How To Get Whole Home Backup Power For Under $1000

hey guys welcome back to the channel so in some previous videos you probably saw how we were able to install a soft start kit on our air conditioner and this is going to allow us to run our AC with a generator so I'm going to show you my setup my generator the soft start kit that we've got set up and this power Inlet box as well so let's show you what we got going on how this works and how easy it is to use all right so this is my air conditioner it's a basically a Goodman two-ton system and as you can see we have the ICM 870 soft start kit wired up on this one we our amp clamp hooked up to our common wire on our compressor so we're going to show you the inrush amps when we start this unit up and before we do that we're going to basically simulate a power outage we've got the screws removed from this just to show you what we got here so if you saw in a previous video we installed this interlock kit and the purpose of the interlock kit is in the event of an emergency this is going to prevent you from either having your generator breaker on and the main breaker on at the same time you can only run one or the other so let's say the power just went out it's 100 degrees outside power is off so this doesn't matter we're going to turn the main off and the only way that we're going to be able to turn our generator breaker on is by sliding the interlock kit up and then we can turn that on so now what we've just done is we've allowed a potential power source to go through here to that generator breaker and it will feed all of these other Breakers except for the main which will prevent any energy from going back out and potentially harming a lineman or causing further damage here's our power Inlet box if you saw in my other video I also showed in the event of an emergency how to get these components and run your generator if you can't go to Amazon and you can't get this set up a lot of people disagreed with the fact that I had a suicide cord but if you're smart you're not going to electrocute yourself and you know how it's designed but I went ahead and went back through and changed this to a power Inlet box and that's our ground in the middle there and we have our three neutral and two Hots and basically you just line up the two little uh little Nubs there turn it and then you lock this in by threading it in now when there is power you will notice that this green light will be indicated if there's power coming from your generator anybody what you doing so this is our generator it is a natural gas generator a Furman I believe it's 6500 watts 6 900 watts starting on natural gas and 5500 running Watts now we have our hose this is a 3 8 flared to a quick connect so I have my Grille set up on a quick connect and to change these out it is very easy and very fast you just it's kind of like an air hose snap it into place and we are ready to fire this baby up so this has an electric start so we're just going to select natural gas or LPG there so with natural gas what you actually do is you put this on choke you start it for three seconds then you put it to run and then you can start it up as you can see we have lights let's go over to our thermostat and see what we got so that has powered up we're just going to give it a second all right so our thermostat is back up and running are set to 68 at 68 in here we're going to bump it down to 66. this icon will come on so the fan will kick on in just a second there it goes and now let's go out to our disconnect and plug it in and see what our amps are all right so since we're right here by the generator we're going to show you the inrush amps and we're going to see if the generator makes any change in Pitch when this comes on so let's go ahead and plug our disconnect in see what we got [Music] the generator made a little bit of change in noise not not very much at all but as you can see we had 6.3 amps inrush and our AC is on we've got hot air coming out of the top already so as you can see our generator is powering the AC we've got 52 and dropping degrees coming out of the vents so everything is working as it should in fact we actually have two air conditioners going right now our mini split in the garage is running so I'll go back there and show you that running simultaneously with our generator see our Mr Cool mini split is running it's pulling heat out we'll show you what's coming out of the vents inside as you can see we've got 52 and dropping coming out of our mini split so we are running two air conditioners simultaneously this has a built-in soft start this is all variable speed compressor so very efficient the compressor has no problem powering both of these as well as many lights all the lights in here and inside my house are on so this is able to power just about anything we need and it's going to be really awesome in the event of an emergency when we're able to power those items all right so let's say our power is restored all we have to do is come over here after we've shut our generator off we're going to flip this back off and as you saw that drop down by itself turn our main on and we're back on grid power now as you saw when we powered up this AC unit we had 6.3 amps super minimal load on the generator now my AC system is relatively small in comparison to a lot of homes say you have a four ton or a five ton system you could be looking at over a hundred amps of inrush amps without this soft start kit and so that's when it becomes critical to have a soft start kit to be able to to be able to power your generator but even so the ability to go from 35 inrush amps to 6.5 is amazing it puts less load on the generator and it allows it to power other items in the household other than just my AC or if I have a heat pump my heat during the winter months so in the event of an emergency having a generator that is capable of running on natural gas is very important for me because here in Salt Lake City we've had several instances where we lost electricity but we still had gas and so in that scenario if there was a day or even two days that we didn't have electricity but we did have gas I don't have to run and fill this up with gasoline now if we weren't able to get natural gas then we would have to look to Alternatives but we have two other viable options we can run this on gasoline and we can also run it on propane so I love the versatility of this unit if you're looking for a generator this one is a fantastic option in fact I believe Costco has these on sale right now and they're about seven hundred dollars which is a steal now if you're interested in setting your AC system up with a soft start kit so you can power it in the event of a power outage with a generator check out these two videos right here and we show you how to install the micro Air Soft start as well as the ICM 870. until next time you guys be safe later

Channel: The DIY HVAC Guy

Views: 787,189

Keywords: backup power, whole home backup power, whole home generator, solar generator, portable power station, off grid, generator back up power, generator, tri fuel generator, natural gas generator, firman generator, power inlet box, interlock kit, tansfer switch, micro-air, soft start, air conditioner generator, power air conditioner with generator, ecoflow, bluetti, solar panels, off-grid, ecoflow delta 2 max, solar generator diy, diy, diy hvac guy, diy backup power

Id: 1XHRY_P8fXw

Length: 9min 3sec (543 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 01 2023