Generator During Power Outage - semi-portable whole house 10kW generator used during a power outage

so this video is about a power outage that took place in december of uh 2020. what i'd like to do is just kind of make available to folks some information about having a a temporary whole house generator it's a little more uh affordable than a automatic whole home generator which by far is the best we live out here in the country and we have a few complications like having the a barn and a shop and power to consider for those but other than that this is a typical household and i'm gonna walk you through a power outage that we had yesterday and some of the steps i was able to take to use our portable semi-portable generator with a plug which i will zoom in on here that allows us to bring a 50 amp service into the house from the generator so hope you enjoy and you'll bear with my comment everyday speak i'm not a professional youtuber well the power went out and the power company provided this update well with the power out i've come into the garage and come to retrieve the generator that's sitting right back there the blue and black generator please excuse the mess here you'll notice that i have garage door openers on two of the three doors with the power out those doors can only open in manual mode but the garage door on the end there has a pull string so i'm going to go ahead and take the generator out of here through the third door i just thought i'd share this because you know other people probably want to think about this so this i'm going to use this power outage as an opportunity to work on our setup and and refine this the process so i'll get it out that door so fortunately unlike the generator our fuel storage is right by that third door that's easy to open manually so here we have two 30 pound tanks and a 20 pounder this is part of our storage not all of it if i was to step outside long term we'll plug into that 500 gallon tank out there but for now we'll use these three and a couple others that we have okay so first thing before i hook up that generator i'm coming out here to the panel sub panels in my garage i have a main panel and a sub panel over here there's also panels in a barn shop and basement so first thing i'm going to do i'm going to shut off the main service so the main service 200 amp is off then i have some other things that really even this very powerful thousand watt that's a thousand yeah uh 10 000 watt generator can't handle for example there is a well on here so you can see my well pump right here i'm gonna need to get that well pump shut off it's a 30 amp service and my main focus right now is to have the freezers going one in the garage one in the house basement and shop so i'm going to configure these panels accordingly and then the last thing i'll do is turn that generator um on keeping the main off so just to review i've turned off the main i've turned off the furnace i've turned off um the shop different building we don't need that going but later on i will need to get the freezer in there going turn off the washer dryer water heater turned off the oven and well pump the oven's 50 amp the well pump is 30 amp so i could handle that but um not everything at once and then on this panel we have turned off a number of things disposal dishwashers and the barn we don't need any power to the barn okay so we've got the sub panel kind of set up now the next thing i'm going to do is start the generator and then after the generator is running i will turn on the generator inlet plug notice i've already got the main cut off so that's the most important thing all right we'll be right back so we're out here at the generator and i've positioned the pickup truck to be really close so that i can lay the tailgate down and provide some range shelter okay so my next step i've got the propane attached i've got the 50 amp cord and i'll just show you all the way over to the box now since i turned the main off i can now plug the generator plug into the outdoor weatherproof 50 amp inlet so i'm gonna do that now so there's the plug all tightly in place not a bad idea to practice a little bit on that it's not complicated but it's a kind of like a push in and twist and probably took me a full minute to do that just because i haven't done it in a year all right well with the power plugged in down yonder and you can't even see it uh next step is to fire this up this is also a good reminder to keep the battery charged it's about two three months ago i topped off that battery but that's the auto start battery if you let it run out no big deal you just have to pull start it and that could be difficult if it rains okay next step i'll fire this up with the propane valve turned back on all right so i went ahead and um checked the oil and sure enough it needed some oil so i topped off the oil and i went ahead and turned on the switch and as you can see by the yellow indicator down there the battery is operable it's got enough charge make sure to open up that propane tank so we have propane flowing generators switched on propane so i'm going to go ahead and use the little remote key fob here and give it a go [Applause] all right you have power well as you can hear uh the generator is up and running now and so we're going to come take another look at the panel and be very careful so that we do everything just right so the main service is off and we have this protector right here that is designed to make sure we don't throw any power back on the line and so at this point i have the opportunity to change the inlet generator to the on position and that will energize the circuits on the house my wife is inside ready to turn off everything that comes back on so we don't overload it as a matter of fact [Applause] yeah we'll uh we'll just let this happen all right so we're going to go ahead and flip it and see what we got use my other hand here bear with me [Applause] you may have heard the generator spike maybe rpms so let's go and take a look at that well we're taking a little break and i thought we would splurge and watch a little bit of hulu um the fridges and freezers have been recharging or cooling things down again for about an hour so just taking a break by the fire and watching a quick hulu episode okay well we've been running the generator for about three hours now and it's time to go to sleep we got an update from the power company that won't be fixed until 3 15 a.m i keep pushing it out so at this point i'm going to go ahead and turn off the uh generator inlet and get it set up to assume that we wake up with power so i'm going to turn this off so now power of the house is off and i'm going to go out and turn off the generator [Applause] all right so i used the key fob to go ahead and tell the generator to turn off and it's now off um for that three hours you can see the tank here that glaze as it's frozen over it's probably 46 degrees 48 degrees outside tank feels like maybe it's um maybe it's a third left maybe 40 percent i tarped over if you can see here i put a tarp here over the generator because i wanted to make sure if it rained i didn't overly uh drench it so i am going to go ahead and um turn off the standby mode for it because it's probably not the best idea to keep that battery going i'll show you what i mean here you see that orange light still on so i slip this to off or stop and that'll that'll cut the battery for now and then i'm going to come over here to the tank and close it so turn off the propane and then um maybe i'll get up at 6am and see if power's back on or not so that'll be it for tonight with the generator so uh now you can tell it's quieter i've shut the generator off and i'm gonna go back through and turn everything back on the breaker including the main keeping the generator inlet off that way should the power come back on tonight while i'm sleeping um everything will resume okay well here we are the morning after the power outage the power ended up coming back on at 3 15 a.m and um we just ran the generator for those three hours which is just long enough to get the freezers down to temperature before we shut it down at about 11 00 p.m so it gave us a few hours of of time to get those freezers cool and also for when the power was still out to not warm up too much so it worked out well um i removed the tarp the tarp did a great job kept the do off the generator and the connections i thought you might want to just have a quick look in daylight of the setup so you can see here is the 50 amp cable in fact i think i'll show you that 50 amp setup i had that installed for about 500 um a year ago and never had the opportunity to use it so let's take a quick look inside kind of see how that is set up so we looked at the breaker panels yesterday um move this broom out of the way but right here this is where that 50 amp service comes in intercepts the breaker and as you saw earlier i can focus here the generator inlet is there and you can see follows its way down and that's where it goes outside okay so for for the 500 bucks i got that installed by a professional who would make sure that all the safety measures are in place he also installed the safety mechanism here so the main and the generator can't be plugged in simultaneously okay hopefully that's helpful overall i'm very satisfied with how the generator held up for this outage it did well a couple things i uh noted is um i'm glad we have the 30 pound propane tanks in addition to this 20 pound tank um in about three hours i'm guessing it's something like 6 000 watts we ran through two-thirds of a tank about um very pleased with the transfer uh the cable and i'm gonna call it a transfer switch inside i'm sure an electrician will correct me if that's wrong but the uh the ability to switch manually and roll out this generator the generator did awesome it was really great to have that remote start button so that we could be in the in the shelter of the garage pushing the on off switch um the auto start was nice so i wasn't out here pulling it so highly recommend also this westinghouse wg 95 100 df generator there are a couple that have come out and since the year that we bought this um that i would also recommend if i can i'll put links in in the description but um there are a number of generators in this kind of 10 000 roughly what category that are just making this real affordable and easy for an average homeowner to to do now you have to be somebody who's willing to come out here possibly in the rain and stretch out the cord and flip those circuit breaker switches but you can get a system like this for maybe fifteen hundred dollars versus maybe uh seven to ten thousand for a whole house automatic uh solution nothing wrong with those uh it's just not in my budget okay well thank you for watching and putting up with my plane speak here and you have a great day

Channel: danr97123

Views: 55,564

Keywords: generator, power outage, whole house backup, whole house generator, transfer switch, 50 amp outlet, DuroMax, Pulsar

Id: N1zu_o_Hi8w

Length: 15min 18sec (918 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 23 2020