Budget Friendly Emergency Backup Power - Transfer Switch

hey everybody adam here with hometown acres welcome back so today we are going to talk about emergency home backup power stick around so if you're like us and you live in a rural setting you know that one of the major downsides to this type of lifestyle is utilities usually if the power goes out it's not just a five or ten minute thing it's usually at least a couple hours and sometimes it can even be days the setup that we have here we could be almost entirely off grid if we chose to be we have a well we have a septic we have a backup generator and we have a wood stove for heat and the ability to cook so what i wanted to talk about today was the emergency backup system that we had installed at our place now there's three different options you can go with uh when installing a backup power system the first one would be just to go out and buy a generator and run extension cords in through your windows that's not ideal usually a backup home generator is going to have two or four outlet ports that you can plug extension cords into and run them into your house to me that's just extremely limiting you know the things that you need on backup power things like you know your well pump uh your refrigerators your freezers things like that and i just think that there's more more things that you need to have plugged in in the event of emergency than what uh extension cords in a generator give you now the second option is what we did which was install a transfer switch which allows you to hardwire your generator into the circuits that you already have established in your house so really there shouldn't be any disruption to your electrical service if you go that route the third and final option is to have an on-demand backup generator now these are expensive they're in the neighborhood of ten to fifteen thousand dollars and you do get what you pay for though it's it's a much nicer system than going with the uh transfer switch option because it's all hands-free if the power goes out it turns on by itself usually you can plumb these into the natural gas that comes into your house you have an unlimited supply of fuel for the generator and you don't have to screw around with gas cans and filling it up and making sure it's not running out the other nice thing about these on-demand systems is they usually will kick on once every 30 days and test themselves to make sure they're working this also keeps you know any internal components of the motor of the generator from seizing up or anything like that that is not the option that we went with just because we were on a budget and we wanted to be able to afford our backup emergency power right now so we had it in the case of an emergency as soon as possible so what i want to do now is take you up to the house and show you the emergency backup power system we had installed all right so that's all there is to hooking up your portable generator and hardwiring it directly into the circuitry of your house what you will need is you'll need a generator extension cord this is a 30 amp cord these are kind of pricey you can spend anywhere from 50 to 100 bucks on one of these extension cords but you need something that big because this generator is a 10 000 watt it's made for backup home power you can get smaller 2 000 3000 5000 watt generators but those are more for camping or cabins or something like that this one is designed specifically for backup home power now as you can see there there is a battery on this so it does have electric start it's actually a dual fuel as well so you can put gasoline or propane in here so what we're going to do now is we're going to fire it up and then we'll go down in the basement and show you how all of this works all right so we're down in the basement now we've got the generator running outside this is the main breaker box for all the circuitry in the house this is the transfer switch panel what i'm going to do now is simulate a blackout by turning killing the main breaker on this panel box we'll flip the transfer switch and it should provide backup power after we do that i will go ahead and explain to you how all this works okay so now we are simulating a power outage i'm going to go ahead and flip this transfer switch now okay so i heard a beep that means that we've got something on i'm going to go ahead and show you the certain things that we have that we have on backup power all right so the first thing we have on backup power is our chest freezer so if you see that little power light on down there and then there you go that is all of our frozen goods that are not going to go bad in the event of a power outage all right so that is our boiler system that we have here and even though our boiler is powered by gas it still requires electricity to power the water through the radiators so i don't know if you can see in there there's a little green light that keeps popping on so we have power to our boiler the next thing is is our hot water tank here so i'm going to turn my flashlight back on so our hot water tank we just have plugged directly into an outlet there with a surge protector you can see that surge protector light is on so right now we've got a freezer we've got our hot water tank and we've got our boiler another thing we have on our backup power grid is our wood stove now obviously the wood is providing the heat but because this is a fireplace insert we do have a blower here so i'll go ahead and turn this up so on backup power we still have our blower to kick the heat out into the room so since the power is out we have to prioritize what's important right now a light in the bathroom is not but our well pump is so we still have running water but we have no light in the bathroom and last but not least one of the more important things is your fridge if power goes out and your fridge isn't working you're going to have food spoiling within 24 hours now that we've seen that this system does work let's talk about how it works and then we'll cover how much a system like this costs to install versus those 10 or 15 000 on demand backup home power systems under normal circumstances without a backup power system you have your power that feeds in from the grid hits your meter box and then it comes down to your main breaker and then it gets dispersed throughout the circuits of your home but when you install a transfer switch and a sub panel you need to identify those essential circuits and you're actually going to relocate those from your main switch over to your sub panel for your transfer switch so now that you have your essential circuits separated out onto a sub panel when the power comes in it's going to feed just like it did before your main breaker it's going to power the non-essential circuits and then that power is going to continue to flow through from your main panel to your essential sub panel and then your essential circuits are going to be powered as well so that is how it's going to work when you don't have a power outage but you have your backup power system hooked up so now let's talk about what happens when the power is out so when the power is out your power feeds from the generator to that external port on the outside of the house from there it feeds your essential panel with your transfer switch and then that's going to power the essential circuits of the house now when you flip that transfer switch what's going to happen is that's going to prevent you from back feeding your main breaker which is going to prevent you from back feeding the grid and the reason you don't want to back feed the grid is because if the power is out there's probably line workers out there trying to restore power and they're not going to be expecting there to be a back feet of power from homeowner generators so it's important to note that when you're getting your power from the grid both your non-essential and your essential panel boxes are going to be wired but when you're getting your power from your generator only your essential panel box is going to be wired your non-essential is going to have no power so that is my very rudimentary understanding of how the transfer switch and transfer panel works for backup generators this is definitely not a diy project this is something you want to hire a professional certified electrician to install speaking of that let's talk about the cost i mentioned before that a full-fledged on-demand system is in the neighborhood of ten to twelve thousand dollars the cost of this the transfer panel itself is about three hundred dollars i paid eight hundred dollars for that 10 000 watt generator and i got a friends and family discount because i know an electrician who installed this for me and he charged me 300 bucks to install it so my all-in cost for this was about fourteen hundred dollars compared to ten thousand fifteen thousand dollars for an on-demand system now with this system here there is gonna be a little bit more involved in what you have to do to make it work so one you've got to keep it fueled up with gas the gas capacity of that generator is about 6.6 gallons and it's rated to run for about 15 to 18 hours at 50 capacity so that means at least once a day i'm going to be going out there to refuel it with gas and honestly if you're running backup power you're probably not going to be running that generator 24 7. you're going to be going out there turning it on for an hour or two to make sure the freezers stay cold the refrigerator stays cold if you need to take a shower or something running the well water but it's probably not going to be something you're going to be running 24 7. so you're gonna have a lot of in and out turning the generator on and off now they do make some nicer units that have a remote start on them so you can start and stop them from inside the house that'd be something that would be really nice another thing like i said earlier those on-demand generators they will actually test themselves once a month every 30 days or something like that so they start and stop and like i said keep everything from freezing up and seizing up but on these generators you do need to go out and probably run them for 10 or 15 minutes once a month to do the same thing but it's gonna be more manual you have to do that yourself i think those are some fair trade-offs to save somewhere in the ballpark of nine to fourteen thousand dollars let me know in the comments below which one you guys would go with or if you have a backup home system set up let me know what you've got anyway i hope you enjoyed this video if you did click that subscribe button check out some other videos and thanks for [Music] watching

Channel: Hometown Acres

Views: 882,105

Rating: 4.9037056 out of 5

Keywords: Emergency, Back, Up, Power, Portable, Generator, Electric, Prepper, Hometown acres, Outdoors with the Morgan’s

Id: EiRW6rpLxyQ

Length: 10min 33sec (633 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 17 2021