All About Generators!

[Music] hey everybody charlie hogwood with survival dispatch back here again for another of our lessons learned series of videos this time around we're going to touch base on generators yep generators making your own power one of the top nine areas of preparedness that i always talk about and one of the things that i say that is probably easiest to live without unless you have something that you really need to use electricity for so generators are a special kind of a piece of equipment sometimes different sizes different fuels different applications and it helps to get the right kind and to size it and to use it and know what your strategy is for going forward with that so that you can optimize that piece of equipment in your long-term needs for off-grid survival so off-grid survival includes hurricane outages regular power outages all of those things that would cause the power to be off when you need electricity and why do you need electricity you need to keep your food cold you need to keep your food frozen you need to keep maybe some air moving you need maybe you have some medical equipment that you need to keep power to all of that kind of stuff if you've got a cpap machine that you use if you've got an oxygen nebulizer things like that all require power some of the other stuff you can get by on batteries like you know radios and tran am radios things of that nature that you can that you can stock little batteries for that's fine but there are some larger things that really would benefit from the use of owning a generator now you may say what kind of generator do i need how big do i need well what we're going to do is we're going to go through a little bit of that to help your decision making process and even if you already have a generator we're going to talk about the strategies of how to use those and prepare them so that you don't run short on fuel and supplies so let's talk a little bit about the differences between fuel choices now there are multiple choices of fuel propane and gasoline are the two common gasoline is of course the most common portable generator that you're going to see on the market propane is a is another one you can do a propane conversion to pretty much any gasoline operated generator all you got to do is get a propane conversion kit and i'll tell you about the benefits of those the other kind of fuel that you might see on generators might be diesel now diesel fuel that usually runs on larger generators that's a little bit different since it's not that common i'm not going to dig into it all that much we're going to focus on the fuel choices between propane and gasoline so the pros and cons let's talk about gasoline a little bit gasoline's got a limited shelf life we know that we need stabilizers for that fuel if it sits around it can get moisture in the cans right if you get moisture in cans that moisture is going to end up in your carburetor it's going to get through there and it's going to start causing you operating problems so we don't like moisture in our fuel ethanol that is in most of today's fuels has a tendency to corrode systems the problem with running ethanol through small engines and then letting it sit for a while as it separates and it also creates moisture that alcohol that's in the ethanol will start to condensate and that will corrode the inside of your fuel system it can damage the rubber seals and o-rings and and seats of valve uh systems and that's not going to help you when you need to use that piece of equipment a lot of boat engines have problems with that because they don't get used very often ethanol separates in the cans and it tears up your fuel systems on boat engines well generators are not that much different as being small internal combustion engines so if you're lucky you can find non-ethanol gasoline and that's a good thing to store if you can get that gasoline is also very easy to find except in an emergency so for anybody that's experienced a hurricane before or a disaster that is ongoing and the fuel trucks can't get to the fuel stations you'll see the long lines of people standing there with little red cans trying to fill up those cans one of the little tips and tricks that you might see is sometimes a gas pump might say diesel or it might say emergency use only or it might just say it's empty it's not really empty it may be it may be they might have put the bag on the handle but sometimes those bags are just put there so people won't think to use that pump because they want to save that for police cars and you know government vehicles so just because the pump says it's empty does not necessarily mean it is empty um dangerous for refueling on hot engines if anybody's ever refueled a gas lawn mower and got a little bit of fuel on that hot muffler you can get a combustion and out in the daylight in the sunlight you won't see that flame necessarily it's not the fluid of the gasoline that burns it is the vapor that comes off the gasoline that burns and it burns very quickly so a little firefighting tip for you nothing actually burns it's the vapors off the things that burn if this table being made out of wood were to catch on fire the wood is not technically what's burning the heat has created a condition where it releases the gases off of the wood that is burning and now it's reducing that wood into uh to a fuel so that's the same thing that happens with the with the gasoline so it's very dangerous to pour gasoline on hot engines i've seen people do it i've seen fires break out from that so if you're going to use a generator and you're going to refill it with gasoline you need to let that sit for a while and cool down because everybody here i'm sure has experienced refilling a lawn mower and you fill it up and you can't see how much is in there and it all gurgles out all over the side of the engine you don't want to do that when you're standing over it you don't want to do that when it's near your garage or near your house somewhere under your deck where it's going to catch the house on fire so let those engines cool down a little bit so let's talk about propane propane doesn't have any of those same problems well lp gas lasts absolutely forever it's always been there it doesn't need much to be converted into a use of fuel they only add a an odorant which is called ethyl mercaptan which is i believe the stinkiest substance on the planet according to the guinness book if i'm not mistaken and they take about one dixie cup full of that stuff to put into each 9 000 gallon semi tanker to give it the odorant that you normally smell in natural or propane gas so over time that odorant can can work its way out and then very very old fuel you cannot smell it if you have an old old propane tank that's been sitting around for many years that's been filled a lot of times the larger ones that are alongside a house sometimes those all that odorant can sit down and build into an oil in the bottom of those tanks as they get low on fuel level now that concentration of that odorant comes out more and you'll smell it more and you'll actually think you have a gas leak so that's just a little insider tip on what happens when old propane tanks have been used for many years uh get that increased saturation of ethyl mercaptan in them but propane itself will always be flammable as long as there's pressure to it it can be used i've pulled propane tanks out of the ground that have been there for 40 50 60 years and the gas in there was perfectly fine and we've run it through equipment to burn it off so you can actually bury a propane tank as long as it's got the proper cathodic protection anti-corrosion protection so you can bury those under the ground which makes them very good for long-term or grid-down situations because that gas is now underground in a heavy tank and it's prepared properly for for long-term storage now if you've got if you live anywhere near a salty area like a coastal area or there's a lot of groundwater make sure that tank is coated with what's called a cathodic protection paint and then you put on a sacrificial anode on there and that's kind of like on a boat where you have the zincs on a boat engine well that sacrificial anode will will start to eat away and it'll draw that electrolysis off the tank that which makes that's what makes buried propane tanks such a great idea for long-term storage and those buried tanks are out of sight out of mind and people don't know they're there and they're not going to run off with them so that's pretty handy too so propane is safer to transport than gasoline because propane that is transferred in tanks and carried on vehicles is actually put in dot rated cylinders as opposed to plastic red cans so car accidents can happen with propane tanks and you're still going to be in much safer shape than sloshing gasoline all over the inside of your car so there's that so um the thing about propane though is it does reduce the rated output of your generator by about 20 so it's not an equal amount of power to a gasoline operated generator it's the same exact generator but because of the the btus in the fuel the ability for that fuel to come to create energy or convert energy into those to those watts it reduces that power down by 20 percent so why do you need to know that if you're calculating the size of your generator to operate the watts and the power of whatever appliances that you want to operate in your home in a disaster and you're going to go with propane increase the size of the generator accordingly it's not too complicated i know it sounds like math and everything here but what we're actually looking at is if i've got a 5 000 watt generator so that's 5 kw same thing as a 5 000 watt generator and i'm going to run that on propane i'm going to lose 20 percent of that wattage if i needed all 5 000 of those watts maybe i need to go up a size in the generator to accommodate for that but that's not not necessarily a bad thing because propane fuel systems they really never foul up they don't have the carbons they don't have the moistures generally they don't have a you know the corrosive problems that you'll get out of ethanol and regular gasoline so fuel systems that run on propane are going to last for a very long time i've had vehicles that run on propane that will go a million miles and because of the lack of all that oil that comes you know through the gasoline and moisture those engines will last that much longer so those are a little bit of the pros and cons between propane and gasoline so let's talk about how much of that fuel to have on hand so my recommendation as somebody that's been in this in this field for a long time is i would like to see two weeks of fuel based on your on your generator and well how do i figure that out if you figure out what your run time is going to need to be based on the load of your appliances so i can go on my refrigerator and i can see how much energy it takes i can look i'm going to run if i'm going to water run a water pump or if i'm going to run fans or window shaker air conditioners i can add all that up and i can say okay i've got now i need this size of generator that size maybe let's use a 5kw generator that's a typical size generator you see down at the hardware store now i'm going to figure out i'm going to run that with a strategy let's say i'm going to run that 10 hours overnight at this load my instructions on that generator are going to tell me what that fuel consumption is and now i can calculate it so i knew that when i was running a 5kw generator i was probably going to use five gallons per night you know at the load that i was running last time i went through this and now i know that if i want to run two weeks i've got seven nights at five gallons so i'm looking at 35 times two i'm looking at 70 gallons of gas if i'm going to do that so you start doing that math and you can figure out where you are now the minimum i would say to have generator backup fuel power is going to be four days so that's what's going to happen with a lot of large propane tank systems you start getting into the 15kw the 20kw i've seen i've seen 60 kw generators on large homes in the past and they get this big tank on there and they run out of fuel in the first two days so they're spending those tens of thousands of dollars to install that and they are running out of fuel you've got to think about the size of that generator that you're putting in so when you're looking at that plan accordingly if you have to add a second underground tank or you need to add more fuel whether it be diesel or gasoline account for that i'd also recommend while i'm thinking about adding some carbon monoxide detectors as carbon monoxide which is the exhaust gas that comes out of an engine that invisible odorless gas that can creep into your bedroom and and help you not wake up in the morning that's very important so if you're going to use generators as a backup plan even if that generator is close to the house definitely do not run it in the garage some people have done that and they've not woke up the whole family because of that exhaust coming out but i do think part of your emergency plans should be to have a carbon monoxide detector at least in the sleeping areas if not other areas where commonly where people are laying around during a disaster so let's talk about that sizing and load capacity of a generator a little bit try not to make this too boring to sciency but there's generators are rated on their energy output and that is watts or kilowatts a 5 000 watt generator is a 5kw generator same thing there's nothing fancy there so 5kw is just another way to say 5000 watts so don't be too confused when you see that it'll be it could be 1kw 2kw or it could be 5kw it could be 60 kw those are just tens of thousands as you get into the larger sizes choose the smallest generator that you can get away with and the reason for that this is not the time to go big or go home because you got to fuel that beast we just talked about how much fuel it could take to run a 5kw 5000 watt generator for a week or two weeks if you're going to run it 24 hours a day that could be a problem if you're going to run it for say 10 hours a day now you've reduced your fuel consumption your needs by less than half so you know half of what you would normally need that's that's a big savings plus it cuts down on your maintenance and everything else if you get a generator that is oversized to put out the same power you need it's still going to use more fuel and that's not helpful when it comes to storing all that fuel so always pick the smallest one you can get away with now there's a there's a thing called engine or motor startup capacitor startup with uh with some appliances refrigerators things with cooling capacitors and compressors in them when they come on you ever heard you've seen the lights dim or you see the the motor go and it brings down the output on the the generator that's the startup and then as that motor starts to spin now that power kind of settles out add those add that startup amperage off of that uh appliance into your load calculations and that's pretty easy most generators will have a guide and they'll say i can run a refrigerator and two tvs or whatever it is use that information to your benefit print it off keep that with your generator stored for those emergencies so you can make those calculations when the internet is down so don't try in this case don't try to run your full home central air conditioning system off of a generator you're gonna it's it's not gonna work it's gonna take too much power you're gonna have to oversize the generator and as much as we love air conditioning after a hurricane after disaster when everybody is suffering off grid that's not necessarily the time to try to cool down all the unused spaces in your house what i would recommend is leave that off the circuits that you're going to use and we're going to talk about circuits a little bit here coming up leave that off this system focus go down to the hardware store and pick up a box with a window shaker air conditioner you don't need a giant one you just need a small one remember small small ac small generator less fuel storage more economical all the way around get the window shaker air conditioner leave it in the garage on a shelf somewhere until you need it when you need it you put it in the window in the bedroom like we talked about on the hurricane video put that in the window of the safe room or of the sleeping cooling resting room that we're going to establish after the grid is down the whole family can go camp out in one room and sleep overnight with the ac on while that ac is on you're cooling down all the refrigerators and freezers again then in the morning we're going to turn all of that off and get out and get to work leave the generator off during the day so it's easier to cool things off at night when the air is naturally a little bit cooler and you're not using as much fuel by doing it that way that's part of the strategy that's going to really help to extend your survival time on generators add up the watts of all your appliances to consider that startup load like we talked about and remember that if you put too many things on one generator you're going to bog the engine down on that generator which is going to slow the generator spinning of the generating part of the generator and it's going to send less energy to your refrigerator for example electric motors don't like to be under powered so if i put too many things on a generator and instead of putting out 110 120 volts you know somewhere in that range and i'm only putting out 90 volts or something like that that's going to damage the motors on all of my appliances that's going to damage the refrigerator irreparably it's going to damage tvs it's going to damage electronics that are counting on a stable what we call clean energy we don't want our energy going up and down and up and down that's why when we look for a generator we look for one that's that is set up like an inverter that's got stable power coming out the older generators didn't have that so when they started run you hear them revving up and revving down it was sending that that unstable power to those appliances and refrigerators and sensitive appliances like that that we have these days with those logic boards on them don't like power that's surging at them they just want to clean energy within the proper voltage range so don't put too much on a generator because then you're going to run at a consistent lower voltage and damage that appliance so that's why it's nice to have a multimeter a volt meter on hand you don't have to know all of the functions but if you at least know what voltage and you can test just put the leads right into the outlet you know without electrocuting yourself you take the little points put them right into the outlet and then you can check the voltage output and if it's in that 110 115 120 range you know then you're better off but if you see that it's putting out 75 or 90 volts that's bad or if it's putting out more than 120 125 then that's bad too you got to get in that right range so have a volt meter handy and keep that with its battery next to your generator for emergencies now some people are on water wells they're on wells with electric pumps on them now electric pumps are often for their for the best energy consumption they are set up on a 220 240 uh power line right so on on their line coming in you can do them on 110 but it's it's kind of hard on the pump and it's it's kind of hard on the the breaker a lot of times because they don't that surge when they come on so do i recommend putting water wells on a generator you can but you've got to add that into the rest of the calculations of your generator now generators can put out a 110 120 but they can also have a 220 receptacle they can have a 30 amp twist lock receptacle there's some things you can learn about this i want you i'm not going to teach you everything today i want you to learn what to ask but you can do all of these things but you've just got to be careful when you put those loads on especially what we consider an intermittent load like a water well pump won't run all the time a refrigerator won't run all the time so if you've got but you've got to calculate them as if they are running all the time because if they both came out at the same time what's that going to do to the power coming out of your generator if they're alternating coming on off what's going to do with that surge so read the directions on your generator understand what you can put on there and wire it properly and be very careful with that so look at the that that runtime strategy so your generator is going to have the info on how long it will run based on what loads or how long you want to operate gas gallons per hour i say again i'm going to reinforce it again and again run your generator for about 10 hours overnight to re-freeze your freezer and to support that before the power goes out i would start putting water bottles in all of the empty voids inside of your refrigerator and in your freezer even if they're not frozen and you've been taking food out fill them back up with with water bottles that need to be frozen and once they come up to that temperature that will mitigate that up and down temperature cycle in that refrigerator freezer coming on and off if i'm going to leave the freezer off for 12 or 14 hours a day and leave that door closed i want that stuff inside to stay frozen and the more the more material i have in there that's frozen the longer that food will keep without having active power on it and you're going to have to judge this based on your situation your generator output and so forth so that's that's going to come in pretty handy to know that kind of thing and to mitigate that that temperature warming i would also say what happens and i've experienced this what happens when the neighbor has grandma on their side and they need her to have her medical equipment running and they want to borrow can i just run my cord over and plug it into your generator would you mind that'd be cool yeah because grandma needs a fan all day okay that's fine but i'm not running my generator all day long yeah but she really needs it can you run your generator longer i'll contribute some fuel well it's going to double your fuel intake to run that generator all the time so you've got to make that decision are you going to allow that to happen are you going to make those arrangements whereas you had it all worked out in your head i'm going to run it only at night and now somebody wants me to run my generator all day that changes my maintenance cycle that changes my fuel needs and what happens when they don't bring the fuel over like they say they're going to well how long are you going to keep you know giving away your fuel now you've you've actually cut your survival time by 50 if you're gonna run that thing twice as long as you planned on that's going to be a real problem for your family so now you got another thing to think about these are real situations that i've seen um let's talk about extension cords a little bit the sizing of extension cords is important i can't run an entire house on a small you know little three strand 12 gauge wire i'm going to get that cord hot it's going to melt it's going to be a fire hazard it's also going to it might continually trip out the breaker on the generator and if i don't know that that's tripped the generator is now just running but it's not putting any power out so i've got to get the right size cord or i've got to use multiple cords in different parts of the receptacle to go to different places that'll help balance some of that out some generators will have more than one set of receptacles on it this is where your sizing is going to be so important now because we're running a generator in a disaster environment that could be wet flooding a lot of water dripping you know running around and all these cords are on the ground or they're running through the garage on wet concrete and if one of those cords gets damaged and the shielding the insulation comes off of it and you walk through that garage barefoot or one of the kids come running out of the house that concrete now is energized and you're going to look at getting electrocuted so we don't want that look at the cords make sure that they are in good shape go down every inch of it look for any slices or any problems with those cords and then what i'd also recommend is putting a gfci adapter you can buy those separate from the extension cords at the hardware store it plugs right into the generator and then you plug your cord into that anytime that thing senses some sort of a short it will trip the gfi button on that and it'll shut the power off going to that cord that's just like you have that receptacle next to your kitchen sink your bathroom sink uh that way if somebody drops the hair dryer in the sink and the water gets on it it pops that little button on the gfci on the wall on your house receptacle that's the same premise that a portable gfi does that it's got that little button on there in the gfi receptacle which is called a ground fault circuit interrupter so gfi and gfci are the same thing just a different way of saying it water on the ground and concrete that's a big problem so we've got to talk about you know like we did puddles if you're running cords through the yard that's a problem vehicles running over the cords damaging them that can be a problem so let's talk about some of these home remedies diy let's it's no big deal i'm going to go down the home depot i'm going to pick up a bunch of electrical stuff and i'm going to plug my generator and back feed my house through the dryer receptacle so my dryer see my dryer is 240 220 i can go ahead and just get a male plug on this side to go into the wall and back feed power into the house i can get my mail receptacle that goes into the generator and plug it into the generator so what i've got now is a live 220 plug with these prongs sticking out that's energized if that generator is running that's a hazard that's a serious danger but if i plug my generator in there and i cross the wires inside that receptacle and i don't know what i'm doing i'm now sending power backwards reverse polarity through the house and that's going to be a problem that's where you start blowing out tvs blowing out refrigerators blowing out the appliances when you really need them so i strongly do not recommend creating your own cord that goes into the dryer and the onto the receptacle in your laundry room if you're going to do that and if you're not going to listen to my safety warning about that you've got to make sure that you turn off every single breaker in your panel you got to go to the panel before you plug it in you got to turn off the main breaker and turn off every single breaker in the panel and not just for that panel but every panel in the house if you've got more than one the reason for that is if i run power into the wall for my dryer from my generator and say ah i made my own power and you don't turn off that breaker that electricity is going to go backwards through the breaker backwards through your meter and it's going to energize the power line going down the whole street and anywhere that there's a wire that's on the ground it's going to energize that wire or if there's a if there's a utility worker on a pole and he's trying to fix those wires and you you energize that wire it could catch him off guard and it could kill him on the pole so you've got to be very careful not to energize power lines because you forgot to turn off all the breakers in your house you can see why they created this thing called a transfer switch so a transfer switch allows you to plug a generator into a box that's another circuit box that is properly wired in to your home electric panel your distribution panel so then what happens is you turn off all the breakers and you only activate the special circuits that you're using that are considered emergency circuits and you're not back feeding the street so that's what i would recommend doing is looking at get a transfer switch properly installed by a qualified electrician so you're not injuring yourself or anybody else in the middle of a disaster so that's a problem so you could damage your appliances you could get somebody killed and that's not a good thing let's talk about securing your ginny from theft you may have heard me tell the story some time back where we had somebody that didn't buy their generator early enough they waited the last minute they wanted power they went out and bought a 7 500 watt seven and a half kw generator brand new spent way too much money on it and uh because they bought it when they needed it and they set it up outside and they ran their cord into the house and they set it up outside their bedroom and they go to sleep and they're hearing this thing running it's nice smooth hum ah sounds good my fan's running i'm sleeping cold tonight and then my the guy's fan goes off he's like i don't know why my fan went off but i still hear the generator running so he gets up and he goes outside to check on his generator and say well did the plug come out or what happened and he does not see his generator any longer what he sees is an old crusty push mower that somebody had rolled up there started up the the gas engine turned off the generator and rolled it away because it was on wheels and now he lost it on the very first night lost his beautiful new expensive generator and gained a crusty old lawn mower that is not going to provide power to his bedtime fan so chain those things up secure those things don't put them in the garage don't run them there but if you're going to operate them overnight put them out of sight out of mind away from the the street or where anybody else is going to get to them and that leads me to the tactical considerations of noise and light discipline well there's also a thing called sound discipline when in tactics if i can hear a drain or a generator what am i going to say as a person who doesn't have any power that's in need of something i'm going to hear generator and said but those people have a generator that also means i can infer that they've got fuel well i need some fuel they might also have some food and if i need food they've got everything i need why don't i go knock on their door or borrow something without asking them so you can reduce the sound signature of a generator by digging a pit if it's dry you can dig a pit you know foot two three foot deep and then you can set your generator down inside of that and then you can take some some plywood or you can make some walls sandbags or whatever you want to round that and what that does is that takes the sound of your generator and sends it straight up into the air and not around the neighborhood so where you think you hear a loud generator you might actually only hear a low rumble or nothing at all the further you get away from it so that gives you a little bit more it's another layer of security that you can use to reduce those stray cats that come around that want to borrow your stuff without asking so moving on from that uh the other thing i would say is pay attention to your maintenance understand that a typical 5kw generator that you find down at home depot with a little briggs and stratton engine or something like that is going to have for every 24 hours of actual run time it's going to need an oil change so you need spare oil now changing oil on a generator is not difficult you just get it up on a table somewhere you open up the little thing you tip it over and pour it out into a you know to a waste jug and then you pour new oil in it make sure you got the right amount and start it back up again if you don't change the oils on those things properly and they're going to run and run and run you can burn them up those generators made today are mostly disposable finding parts for them is not cost effective i know that some generated nicer ones like i love honda's hondas are more expensive but to me it always starts even after it's been sitting for a long time i you know i know that it's going to be a quality piece of equipment as opposed to one of the off-brand names so if you're asking me i would say honda's i'm going to do another gener another generator video where i'm going to show off several types of generators and we'll see how they sound they're nice and quiet i've got a 1000 watt honda that i can set on a table and run and run plenty of stuff and not even hear it we can still have this conversation so they're nice and quiet so i like that about them so have some spare oil for the proper size and type of for that machinery have extra oil filters if yours calls for it extra little inline fuel filters and all these little things just cost a few bucks a piece but just get a little box of extra maintenance parts just like you would for your car for long-term survival and set those in the garage tape that box shut label it you know maintenance supplies for my generator and then follow those maintenance requirements so that's what i've got for lessons learned from operating with generators i hope you got something out of this check out for this and all kinds of other great information on survival dispatch insider magazine at insider.survivaldispatch.com and until next time this is charlie i'm [Music] out you

Channel: Survival Dispatch

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Length: 32min 46sec (1966 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 18 2020