Follow up on Ice Storm Gen Thread - How much power does a house take

[cat fever]

My thinking was that I might need the tractor for other things at the same time. Plus it's easier to transport the portable generator if I need to.

But the diesel engine on my tractor should outlast a gas engine on the generator.

There are pros and cons.

You answered the question; I need two tractors. :laughing:

 

[k0ua]

My thinking was that I might need the tractor for other things at the same time. Plus it's easier to transport the portable generator if I need to.

But the diesel engine on my tractor should outlast a gas engine on the generator.

There are pros and cons.

You answered the question; I need two tractors. :laughing:

Now you have all the bases covered! I think GP summed up the drift of the reasons not to get a PTO generator. But if you think you would not need the tractor to clear the lane of snow of downed trees, then the PTO generator has some advantages. But like he said pluses and minuses. Just like everything.

 

[CurlyDave]

I have mentioned this before. I rewired my water heater for 110. Half the wattage, much less possibility of deposits forming on your elements. A friend told me this trick. I was skeptical but have noticed no difference in available hot water. Mind you I live alone with weekend company. She does her laundry here (as well as mine) and still have never had a shortage of hot water with a forty gallon heater.

Actually it is 1/4 the wattage, not 1/2. Power = Volts squared divided by resistance.

This will work for small amounts of water use, but most people will find it too little. There is very little power saving from doing this. The load is lower, but you are still keeping the tank full of water hot all day long and that takes the same amount of energy whether it comes from 110 or 220.

The elements are not that expensive to replace.

 

[Gary Fowler]

When I was looking at generators (whole house type) I was told by one installer that I would have to fix my circuit breaker so the heating system would only use one of the heating coils otherwise even a 20KVa genset wouldn't start it (they pull 50 amps each circuit). I did some basic calculations and decided that I really couldn't afford to run a whole house propane engine genset @4.3 gallons per hour (natural gas is not available for me).
I decided to just get a standby 10K surge watt/8500 continuous and buy a catalytic heater for heating. So far I have not needed either in this being the 3rd winter since purchased. I think the 10,000 watt genset will run everything in the house including the electric stove if I run them one at a time. I am sure it wont power all 6 burners on the stove either but by just using one + the microwave we cans still cook a meal.

 

[Industrial Toys]

I did correct my calculations. It's not a matter of saving power. It's a matter of reducing watts per square cm (to reduce deposits) on your elements and reducing load on a standby system. We have done three loads of warm laundry and have not run out of water.

My main genset is a 7.5 Onan/Kubota 1800 rpm, for an Electrically heated house. It is switched by a 200 amp ASCO ATS. In the summer, there is no shortage of power and in the winter I only have some small baseboard heaters left on and heat with a wood stove (in an outage). But it's nice not to have the full load of the water heater to deal with. And since all my gensets and inverters are only making 220 (they are wired into a transformer) everything is always nicely balanced.

Running a 200 amp serviced house with a 7.5 seems crazy, but with some load management, it's far nicer to have every light and recepctacle working as usual in an outage.

 

[vsteel]

For those looking at a PTO generator I tried to sum it up in this post on another thread. For the TL;DR people it comes down to your usage model.

http://www.tractorbynet.com/forums/attachments/340207-pto-portable-generator-whole-house.html#post4176604

 

[pwright]

How does solar run these things? the only way to run huge loads is for a short time with your battery bank if you have one. Run something like a pump from battery/inverter system to pump water, and takes hours to recharge batteries back to that same state.

That's pretty much true. FWIW, our 6.8 kw solar system recharges our batteries by noon here in the winter with full sun. By mid-afternoon if there is a light overcast or partly cloudy.

Know of anyone that has enough solar panels to make 48 kilowatts? I sure don't.. The money is just not in most peoples pockets to buy that much solar capacity.

The cost of the panels wouldn't be the most painful part of it. The mounting, combiners, inverters and charge controllers would be as much or more than the panels. Not to mention the roughly 2600 square feet of space the panels would take up.

So they make compromises. First thing they do is get rid of the things that consume big bunches of power. Like my heat pump/air conditioning. Lets heat with wood or gas or something. We can sorta cool with a small fan.

Or they put in a big enough system to handle it. We have a normal washer, gas drier, refrigerator, small chest freezer, microwave, dishwasher, garbage disposal and all the other normal appliances.

Lets get rid of that electric hot water heater, and either have a solar hot water heating system with lots of storage for non sunny days, or a gas water heater and supplement it with solar water heating maybe. Lets cook with gas or propane and get rid of that huge electric hog of a electric stove. Heck an oven can use 10Kw by itself.

Definitely change out everything that use electricity for heating like stoves, water heaters and furnaces. We use propane of course for all of that but use a pellet stove for keeping the house comfy after the sun goes down mostly because the 1 hp blower in the furnace is a pig.

Change all the lighting to LED.

Using a mix of LED and CFL but lighting is a small portion of the overall energy consumption.

And have a big as you can afford battery bank and inverter setup so you can make some big draws but have time for the solar to recharge it. This acts like a flywheel in mechanical terms.

Exactly. Our battery bank costs more than the panels but not as much as the inverter/charge controller setup. Thinking about adding 50% more capacity to our bank just to give us some more emergency capacity.

 

[pwright]

That's always been my irritation with people talking about going off grid, that don't have a clue about consumption. I couldn't care less about CFLs, LEDs and electronics. I want to heat my house, dry my clothes (in the winter) ,take a hot shower and cook a hot meal. Electrically, those things are HUGE loads!

True but most of those things are used for short periods in the day so really aren't that much of a problem to handle as long as you did properly budget your power when sizing the system. It's the things that you don't think about that can bite you in the butt. We didn't think about the power the HughesNet satellite dish modem consumes. It uses 45 watts. Well that ain't much you think until you do the math and realize it is a full KWh a day and 30 KWh a month. Fortunately we had built in quite a bit of slop when spec'ing our system out.


If you are in a remote location with no utility power, that's one thing. But if the utility comes by your place, that's the cheapest (and easiest) power in my opinion. Then it's just a matter of conservation.[/QUOTE]

 

[Diamondpilot]

Not to hijack this thread; but, Would it be better for emergency purposes to have a PTO generator or a portable gas/diesel generator? I have been kicking this question around for some time.

I went on through this and ended up with a dedicated gen for 2 reasons. Wife can use it and I may need my tractor. Both turned out to be true. First time we had a outage I was a day away. It lasted 11 days with no power due to a ice storm. I used the tractor 12 hours a day for the 10 days I was home for it.

Chris

 

[Diamondpilot]

I have a 8550 watt Troy Built generator and have used it at my last two homes. I have a generator interlock kit installed on my panel as I did also in my last home.


I have gas hot water, furnace, and stove top. I can't run my AC but can run everything else. I ran it for 11 days straight when we had a ice storm. It used right at 9 gallons per day. Main reason I left it running was 3 girls in the house and it got down to -30 at night and we are on a well pump for water. I shut it off twice a day to fuel it and check the oil, maybe 5 minutes. I did change the oil every other day or 50 hrs. It's a quick job because it has a drain hose quick valve setup.

Chris