How To Safely Power Your Home With a Portable Generator

all right welcome back to the ssl family dad channel today we are doing a a diy project here at the house we are going to be installing a generator inlet box and an interlock kit a circuit breaker interlock kit so what is that what does that mean what is this going to do for you so if you are looking to hook up your generator a portable generator uh you know whatever wattage you have 10 000 watt and below probably some type of portable generator to your house and be able to you know power kind of any circuit in your house this is what you want to do there's two main ways to do this one of them i've done a video on which i will link up in the i card system there that is installing a generator transfer switch a generator transfer switch is limited it is a safe and effective way to hook up a portable generator to your house but it is limited to the number of circuits that you can power so generally you have to pick 8 10 maybe 12 specific circuits in your panel that you want to power so maybe your well in your kitchen circuits for your refrigerator and you know some lighting and some other things like that but you can't really you don't have full range control over any circuit in your panel for bigger houses this definitely can be an issue because you may want to power more things or you may want to have to have control over what you want to power at what time so today we're going to be using the other method which is using a generator or panel interlock kit and a generator inlet box on the outside of the house and i'll go through the whole install on this it's not too difficult there's uh one thing that you're going to need set up previous to this part of the install and that is some kind of a some kind of wire from your panel to the outside in our case we're using a wire that was existing here at the house but you can hook up your own breaker in your panel and then just run a wire to a hole drill a hole you know out of your basement or something like that and then you can hook this up so that'd be something that i'm not going to go through in this video so how this works is on the outside of the house here we have some wires coming out that is wired to the panel we're going to put the generator inlet box on the outside of the house this will get wired it's a waterproof box a cable goes from this box here and then plugs in directly to the generator it has a twist lock uh you know plug on it and that's going to handle a 30 amp this is a 30 amp uh system here and then on the inside of the house on the electrical panel you're going to need what's called a generator interlock kit i'm going to go through why you need this why it's important and why this is this is a safety thing is this code you can't do this without it before we get into this i have just several quick disclaimers all right number one you do not want to back feed your generator through a dryer outlet in your house or an air conditioning line or something like that that is something that you do not want to do a lot of people are out there looking to do that because you've waited too long and now you're in a power outage situation and you want to find a quick way to feed power back into your panel that is not the safe way to do it you can absolutely cause your generator can catch on fire when the power comes back on if you don't do things properly you have other issues with causing damage to things in the house causing damage or hurt people that are out working on the lines linemen things like that so you do not want to do this through back feeding through a circuit without the proper equipment and also i am not a electrician i this is a diy approach to this from a homeowner's perspective it's something that that most people can do with general knowledge of electricity and so i'm going to go through just the the basic and quick of this uh if you don't feel comfortable with it though i would recommend getting electrician to do it they can pop this in for you probably at a minimal cost so so let's get started we're going to start first with the outdoor generator inlet box we're going to mount this to a brick wall here on the outside of the house and then we'll go inside and hook up the generator interlock kit next i'm going to start by drilling a hole in the back of the box so we can feed our wires through i'm using a paddle bit for this which isn't ideal but we're going to run it in reverse once we get down to the paddle so we don't crack the plastic all right so now we're going to mount this box to the wall we've got there's six actually mounting holes in here we're only going to use four of them as long as we get good holes so because we're drilling into brick here we are using an actual hammer drill uh this is a new tool that i just got because we have a ton of brick on this house so a hammer drill uses a twisting and a hammering motion in order to drill through masonry stuff bricks concrete cinder blocks all that kind of stuff so this one can actually be used in just a drill mode or it actually has the hammer drill mode as well we've got the correct size masonry bit in here for these tapcon screws these are great for masonry stuff they you just you don't need any kind of anchor or anything like that you just drill the correct size hole in these they have a really coarse thread on them and so they'll thread right into the the cement these work really well so this also has a depth gauge on here i don't want to go too deep but i do want them to be you want to make sure that these don't bottom out in the hole because it'll actually strip your hole out if they bottom out so we want to make sure that we at least go this deep we'll adjust our depth gauge here just a little bit so we're going to go ahead and drill our holes to that depth the way that this works the uh it's best to try to cut these off the same length and then push the extra wire back into your hole so i'm actually going to re-strip all of these and just cut them cut them back to the length of this black one here so the wiring's pretty straightforward on this um the actual plug itself has screws on each side there's just four terminals here it's 220 volts so there's a ground terminal on one side and then the two sides opposing that are for your hots so it's your uh in this case it's wired as red and black but a lot of times they're yellow and green and then white or your comment is going to go here so pretty simple just stick the wires in and make sure that they're clamped down so i've got them all opened up right now i'll put the wires in and tighten them up so that's that it's all nice and safe and secure and i like i like this particular inlet box because you have the clear panel on the front so you can see exactly what it is if you're just walking by but this has a kind of extra safety feature these screw in so that just in case the breaker was somehow left on inside which we're going to talk about that in a minute no one could stick in here you know stick their hand in there whatever you'd know you know that this was uh meant to be closed so it's got these little twist locks on each side and you can actually lock this you can run a zip tie through here one of those little cable locks or something like that to actually uh lock this little uh door shut so that no one could get in there kids can't get in there or something like that but so now we have this done nice and secure level and screw it onto the outside all wired up we're going to go inside and install the interlock kit for the breaker okay for in here on the panel we need to install a breaker or generator or panel interlock kit they're called lots of different things in order to do that every panel is a little different and so what you're going to need to do is actually go to gen interlock.com that was the website that i found this stuff on and they were pretty good they had pretty much every different kind of interlock kit that you can get i have a cutler hammer style panel and you know you might have a siemens style panel you might have a square d panel whatever it is you can put type in your brand and then it'll ask you to take a measurement from the main to your first breaker either on the left or the right and then it'll tell you the internet kit you need you can buy it this comes with absolutely everything you need to install it and it's it's great we're going to flip the main power off we're going to be running on some led work lights and we will take the panel face off and then we're going to actually drill some holes in here and install a bracket okay so before we take the panel cover off it comes with this template that we are going to put in place and mark our holes and set it in up next to the main breaker and then just right down against the generator breaker and mark those hole locations so one of the first things i'm actually doing here there was a 50 amp breaker in there and that generator inlet box is only rated at 30 amps as well as my generator so i'm just going to go ahead and pop a 30 amp breaker in here just so everything matches and breakers are pretty easy to install um there's a lip in here that it kind of hooks on there's little hooks on the back side of it you wire in your two wires black and red and it just kind of fits in there and then snaps into place and so i'm not going to go through that process in too much detail it doesn't matter which terminal the black and red wire goes into so part of this also it comes with these zip ties and they want you to connect the top two breakers together and so there's a double zip tie here that we're we're using to do that and this will make sense in just a few minutes so these zip ties actually have a release on them which most zip ties do not so if we didn't remove this breaker we can actually release the tension on the zip tie and pull it out but this is to hold these two breakers together so that you can't force this breaker over and it'll pull the breaker out uh when when we have our bracket in here you'll see exactly what i'm talking about but this just holds everything together um it's kind of an extra safety thing it looks like so a couple things that help me out a lot when i'm doing electrical work when i have to have the power off is this little blue eddy or max oak power inverter it's a battery inverter basically and i have two my led lights running off of this one of them is this stanley led light this work light this comes on a tripod so this is a little taller and then i'm also using this smaller work light which is just a bunch of led panels on swivels which is pretty handy as well so so the kit comes with the the drill bit and screws that you need to uh to get everything installed it also comes with the bracket itself and a mounting template this is just a temp this is all milled aluminum it looks like and this is just a template just so you get your holes marked out just in the right place and then the bracket here will slide on those those screw holes comes with a couple little uh stickers to put inside the panel just to show you what you have and then it also comes with red locker thread locker for the little screws that we're gonna put in so so all right so let's just go over what we have installed here basically what this is is a safety bracket it just forces you to if you're going to have the generator turned on it forces you to have the main breaker off so the main breaker is in this down position it's off right now the bracket can slide over which then allows this breaker to turn on so now i can't turn the main breaker on because the bracket prevents it and what this prevents is back feeding so if for both the safety of your generator and the safety of the people working out on the lines you know outside your house if you're powering you know you have power coming in through this breaker here when it's on it's energized now the rest of this panel and it energizes all all the breakers in this panel now everything is on but that also means that if you turn on your main breaker here if you were to flip this on it would backfeed power through this breaker and then out into the lines out you know into the neighborhood which is what we don't want to do it also prevents if you did have this main breaker on let's say and you had your generator powering in through here so you were sending power out to the lines when it when the power comes back on basically it would feed all that power back in through and back out to your generator which will could start your generator on fire it could cause all kinds of problems so we don't want that to happen either and so this prevents that so this is a safe way of back feeding your generator power through the breaker and energizing all the breakers on your panel now how you'd want to use this is and it actually gives you instructions but you'd want to shut off all your breakers and start your generator up let it warm up and then flip on the generator breaker which is this one right here so that is energizing the entire panel and then you just want to flip on the circuits that you want to use so just a few of them you don't want to power you know all these 40s and 30s and 20s you know doubles well this is the well um but all these 30s and 40s all these are all for welders and ac units and the 50 down here for our stove like all that stuff's going to get turned off you're not going to power that kind of stuff with the generator but all these 15s and 20s for various things we have it all labeled in here so you can turn on your refrigerator and garage outlets and you know garage door opener and you know your furnace and all kinds of different things so you can power whatever circuits your generator can handle it just gives you a lot more versatility when you're using a portable generator power your home so then when you're done you want to turn the generator power off now that allows this bracket to slide over and out of the way it's a little bit tight now it allows me to turn my main on and now we have power back to the house and so you can see the bracket will not slide over so won't let me slide this over so i can't turn this on now so that's a safety as well on this side of it when the when the main panel is on it's not going to feed power out to that outlet that we put on the outside of the house so this is safe as well on the outside so everything that you saw in the video here today will be linked in the description as i said and i'll also probably put a comment with all that so where you can get the generator interlock kit um the generator inlet box which was over on amazon as well as all the tools and things that we used including that uh greenworks uh hammer drill which is pretty nice that's a new addition for for me and a few other things the led lights and other stuff you saw here so links all that stuff if you're interested in any of those things and if you have questions or comments if you've done a lot of these before if you have any words of advice or anything like that i'd love to hear from you throw that stuff down below uh and questions as well i try to answer questions uh even if this video is 10 years old i'll try to get to your question so don't forget to hit thumbs up on today's video of course subscribe if this is your first time here and follow along with the ssl family dad channel we'd love to have you tag along and as always guys thanks for watching have a good one [Music] you

Channel: SSLFamilyDad

Views: 265,297

Rating: 4.9159341 out of 5

Keywords: ssl, ssldad, sslfamilydad, farming, farm, diy, michigan, sustainable, sustainability, family

Id: XMErA8pHf9Q

Length: 16min 21sec (981 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 06 2021