mo1
Platinum Member
You get above 25kVA most pto generators are 4 pole, 1800 rpm. Lower rpm should help gearbox noise. I just don’t need that much power.
Have 2400watt inverter gas for over twenty years as a quick standby. Some lights, refrigerator, freezer, telecom and emergency stuff. Good for <8hour outages. Nice and quiet. A 10,000watt pto generator for whole house, 240v loads. Don’t know of a one best solution. Combination gives options and flexibility.
We are about due for another twenty year major ice/snow storm. Recent outages are mainly from grid failure from tremendous population growth.
One can run a generator with a larger nameplate capacity than the tractor can power without trouble, the only issue is that the generator can only be run at the capacity that the engine can power. It would cost a lot more than an appropriately-sized generator though.
A 25 kVA generator is huge, it would make 108 amps at 240 volts and would easily supply the full usage of most houses, unless somebody has multiple electric resistive backup furnaces or a bunch of stuff running when they are charging a battery-powered car or something. 25 kVA is the supply that large houses and smaller farms get from the utility as they are often fed with a 25 kVA transformer. A supply from a 25 kVA transformer would normally be called a 400 amp supply and you would have two 200 amp panels.
A 10 kVA generator certainly can power a whole house. The utility said my property needed an unusually large 37.5 kVA transformer because of the mutiple buildings and such, it has three 200 amp disconnects on the pole that feed four service panels. The most I'd ever actually used according to their website was 14 kVA, and I rarely use more than 10 kVA even in the summer.
The outages around here are usually due to lighting strikes blowing the fuse at the customer's transformer (there are reclosers elsewhere), tree limbs/ice knocking down lines, or drunk/high drivers knocking down poles. Elsewhere there are a lot of outages due to inadequate generation and transmission capacity. The local co-op does a good job in avoiding those two. They have successfully resisted the pressure to change their generation mix to higher-cost, lower-reliability, and lower nameplate capacity sources, and with the lower cost per MWh they are getting as a result, they are able to put more into transmission and distribution without blowing the costs out of line.