- In this video we're gonna go over some of the most important topics when it comes to installing and running a generator transfer switch. We've got a lot to get
through so stay tuned. (upbeat music) So before we get started with the actual install instructions of
this transfer switch, I just wanna go over a couple of things if you're handy and you have a little bit of knowledge about electricity then this is job that
you can definitely do, the instructions are very easy to follow, it really doesn't take that much, it won't take that long I think mine took about two to three hours to put in and if you can do it that way then you're gonna save
yourself a bunch of money but if you don't feel confident in what you're doing or you
just flat out don't want to do it then I would definitely advise hiring a licensed
electrician wherever you live and have them do it, it'd be far better to have them do it than for you to do it and possibly get very
very hurt or even killed 'cause electricity is
nothing to mess around with and there's a lot of electricity that's gonna be going through this panel before I shut off the power. So with all that doom and gloom behind us let's go ahead and get started and turn the power off. And now the power is off. So before I take this
box apart to show you how it's installed, I just wanted to go over a few things that is particular to this box, this is a GENERAC 30 amp manual transfer switch
and it has eight circuits and you can buy other circuits from your local home
improvement store to mix and match whatever it is that you're wanting to move from your main panel over to your we'll call
it our emergency panel because that's what it is and there's no secret to this guys what you're moving whatever you're wanting to run in your transfer switch, all you're gonna be basically doing is taking the circuit from your main panel and putting it now into this one and we'll show you how to do that here in a little bit. But when you do that, make sure that you buy the circuit breakers that match your particular panel. This particular panel came with Siemens circuit breakers so
when you go to the store and you decide you are wanting to get different circuit breakers, make sure you're getting the ones that match the box and so in this case, buy some more Siemens circuit breakers. Also make sure that when you are choosing what you're gonna move over there, you don't wanna overload
this box, its a 30 amp panel and you also wanna make sure that whatever circuit breaker you're wanting to move over that it matches. So if you're moving over a 20 amp circuit, make sure that you are then installing it and connecting it to then
on your emergency panel, a 20 amp circuit, you do not wanna go from a 20 amp circuit to a 15 amp circuit that's not going to work. All right, now that our main power is off, we can now proceed to the first step of this actual install. And the first step would be installing a 50 amp breaker in your main panel and what this 50 amp breaker does is while you still have
your your utility power that's coming from the grid, this is what is going to send the power over to your transfer switch box to power all of the circuits that you move from this main panel over to there and so you've got your,
you've got a black wire and a red wire here. And these black and red wires go out of the main panel up through the conduit and they screw in up here in these lugs so you've got your black, your red and your white, and your white wire is a neutral wire and the neutral wire also goes through the conduit and it's over here in the main panel and I don't know if you can see it or not, but it's screwed in right there on this neutral bar right here. You also have over here, your ground wires are all into your ground bar over here and there is a green wire its right in here that also goes into the transfer switch box which is there's a ground panel over here. And so once you've got all that hooked up, you now have power going
to your transfer switch box and that's what's going
to supply the power to all those circuits. Now that is where then
the next step comes in of selecting which circuits that you want to be powered in the event of the electricity going out. So there's no mystery about this you're basically just moving circuits from your main panel and you're moving them over to the transfer switch panel. So let's start over in
the transfer switch panel and you'll see where there's wires coming out of all these circuits. They all are color coded, they all have different colors so that that way you can distinguish once you've
run your wires through what wire is attached
to which circuit breaker so in this case, this circuit breaker has a light blue wire and so that makes it also easy if you ever wanted to reverse the process you can find what it's attached to and then put it back into the circuit that it was originally
in in your main panel. So you would run all of your colored wires through your conduit, I would also just run all of your white wires through the conduit as well because those white wires
are also going to all mount and screw into your neutral bar over here. It does not matter what order you put them in neutral is neutral. So for example again,
here's that light blue wire I pointed out over in
our transfer switch panel and so what we did is we pulled it out of one of these circuits,
it was screwed in just like this one is, we pulled this black wire out of that circuit and attached it to this blue wire which is coming from our
transfer switch panel. And so now what that is doing is it is allowing the power that is coming from the utility power to come from the transfer panel back
into the main panel and into the wire of whatever that is powering inside of the house. Now please make sure that when you are moving your wires and attaching them to the wires in the
transfer switch box that if you pull a wire out of, say, a 20 amp, this is a 20 amp circuit breaker, if you pull a wire out of
a 20 amp circuit breaker, it needs to be attached to
a 20 amp circuit breaker in the transfer switch panel as well. So guys, it really is just that easy. As a quick recap of what we just did, we chose which circuits we wanted to move from our main panel over to our transfer switch box, we've put in the circuits that we need to use that match the circuits that
were in the original panel. We have our wires running from our new power source, which is
this transfer switch box we have all of our wires pulled through into the main panel that
then are wire nutted to the wires that go to whatever it is that we were trying to power. We also have our neutral wires, they're all screwed in to the neutral bar and we have our ground
wires, they're screwed into the ground bar. And so the next step that we would have to take then is installing and wiring our generator input cable. All right guys, so now we've gotten to the step where we wire up
our plug for our generator. And so I've already wired this one up of course, also most
people mount their box on the outside of their
house because that's actually what the instructions say, I chose to mount mine
just inside my garage door because I just felt like it added a little bit more protection
to the plug itself and I didn't, I knew I wouldn't have to worry too much about bugs and other things getting up inside the box so mine's just inside my garage door. I've got a long enough generator cable that I can get the generator
far enough from the house and so that's just how
I chose to wire it up. But just to give you a quick overview of how this wires up, you've got your you gotta have a 10 gauge wire that's coming into this box that then is also attached to your transfer switch box. You've got your black, red, white and green wires, your
black and your red wire are of course hot wires and they're in two holes that
are designated as X and Y and then you've got your white wire which is a neutral wire and it is in a hole that is
designated as W of course. And then of course,
you've got your ground, which actually mounts
to the back of the box and then is attached to a green wire that then goes over to
the transfer switch box and mounts to the ground bar and the transfer switch box itself. So that's a real quick overview of how to hook this part of it up. After you got it all hooked up you would just set it in there and screw in screws and
that would hold it in. And the instructions when
you're mounting it outside it wouldn't be like this,
you'd have it face down there's a cover that goes over it. So now I'll show where the generator plug wires come into the box and install where you are
gonna wire them in at. So I've got my wire coming from the plug coming down the wall and then those wires come in here and the black mounts
here, your red goes here and your white goes here. And again, these are hot, just like the utility wires those are both hot. So this will be your
hot wires, your neutral and then the ground wire
that was in that plug it mounts to the ground bar back there,
you can hardly see it there's a ground bar in the back there you just screw that into. And so that pretty much sums up how easy it is to install all this,
of course it takes longer because it you know it takes time to actually run the wires and you know how it can be trying to get these wires
exactly how you want them so that you can get them screwed in. All right guys, now that we've got our covers back on both of our panels, we're going to go ahead and simulate a power outage to make sure that everything is hooked up correctly and just to show you how it would work. So before I do that, I
wanna show you real quick there's two lights up here on the transfer switch box one says utility and one says generator power. Both of them aren't on right now because I still have the
power off to the house and the generator power is not on because I have not turned
on the generator yet. So that's about to change
here in just a moment so let's go turn on the generator and see how it works. I've already got the plugs all hooked up and so all we got to do
is turn on our generator. (generator humming) There's our plug. So now you can see that
generator power light is on and what we need to do now is we need to push this button here to switch over the house to generator power. And as you can see as
soon as I hit that button, the lights in the garage came on, I've got all my circuits
on because my generator can handle everything I've got hooked up so let's go inside real quick and see if the kitchen lights are on. And they work. And this is all on
generator power right now. All right, so now let's go out and check our well. (generator humming) In here's our well house all right, let's turn this spigot on and see if we can get
that pump to jump on. (water gushing) There it goes we've got power to the well so that's a big deal
guys, it's good to have running water in the event
of a electrical outage so that's awesome. All right, so now let's simulate the utility power coming back on. So now the power is back on. (generator humming) So now you see both of the lights are on and what's nice about this box is when that light turns on now you know that you have your power back, whereas some other panels you're not gonna know unless you're constantly checking or the power company sends you a text or someone lets you know
your power is back on. So now what we're gonna do is we're gonna switch back over to utility power and that's as easy as pushing this button and you'll hear that click and we'll be back on utilities. And now we can go shut off our generator. All right, so now that the installation instructions are completed and we went over how the
transfer switch works and we also did a simulation as to how things might work
when the power goes out and you're using your generator, there were just a couple of things I wanted to let you know that you're gonna have to buy extra that did not come with this kit. You're gonna need to buy that 50 amp double pole breaker that is used to send the utility power
over to your transfer switch from the main panel and you're also gonna need to buy the 10 gauge electrical wire to run from the box that your
generator plugs into over to the transfer switch. And so when it was all said and done just to give
you an idea of price, I had about 450 to $500
in the transfer switch and the extra wiring and circuits. That being said overall, getting this transfer switch can make life a lot easier and much more convenient. No more having to use
lanterns, not being able to cook food or super hot
nights trying to sleep again, depending on the
size of your generator, you're gonna be able to
run just about anything. With my current 5500 watt generator I can easily run everything that I currently have connected
to this transfer switch and really much more than that once I plug things into the
outlets inside the house. This right now is set
up to run two fridges, a well pump, a tankless water heater, microwave, fans, lights, TV, internet, computers all throughout most of my house. The reason that we found it important to have one of these is here in Florida we at the very least get threatened with hurricanes yearly so this is really a game changer for those of you that live in similar states where
weather can knock out your power for extended amounts of time. And whether it's due to
hurricanes, blizzards, or even the times where
a typical thunderstorm can knock out the power for a few hours, this is gonna really come in handy and also there are folks out there that use them in their getaway cabins so whatever your need is, I would highly recommend getting a
generator transfer switch, it's a legal and convenient
way to make life easier when the world really does try to make it a lot harder. I can't stress how easy
this is to install, I would encourage you to consider saving yourself some money and doing it yourself if you're handy and have some electrical knowledge, but again, if you don't feel that's you or you just flat out don't have the time to do it then any electrician is gonna be able to get this set up very quickly. This project took me
about two to three hours to do so an electrician is gonna be able to knock it out in no time. So thanks for checking out this video, I hope you found it to be
helpful and informative. If you did, please hit the like button and also click that
subscribe button down below 'cause I have numerous How To videos coming out very soon. We'll see you in the next video. (upbeat music)
