HOME STAND-BY GENERATOR....EVERYTHING you need to KNOW!

[Music] hey everybody Kyle here with Spicer designs damn it lost my train of thought subscribe well it is a cold day in early November and reality is set in we all know what is right around the corner we got a pretty good taste of it today and that is winter so one common concern a lot of homeowners have is power outages especially during the winter months we all worry about not having heat pipes freezing just the inconvenience of not having power another huge concern for people during a power outage situation is their fridges in their freezers no one wants to lose all the contents sometimes that could be a couple hundred to a thousand dollars worth of meat and in my case even more precious than that all my Keystone this is one thing I'm not willing to lose I've got at least 25 to 35 dollars worth of beer in my fridge at all times so today we're going to talk about home standby generators I'm going to go over the basic operation of them a brief overview of the installation process and we're going to talk about costs and comparisons to maybe a portable unit so enough walking around let's get started so now just to give you some reassurance that I know what I'm talking about I am an electrician I have been for almost 18 years and I've installed a ton of these Kohler units I have also installed generacs I do believe that the Kohler is a better unit than the Generac which we're not going to get into those details today as to one versus the other so obviously today's video we're going to be talking more specifically about the Kohler there really is not a big difference in operation and installation and even cost between the Kohler versus the Generac all right so let's start off with basic operation of the home standby system now there are two major components to the system you'll have your generator of course and you're going to have your automatic transfer switch okay so without having the home standby system all you're going to have is your utility power that you're getting from your local utility company once you go ahead and install a home standby system you now have a second source of power now you typically are going to have two options for fueling this generator either propane or natural gas it just depends on how your home is set up and what is available all right so in the event of a power loss you're going to lose utility power your transfer switch is going to sense power loss and it's going to tell your generator to turn on that process usually takes about 12 to 15 seconds for your generator to turn on and then within a couple more seconds after your generator turning on the transfer switch will transfer power over to the generator source and you will now have power in your home again once you get power back from your utility service it will then transfer power back over to the utility Source the generator will typically do a cool down and then it will shut off on its own so you will not have to do anything yourself during a power outage when you lose power or when you get it back which is very convenient another thing to expect from your generator is that it will exercise once a week now this can be adjusted it can be done bi-weekly but I do recommend doing it weekly now the reason for the exercise is to keep the engine lubricated as much as possible when the engine sits for a long period of time all that oil will begin to basically drain down to the oil pan and it's not as well lubricated you want to make sure that all those parts are always coated and oil it just prolongs the life of the engine the other very important part of that exercise isn't just oil lubricating it's to let that engine get up to temperature and allow it to bake all of the condensation out of the engine one for sure way to know that happening is when you drain the oil in it you'll see that the oil comes out kind of Milky looking that means that you have a lot of condensation in it and it probably needs to exercise for longer all right let's pop the hood on this thing and kind of talk about the controls on it okay here's the basic control center in the Kohler units you've got the main breaker for your generator Source power this is 100 amp over here on the control panel we've got some selector buttons for the option menus which I'm not going to go through all that you can find that information online you've got a run button an auto button and an off button if I hit the Run button the generator will turn on and just run but it will not transfer power over the auto button is what you're going to keep it in most of the time that will basically do what it says it's going to turn on automatically if you lose power and then the off button you would turn this thing off in order to perform a service on it and that is really it it's pretty easy it's all right so all the information I've given you about the basic operation of these units the last thing we need to do is actually test it out so what we're going to do is simulate a power loss all right I'm going to go ahead and kill the main breaker in the transfer switch and I'm going to hit the start button on this timer see how long it takes [Music] 13.24 seconds [Music] all right so the next thing we're going to talk about is a brief overview of the installation process where the hell did you come from are you scared you're just a little guy aren't you kind of looks like a giant rat get out of here get inside go on come on damn weeds I just did this okay so the very first step of the installation process is going to be sizing your generator and your automatic transfer switch to your home the Kohler's they have a 14 KW which they typically use for a 100 amp service and a 20 kW which I have that they typically use for a 200 amp service all right for most homes they're going to have a standard 200 amp service with a 200 amp breaker panel the only time you're going to see smaller than that is going to be on a maybe a town home or an older smaller home then you might see a 100 amp service with a 100 amp circuit panel so for my setup I have the 200 amp service and I have the 20kw generator all right the next very important question is location where is the best place to put your generator as you can see right here I've got my electrical meter right here and I've got my gas meter right here this is the ideal location for your generator in some cases they might be separated and in that situation you're going to want to keep the generator closer to the gas meter you're going to want to be as close as you can be to that fuel source because it's a lot easier to run the Electric across the house than it is is to run the gas in order to have the right amount of volume to the generator you're better to be closer to it now as far as clearances around the generator typically you're going to want 18 to 24 inches at least between the generator and the house and you don't want the generator being any closer than five foot to any windows or doors in the house because of the exhaust if the window is open the generator was on you do not want that exhaust getting into the house the other thing that you need to consider when locating your generator is going to be maintaining proper clearance around the gas meter you need to maintain at least three feet around your gas meter and typically around three feet around your electric meter as well now you don't always have that ideal situation where you can actually do that so sometimes you kind of have to find a happy medium you may end up being a little bit closer than you're supposed to be in most cases you're going to be okay unless it's an obvious safety hazard all right one other very important thing that you need to consider when you actually install the generator put it in place most generators come with the option to get a prefab concrete pad they're typically about a three inch pad and there are mounting holes where the generator will actually Mount to that concrete path now when I install these I will dig out some of the top soil I will put paver base down or like a crush and run so that I can get that pad completely level sitting on a perfectly flat surface then I'll put the concrete pad down and then I'll set the generator a lot of installers they do not take that extra time to do that and it is very important because it's a common sense that any engine that is not sitting level if it's sitting kind of out of whack all that oil is going to settle to one side and it's just not good for an engine if you start paying attention to other people that have generators you'll notice that a lot of them are not level that's just a sign of poor craftsmanship and whoever installed that thing is probably a dip oh God that doesn't feel good I got an idea be right back you need this real quick what the hell that's better she won't miss it all right the next thing we're going to talk about is the gas setup for your generator now I'm using natural gas so the first thing you need to do is make sure that your gas meter is sufficient for the additional gas required for your generator the most common gas meter they're going to see on homes today is a 250 cfh mine I had bumped up a couple sizes it's actually a 630 cfh and I have a couple extra things in the house a couple furnaces so I want to make sure that this thing was large enough to run furnaces and the generator you're going to want to contact your utility company and they will basically tell you if you need to upsize it or not the way I set mine up is I have my main gas line running inside when I ran this across I stubbed back outside again right here and then you're going to want a shut off and then you're also going to want to use a flex line to the generator this is always provided with the generator you don't need to purchase this separately and basically this just helps with vibration of the unit same with the electrical lines using the seal tight it's a flexible conduit you never want to have anything hard piped to a motor or a generator something that vibrates any kind of piece of equipment you always want to run a flexible line to it [Music] all right the next thing we're going to talk about is the electrical connections so let's take a little trip down to the basement take a look at that transfer switch all right here we are in the basement like I mentioned before since I built this home I was able to install my transfer switch in the basement it was a little bit easier for me to do it while I was building it so here I have the transfer switch and then my 200 amp breaker panel so let's open these two things up and I'll give you a quick rundown on how the wiring is set up in these just so you have an idea of what you might be getting into [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] all right hopefully you can see this okay basically I'm going to give you a quick rundown on the wiring of this thing I know that not everyone is going to understand this but for some homeowners some diyers this might give you a little bit more information as to if you want to tackle this or not so like I mentioned before from your meter can outside where your utility feed comes into it then comes out of that meter comes down this conduit and it will feed your new 200 amp main breaker which is going to be located in your transfer switch from there it is going to come down to the actual switch itself this is where the actual transfer happens right in here and then out of here you're going to have the load feed that comes out and now feeds your 200 amp breaker panel so this is your normal utility feed coming in now you either have the option to feed your breaker panel through this utility feed or there is this other set of wires right here that goes to your generator Source depending on if you lost power or not the transfer switch will sense that it will basically change positions from the utility feed and move it over to your generator feed all right let's take a closer look at this transfer switch uh you can see there's the little control board right there that's got all kinds of different features on it I'm not going to get into all those details but you can see there is our incoming power from our utility right here which feeds the main breaker and then you have these other two conduits this larger one goes to the generator so does the smaller one the larger one is going to have all of your feed wires from the generator source and then the smaller one is going to be a small little four conductor communication line this is what's telling the generator to start during a power loss and to shut back off again now along with these feed wires from the generator you also have a utility circuit it's just a 20 amp circuit and that feeds the battery heater if it has one the Kohler does not it has a carb heater it feeds that and if you had an oil filter heater it would feed that as well along with the battery charger these generators do not have alternators in them they have like trickle chargers that's what keeps those batteries charged all right hopefully I didn't get too technical with all that I can get into a lot more detail with it but I'm not going to this is not an installation video this is just a general video for your knowledge so I'm going to go ahead and get the stuff closed up and then we'll go outside again and take a look at where these power connections and the communication connections actually go into the generator and then that'll wrap up the installation part of this [Music] foreign [Music] you can see right here our gas line comes in comes over to a gas solenoid and then it comes over to the gas regulator and then it feeds the generator motor itself here you can see we have the battery it's just your normal 12 volt battery I do see that I have a little corrosion on this thing I'm going to be making a video on how to service these generators here after this one so I will address that in that video now here you can see I have the utility circuit that I was talking about these are uh 12 gauge wires that are going to feed a separate terminal and that's what powers the battery charger and the Carter Peter in this unit and then you can see the larger conductors here the ground the two Hots and the neutral and when the generator turns on starts generating power it sends that power out on those conductors and feeds the transfer switch which then feeds your breaker panel the last connections we're going to have is you can see that small little communication wire there's a little terminal block right here those four wires land on them they're color coded inside and out so it's very easy to make those connections that is all you need to do to connect this generator to the transfer switch all right that's going to be it for the basic overview on the installation process let's go ahead and get in that garage where it's a little bit warmer and we can start talking about cost all right I'm going to give you some ballpark numbers here I'm not going to get too specific on pricing because there's a lot of things fluctuating in price right now between material and labor not to mention where you might be located so typically on these Kohler generators the 14 KW and the 20 kW you're going to be looking anywhere from the five to six thousand dollar range to get into one of these generators now that would include the generator itself the automatic transfer switch the cold weather kit the concrete pad and the battery now there are some additional electrical materials that you're going to need like conduit wire seal tight and then you're also going to need some gas parts so overall in equipment and material you could be looking anywhere around 6 500 to 6800 for the equipment and the material so if you decided that you wanted to do this yourself that's kind of the price range you're going to be looking at if you wanted to go ahead and have a contractor do the installation for you you're probably going to be looking anywhere in the 7 500 range to ten thousand dollar range you could even go a little bit higher than that depending on what the location of the generator is going to be in comparison to your gas meter and your electrical meter but that's just going to be a general ballpark pricing for you now of course there are other routes you can go instead of getting a home standby generator you can get a portable unit now the portable units it's a whole different ball game there obviously they're a lot cheaper the connection is totally different oh a little beefier than I thought it was actually a pretty good unit you're not going to have the convenience of the automatic transfer switch but it's a lot cheaper and as often as we lose power it's really not a bad route to go if you want to see a really good comparison video on a portable unit versus a home standby Doug over at one eye Customs made a really good video about that I will leave a link in the description below for that video now overall a home standby generator is not something that we absolutely need it's more of a convenience being able to not be home and you don't have to worry about your sump pump the generator turns on automatically and shuts off automatically you don't have to do anything as a homeowner it does everything on its own now I didn't always have a home standby generator I used to do it a little bit different it wasn't as efficient but it was a very cheap way to power the house thank you guys you're getting tired quit complaining pedal faster my battery's dying faster than you can charge it faster kids you getting warmed up yet or what you're not we'll pedal faster it's warm right here the generator is blocking the wind now this method was frowned upon so then I decided to go ahead and move on to the standby unit which I've been very happy with so far all right that is going to wrap it up for today's video hopefully uh you've got some good information out of this maybe it helped you if you were on the fence about pulling the trigger on a project like this or not or maybe doing it yourself or not if you have any other questions on the operation of these units or the installation feel free to email me at spicerdesignsllc gmail.com or you can leave your questions in the comments now if you like this video today and you found it helpful please hit that like button it really helps me out helps the channel helps this video get out there if you have not subscribed to the Channel please consider doing that anyways thanks for watching we'll see you in the next one boogers are starting to freeze a little chilly out here hey what did I tell you yeah come on keep less talking keep pedaling there we go where's my beer at there it is [Music] it's cold weather makes me thirsty are you still watching mind your own business foreign [Music]

Channel: Spicer Designs

Views: 41,442

Keywords: side hustle, garage, shop, how to, how to make money, business, beginner, tricks, boobs, cleavage, spicer designs, make money, money, sell, buy, cost, one eye customs, tips, keystone girl, bikini, build, generator, stand by generator, kohler, generac, portable generator, whole house generator, generator installation, what to know, back up power, power loss, power outage, lost power, electrical, electrician, wiring, transfer switch, electrical panel, circuit, circuit breakers, diy, homeowner, novice

Id: j7xrTnGxcZE

Length: 18min 58sec (1138 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 13 2022