Electrician Makes Fatal Generator Connection!

welcome back hex Maniac today I'm going to show you two ways to connect a generator up to your house for backup power for emergencies one way could kill someone and the other way is of course the safe and proper way so Choose Wisely we live somewhere where we have the occasional hurricane the more than occasional wind storm and even just a thunderstorm that can knock down limbs off of any one of the billions of trees around us and put out power for a while so a couple years ago I decided we need a backup generator I got a quote on an integrated system for the house and after getting that I decided what we needed was a portable generator because those prices are insane for the integrated ones and a lot of that cost is actually the installation which just kind of doesn't make sense to me now I did a video a couple years ago showing how we set our system up and I didn't want to do this myself I wanted to make sure I did it right so I actually hired an electrician to set it up for us after I found the cheap generator that we were going to use and a lot of people attacked me in the comments saying oh you're going to kill someone trying to be cheap I was trying to be cheap on the generator not cheap on the connection that's why I hired an electrician when the electricians came out they installed this power Inlet box for a 50 amp cable this is where you plug the cable running from the generator in so it can deliver power to the house what he should have installed next was an interlock kit but he didn't what I have to do right now to make this work safely is I have to flip the breaker to the main house off and then I flip the breaker for the generator on if I were to forget to do that or let's say we sold the house and somebody else moved in and they weren't aware how this worked and you forgot to turn that main breaker off the generator can back feed power and if there's a lineman working on the power lines after an outage it could actually shock or Worse kill him so I'm going to install that interlock kit on today in order to make that interlock work I have to move this breaker right here which is actually for the well down here and move the breaker for the generator up to the top stop it's frustrating that the electrician didn't do it correctly to begin with that's why I paid a professional to do it and after many calls I haven't been able to get another electrician to come out here so I'm gonna have to do it myself come on that's scary that was not funny you did not tell me that was gonna happen [Music] okay they got slack that's right yo he was just looking for some place that was warm and dry I think he found it that one's longer yep [Music] with the breakers move time to drill in to the front of the panel box and make sure you take it off of the box to do this or I think you'll be shocked at what could happen [Music] now that I've got it in let me show you how this is going to work come on in closer I can flip the generator breaker on and you can see that the main breaker is off so I can cut the generator off this slides down and then I can cut the main breaker on with the main breaker on I cannot cut the generator on so anybody working on the power lines is totally safe well at least safe for me I should say we're actually working on a bunch of electrical out here so before I test the generator I've got to do some other Connections in here but as far as you're concerned let's go test the generator the generator that I'm going to connect is this Duramax XP 9000 it's a 9000 watt inverter generator the original generator that had hooked up was a 13 000 watt but it wasn't an inverter generator and honestly I don't know what the real risk is of like dirty power coming through a traditional generator into your house with like sensitive Electronics I guess you get like power surges and everything that could potentially harm your electronics that doesn't happen with an inverter generator because it puts out pure sine wave energy we'll see how well it works I I honestly don't know if this one's going to be big enough to power the house but you know we're going to give it our best shot one of the reasons I went with this one was because it was also dual fuel the original one that I used was also dual fuel but dual fuel but I put ethanol gas in it and I let it set you shouldn't let any gas set in anything for a long period of time but especially not ethanol so that had to be fixed and I don't want to I don't even deal that anymore this one's never going to have a drop of gas put in it this one is going to run off of propane because we happen to have a buried propane tank and the outlet on the other side so that's going to run cleaner and everything one of the other reasons why I bought this one was because if it's not powerful enough I can run these in parallel if I wanted to get a second one that I have to connect the battery all right well it's starting to get kind of gloomy out and thunder so let's go see if this thing will actually work foreign ER tempted to put bigger tires on here I'm going to go ahead and connect my propane line I noticed a little bit of a gas smell from right here this connection so I'm gonna put a little soapy water on that and see what happens you see that there is definitely slow leak right there PG you got gas for LPG we'll pick LPG fuel to run low idle off Breakers are off start button [Applause] come on now oh you know what it'd help if I turn the gas on [Applause] we know that runs Next Step come over here to the Box join me join me at the Box won't you I'm going to cut the main Outlet off there we go now I can raise the inner lock up and now power is allowed to travel through here and up into the panel let's get this going again first I'll plug it in here [Music] okay what I did there was I turned the breakers on and now it's delivering power the load right now 3 800 watts approximately it jumped to like 5.2 a second ago all right let's go see what the inside of the house looks like one thing that kind of makes it unique for us is that my mom's part of the house is like wired up separately so it makes it real easy to power her smaller house even though it's part of our house so that simplifies this process for us a little bit secondly if you know you want to be careful connecting all this stuff up luckily I had a stunt nephew that did it for me all right let's see oh adjust adjust all right let's see the lights are on refrigerators on stoves on we don't even have any flicker in the lights and perhaps most importantly the air will probably take just a second to come on let's see if that works any second now I'd actually like to see what the wattages when this thing cuts on it always takes a few minutes any minute any minute now oh yes oh yes of course of course that's yeah all right now it cuts on how long how long did I sit here for 10 minutes waiting for that thing to cut on I walk off for 30 seconds and it cuts on just for reference this is a three and a half ton unit right here now I'm curious to see how many watts it's pulling all right we can cut that off now to get everything back to normal I'm just going to switch that breaker off and then I can turn the main breaker on for the house everything's back on did you know that like something as simple as a solar flare could cause the power to go out and in fact it would just probably make this generator useless but if you watch this video right here I'll show you some ways that you can be prepared for that so you know you don't die see you next time

Channel: HAXMAN

Views: 66,413

Keywords: generator, generator interlock kit installation, generator transfer switch, backup generator, backup generator for house, haxman

Id: CCZI512FsQc

Length: 11min 17sec (677 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 28 2023