Generator install - where to start

[ponytug]

Well then at least look into this...

TRANE TR22REG-DB 22 KiloWatt, Single Phase, Liquid Cooled Whole House Stand-By Generator at Sutherlands

Find 22 KiloWatt, Single Phase, Liquid Cooled Whole House Stand-By Generator and other TRANE products at Sutherlands

sutherlands.com

20kw Single-Phase Standby Generator - Lifan Power USA

The Trane 20,000-Watt LPG/NG Liquid Cooled Standby Generator is driven by a high quality 998cc 1.0 l automotive-style, liquid-cooled engine. This 20kW unit can provide automatic whole-house power for larger homes or essential circuit protection for small and medium businesses such as convenience...

www.lifanpowerusa.com

Well, they are both the same genset, made by Lifan, a large Chinese generator manufacturer. Trane/Lifan warrantees it for 2 years. On the plus side, it has a copper generator head, and there is an oil drain hose to make oil changes easier. On the minus side, it is a brushed head, and the installation manual refers to the "22kW" version as rated to 20kW, also with the typical Chinese manual/figures, e.g.

That sort of thing annoys me, easy to fix, and annoying for pretty much everyone downstream.

No idea of the engine manufacturer but it is probably Lifan nor do I know the quality for this engine. The Lifan engines that I have seen/worked with are smaller.

Is a backup generator important to you, or just a nice to have? How much work are you willing to do on it, and how much in the way of parts are you willing to stock? It doesn't have a dedicated user group that I know of.

@Hunter29 did you have particular questions?

All the best,

Peter

 

[WinterDeere]

...it has been my experience that many generator owners don't follow the daily oil checks and oil service intervals when operating under backup conditions. I've seen manuals from major vendors that suggest at least as frequently as 100hr oil changes in backup mode, more frequently if heavily loaded or the outside temperatures are hot.

I spent many years just changing my portable generator oil after each use, since the thing really only got used maybe 6 - 8 times per 10 years.

After a major weather event, when it might have run 6 hours or 6 days, I'd wheel it up to my shop and park it. The following weekend, I'd run the carb dry, empty the fuel bowl, and change the oil. There was already stabilizer in the fuel, since I never put fuel into my genny without stabilizer. This routeine would ensure it was always ready for next time, whether that was next year or 3 years from now.

More recently, I've started just changing the oil when I do all the rest of my OPE around New Years. I put a piece of masking tape with "FRESH OIL" written on it over the start switch, which I peel off the first time I use it that year. If I get to the next January and that tape is still there, I know I don't need to bother changing the oil in that machine.

But I assume any installed generator is going to run automatic test cycles a few times per month. So in that case, I'll just plan to change the oil once per year, probably when the weather is nice.

 

[JRH02]

@EddieWalker these days, I would think about generator plus battery, especially because with some of the free nights power plans in Texas, you could put your batteries to good use when not needed for backup.

Part of the reason for batteries is that when you need to run he generator, you can run generator at optimal fuel efficiency all the time. If a generator isn't reasonably loaded, the fixed inefficiencies start to add up. So, batteries can take care of light to moderate loads until they hit a state of charge that needs recharging, and then the generator or generators comes on line.

If you go the two generator route, I would consider trying to find models that could be run in parallel. That way, the generators can spend more of their time in "optimal" zones for power output and efficiency.

Given your space, I wouldn't rule out some solar.

All the best,

Peter

I'd like to reemphasis the above as for advantages. But when I hear of a 1200aac box at the pole, multiple drops running off to different houses and probably other things too, you'd need a whole different approach. I don't want to try to comprehend some kind of a hybrid system.

 

[Hunter29]

Well, they are both the same genset, made by Lifan, a large Chinese generator manufacturer. Trane/Lifan warrantees it for 2 years. On the plus side, it has a copper generator head, and there is an oil drain hose to make oil changes easier. On the minus side, it is a brushed head, and the installation manual refers to the "22kW" version as rated to 20kW, also with the typical Chinese manual/figures, e.g.
View attachment 5017621
That sort of thing annoys me, easy to fix, and annoying for pretty much everyone downstream.

No idea of the engine manufacturer but it is probably Lifan nor do I know the quality for this engine. The Lifan engines that I have seen/worked with are smaller.

Is a backup generator important to you, or just a nice to have? How much work are you willing to do on it, and how much in the way of parts are you willing to stock? It doesn't have a dedicated user group that I know of.

@Hunter29 did you have particular questions?

All the best,

Peter

No, dint know it was Chinese. Btw as far as I know all consumer alternators are of brush type. Thx

 

[Hunter29]

PS second link had better photos

 

[Hunter29]

Btw again, to OP , good 1800 rpm NG gensets are available for a few more dollars, but at least they are real.

 

[ponytug]

No, dint know it was Chinese. Btw as far as I know all consumer alternators are of brush type. Thx

That's not always the case. One of four generators here is brushed, and it dates from 1960 something.

All the best, Peter

 

[Hunter29]

So which ones are not..

 

[ponytug]

Well, I know of Mecalte, Yanmar, Caterpillar, and Onan generators without brushes. They are fairly common, at least in my experience.

Most inverter generators are brushless as far as the output goes, though some use brushes for the excitation, with no real impact on output power quality.

Personally, I like an inverter or brushless version with AVR or digital AVR because the power quality is higher, and the THD tends to be lower. Typical setups look like this;

https://yourpowerguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Brushless-Alternator-Excitation-Scheme-Final.webp

From Brushless Generator - All You Need To Know About Them

All the best,

Peter

 

[Hunter29]

None of them will be a 3600 rpm consumer NG generators.

Consumer home generators are built to the lowest standard.

 

[grsthegreat]

I have a brushless 10 kw generac on my shop. Uses a capacitor as a voltage regulator instead of an actual voltage regulator. Personally, i dont see it keeping up with load changes as well as my brushed home unit.

I take care of aprox 318 generacs, ill bet 95% are the brushed alternators. I carry spare sets of brushes on my truck. In nearly 12 years of servicing these units, i can count the number if brush changes ive had to do on one hand.

 

[Larry Caldwell]

The UPS to keep the modem and router up passed with flying colors. We had a little wind storm and the power went out at 5 AM. Thanks to the wifi staying up, we were able to report the outage without driving 3 miles down the road for cell service. I made coffee with the hand crank coffee grinder and the wood stove. Low head gravity feed from the cistern made flushing and cooking water convenient.

I was getting ready to fire up the generator to run the fridge when power came back on at 2, so about 9 hours on the UPS. The LED charging indicated seemed to show that it still had about 15% charge left before the generator would have been required for communication. The only "local" TV station is 70 miles away and streams its news broadcasts, which are only useful for the weather reports. A Kindle Fire HD 10 makes a decent mini streaming TV.

 

[WinterDeere]

I've been thinking more about my install, as the propane is near a 50A subpanel I have installed near the swimming pool equipment.

Our average usage rarely surpasses 50 amps, and so with sufficient battery storage in the basement utility room, we might actually be able to re-purpose the swimming pool sub feed for the generator. That would require a third wire for signaling a transfer switch in the basement, or current-carrier technology to communicate between the transfer switch, but I assume these solutions already exist. I can't be the first to consider this scenario.

Thoughts? Seems a much smaller generator could be used, as battery capacity is increased, eliminating peak demand on the generator, toward average usage.

 

[ponytug]

I've been thinking more about my install, as the propane is near a 50A subpanel I have installed near the swimming pool equipment.

Our average usage rarely surpasses 50 amps, and so with sufficient battery storage in the basement utility room, we might actually be able to re-purpose the swimming pool sub feed for the generator. That would require a third wire for signaling a transfer switch in the basement, or current-carrier technology to communicate between the transfer switch, but I assume these solutions already exist. I can't be the first to consider this scenario.

Thoughts? Seems a much smaller generator could be used, as battery capacity is increased, eliminating peak demand on the generator, toward average usage.

Two thoughts:

1. I would not put batteries inside a nice home, especially a historic home. I think that the fire risk is just too large. Personally, I would much rather battle a battery fire where I can easily put a lot of water on it, and where the water running off the fire hose isn't going to be a major problem.
2. (remember, I'm not an electrician, and this is free advice), I suspect that your generator is going to need to land at an automatic transfer switch ahead of your main panel, so you would be trenching that line, or a new line to the pool anyway.

To me, the NEC seems to get a bit picky about how and where alternate power sources can be injected/landed in a building's subpanel, or main service panel. (I think from a good place of not electrocuting folks, and making sure that wires and busbars don't catch fire or melt...) I think it gets complicated, and I wouldn't believe everything that you read on the internet, as there are folks out there who seem to have misunderstandings of codes and electricity.

My batteries are on a retaining wall five from the house, and I wish that they were farther. The will get moved the next time work gets done on the system.

All the best,

Peter

 

[MAX-24-Dean]

My favorite water cooled LPG generator, quiet and available in multple Kw capacities.

https://www.pdgenerators.com/ford-generators

 

[WinterDeere]

I was pulling my after-lunch double shot of espresso, when the machine conked out. My first thought, being in the middle of a long stretch of working 7 days per week, with only breaks for eating, sleeping, and whining here, was "oh great... no coffee now."

But no, it wasn't the espresso machine... some A-hole took out a telephone pole down the road, on a perfectly nice a sunny day. Hopefully he's okay, but given the week I've had, I wasn't exactly singing his praises.

Long story short, the portable genny ain't cutting it, I actually ended up losing about 19 hours of computer time that I really couldn't afford to easily lose on my current schedule. I also gave the transfer switches in my UPS's such an extreme workout over the last few hours, that I'll be surprised if they're not headed for the scrap bin soon.

I've already looked up some generator install companies, it's time to move on this now. Since I have basically zero time to put on it myself, I'm going to be calling companies that do complete turn-key solutions.

The computer simulation was just re-started. With no interruptions, I won't have results until Monday night.

 

[ponytug]

@WinterDeere If your work covers long computer simulations, online UPS, backed with AC coupled batteries and generators are a huge plus, at least for me. If your computer is heat sensitive, I would remember to factor in what it takes to cover the HVAC for the computer area, especially the LRA for the AC. Inverter AC units are so much easier on generators.

I put my first large system in Southern California, just before Enron gifted California rolling blackouts. The company was beyond happy to be the only kids on the block still running 24x7. They kept their 24x7x365 simulations, data processing, and data collection running as if nothing happened.

If your software supports it, have you looked at building Raspberry Pi clusters? They can do pretty well for 3D simulations (localized compute, with periodic update between nodes).

All the best,

Peter

 

[WinterDeere]

@WinterDeere If your work covers long computer simulations, online UPS, backed with AC coupled batteries and generators are a huge plus, at least for me. If your computer is heat sensitive, I would remember to factor in what it takes to cover the HVAC for the computer area, especially the LRA for the AC. Inverter AC units are so much easier on generators.

Yes. Most of my simulation runs are actually under 30 minutes, but optimizations or parameter sweeps taking hundreds or thousands of consective runs are common. Yesterday's chore was one such task, 234 iterations of a simulation task that was probably only 10 minutes.

It presently runs on a 32-core Xeon machine, which is a power hog, but with one big UPS for the PC and a few more smaller UPS's for networking hardware and NAS, I usually have at least 30 - 40 minutes runtime on the PC and many hours for network and NAS. This has always been plenty of time to set up my portable generator, such that there's no interruption.

That was with my old generator, which blew up last year. I replaced it with a Firman, only thing I could get in a pinch, and the UPSs just will not stay happy on that genny. They constantly toggle, and apparently lose charge faster than gaining it, to the point where the workstation shut down about 3 hours into yesterday's outage.

This is one of my biggest concerns with a $10k permanent generator install... will my UPS's be happy on it? I have four critical UPS's in the house, between workstation, networking hardware, and vector network analyzer, and several others that are less important. I can't have them toggling hundreds of times per hour between battery and generator source.

If your software supports it, have you looked at building Raspberry Pi clusters? They can do pretty well for 3D simulations (localized compute, with periodic update between nodes).

The software handles distributed computing and MPA, more for splitting between multiple large-scale workstations, than any small Raspberry Pi clusters. But it adds about $10k per node per year to the leasing cost, and usually the benefit is negligible... sometimes even negative. The trouble is the overhead required to split the calculation task onto multiple nodes is high enough to undo the benefit of parallelization larger than that already built into a reasonable 24 - 64 core Xeon machine.

Some of the solvers also support GPU. In fact, I ran it for many years on two workstations (distributed), each workstation having Tesla K80 GPU's. This was back in the days when the best solvers ran memory-bound processes that could take 100 hours to solve on the best multi-core x multi-socketed CPU's. Then it was worth the processor and networking overhead to split a solver process onto multiple machines, and even port to GPU's.

But today's solvers are more efficient, and the latest Xeon CPU's are so much faster, I don't really see much need for all of that overhead anymore. Oh, and starting this year, the software lease comes with many hours of cloud computing, which allows me to port the rare very-large-scale task onto their cloud. I haven't had need for that, in the short time it's been available, single solver runs that take long enough (> 2 hours?) to require that, are fairly rare.

 

[ponytug]

@WinterDeere that sounds like a nice set up for your needs.

One thing that I have found is that small generators often have rather poor power quality, but most UPS units are ok with moderate voltage variations. In my experience what causes the most grief UPS units is often frequency variations. Can I suggest two things?
One, see if you can adjust the input power acceptance settings on your UPS to allow a larger input power spread (+/-VAC, and a larger frequency spread). The default frequency setting on a lot of UPS devices is 58-62Hz, which can be hard for a small generator to provide, especially if there are substantial loads dropping on and off.
Two, spend a little time with your Firman to make sure the frequency is set correctly (my suggestion would be to try for 61.5-62Hz unloaded), but try to see what works with your loads, and to dial the voltage up a bit to allow for the distance from the generator to your load and for the resulting voltage drop. (Measure at the UPS, under load and set the generator to whatever it takes to get 120VAC there, but hopefully under 126VAC. If you need more than 126V, then it is a bit more complicated.)

You may have something else on the Firman that is particularly hard on it (EMI, sudden large load additions/drops). It may be worth looking around to see what could be done easily. My bet though is on the Firman not being well adjusted, and not having the greatest controls.

So, I can't guarantee that your new generator will make the UPS happy, but possibly, even probably, as the new generator probably has a better voltage regulator, and probably a larger rotor, which adds to the stored energy, which helps keep voltage and frequency within specifications. Adjusting the UPS parameters will probably help a lot, and may even completely solve your issue of the UPS switching on/off line faster than it can charge.

I recommend Eaton UPS units. They aren't inexpensive, but they are in my experience rock solid, and have the ability to adjust a wide variety of parameters for the specific needs of a site. They work well with windows machines, and have features to provide shutdown feedback to the computer to allow an orderly wind down if they are running low.

Does that help?

All the best,

Peter

 

[JRH02]

@WinterDeere that sounds like a nice set up for your needs.

One thing that I have found is that small generators often have rather poor power quality, but most UPS units are ok with moderate voltage variations. In my experience what causes the most grief UPS units is often frequency variations. Can I suggest two things?
One, see if you can adjust the input power acceptance settings on your UPS to allow a larger input power spread (+/-VAC, and a larger frequency spread). The default frequency setting on a lot of UPS devices is 58-62Hz, which can be hard for a small generator to provide, especially if there are substantial loads dropping on and off.
Two, spend a little time with your Firman to make sure the frequency is set correctly (my suggestion would be to try for 61.5-62Hz unloaded), but try to see what works with your loads, and to dial the voltage up a bit to allow for the distance from the generator to your load and for the resulting voltage drop. (Measure at the UPS, under load and set the generator to whatever it takes to get 120VAC there, but hopefully under 126VAC. If you need more than 126V, then it is a bit more complicated.)

You may have something else on the Firman that is particularly hard on it (EMI, sudden large load additions/drops). It may be worth looking around to see what could be done easily. My bet though is on the Firman not being well adjusted, and not having the greatest controls.

So, I can't guarantee that your new generator will make the UPS happy, but possibly, even probably, as the new generator probably has a better voltage regulator, and probably a larger rotor, which adds to the stored energy, which helps keep voltage and frequency within specifications. Adjusting the UPS parameters will probably help a lot, and may even completely solve your issue of the UPS switching on/off line faster than it can charge.

I recommend Eaton UPS units. They aren't inexpensive, but they are in my experience rock solid, and have the ability to adjust a wide variety of parameters for the specific needs of a site. They work well with windows machines, and have features to provide shutdown feedback to the computer to allow an orderly wind down if they are running low.

Does that help?

All the best,

Peter

Peter - there is a whole scope of stuff. What part of the market are you addressing? And I say that with all respect. New Chinese gensets from Harbor Freight are wonderful. No problem with the power plant or the generator - it's cheap junk like breakers that fail.