 times a year and it's an old house. That 12000watt works just fine.

Roughly $1500 for everything including the generator . Ran it last weekend just run it. Everything on including AC and it just purred. The gas thing sucks but like I said, we don't lose power that often.

Our water and septic are gravity fed. NG so I will always have a stove, just manually lit.

I'm good

Since I do not know where everyone lives or their setups i.e Country ,Suburb. I assume not many city folk have whole house generators but maybe they do. Do any of you have a place you are going to bugout to in case this whole [bleep] show hits the fan? What would you recommend for a minimum 3 bedroom 2 bath place with a basement? How about a cabin? if the generator is not portable how do you keep it from getting stolen by crack/meth heads when you are not there?

Fair question and several answers. Our first house had a 80 gallon natural gas hot water heater and we thought that was great, we never ran out of hot water. Our next house we built in the country on 40 acres. The well was meager and we had a 1000 water holding tank. We had 2 80 gallon electric hot water tanks on the upper floor. One over the kitchen, utility room, garage and one over the master and guest bath area. Electric hot water heaters don't recover as quickly as natural gas and being upstairs they served as supplemental water when we lost power. Our current house is much more rural with many more electrical outages. When we built our house, we each had one surviving parent and so built a small guest wing (600 sq ft.) to provide them a place if needed (it wasn't). So one hot water tank serves that area (small kitchen, bathroom, small stacked washer and dryer), plus the main kitchen and utility room. The other serves our bath and a guest bath. We no longer need them for supplemental water during outages as we have 7,000 gal. of water underground above our house which gravity feeds to our house at 35 psi. So all of that is the long answer. The short answer is that we don't like running out of hot water, we tend to over bulld and the incremental cost of going to an 80 was not that much. I've heard they no longer make the 80s, so when they fail (17 year old), we will scale back.

Alright then

We did similar. Converted 400 square ft florida room to a living space and added a bathroom for the future. Most likely we will move elderly parents in here.

We are in the Sticks too, we get a squirrel/transformer explosion 3-4 times a year or a drunk taking out a pole.
Most outages are one day or less.

The storage explanation fits us too.

If you're dependent on that truck making its delivery, you're dependent on a grid.

Our longest outage was 9 days (snow), on average we usually have a 4 or 5 day outage per year, plus numerous smaller ones. Now we are facing outages caused by the utility cutting power during potential high fire danger days (red flag warnings).

It is the same with diesel. I don't see the difference in the two and it was why I asked.

Diesel for me. In general more efficient than propane, I like the low RPM diesels, I can hustle diesel if needed easier than propane, if you are on natural gas you are depending on a system that could be damaged in a hurricane or overtaxed because everybody is running their Generac.

24kw Low RPM diesel at my new house from M&L Industries in Houma. I am on propane at my current home. My houseboat has an 8kw diesel generator from Central Maine diesel with well over 2000 hours that will keep on running and running. It has an Isuzu diesel and McCaulte generator (alternator).

I have gas stove, furnace & hot water heater with NG which is why a 22kW NG unit will run my entire house. While sized for whole house in actual use I don’t run anything I don’t need just like I do when on electric utility power. Was on generator for 72 hours last summer due to hurricane. Cost me $84 above basic monthly gas bill/usage. As hot/humid as our summers are it was well worth it. All I did after utility power was restored was change oil & filter on unit then ready for next outage. I keep spare filters & oil on hand.

With that much gas service, I would be willing to bet a 12-16 KW generator would be sufficient to run everything you would need to during an outage. Nothing wrong with having the excess capacity at all, but if your budget is something you have to think about you could probably save over half the cost by installing a smaller unit up front and still be comfortable during an outage.

I don't think people realize how little load you actually put on your electrical system during 90% of the time but it wouldn't be more than 25%-35% for most people. Even with the newer all electric homes a load calculation is done to determine the size of the electrical service by most reputable electrical contractors, but there is still only so much a person can use at any one time unless you have a pretty huge house and lots of equipment you run at the same time- which in my experience is very unusual. In my experience, at peak times even a large house will seldom pull more than 100 amps on their electrical service at any one time and most people only pull half that or less even at peak times. These are the factors that need to be taken into consideration when considering your installation in relation to your budget. During an outage, most people will scale back a bit on power usage in any case- I've found it's just human nature...

Yes, anything is better than Generac for a home standby generator.

Kohler and Honeywell are both better generators

Or, you can use your truck to go pick up some at the gas station.

Yes you can and what are the pumps at the station running on? The grid.

You have the option to drive to the working gas station and buy diesel. In a hurricane type scenario (been there a few times) the LP delivery trucks will be overwhelmed and it could be days, or weeks, before you can get yours.

I get that, but that wasn't your original comment that a LP powered home generator was grid dependent where a diesel powered one wasn't. They both are to some degree. It is arguable that a natural gas powered home generator would be the least grid (or delivery) dependent in your new scenario, but they all are at some level.

I know a lot of people with whole house generators and none of them have it for a shtf scenario. It's for the constant power outages that plague our grid. Some are 30 minutes, some are 6 days. NG always runs.

A 25kw diesel generator will burn about 1.5 gallons of diesel per hour at a 60-70% load. A 500 gallon tank will last two weeks running 24 hours per day.

A 25kw propane generator will burn almost 3 gallons per hour on a similar load. Simple math works out to one week of run time with a 500 gallon tank.

Natural gas runs forever until it does not. After Ida hit Houma last year, areas starved for natural gas. Too many home generators and machine shops/businesses were running 500 plus kw gen sets.

Diesel takes a little more maintenance, extra fuel filters especially. My propane generator starts first time every time.

My plan is to have the ability to run my household for two weeks with no outside help after a hurricane.