How to safely run your whole home on a portable generator.

hey y'all it's corey here with everyday man doing everyday reviews for everyday people in this week's episode i would like to show you how to safely and properly run your whole home with your portable generator and we'll get to it right after this [Applause] [Music] okay y'all so this year we've had a very active hurricane season and there's a lot of people out there right now that don't have power to their homes a lot of people in lake charles louisiana a lot of people out towards mobile and so i want to put this video out to help you guys or even in the future coming up in winter storms for you guys up north to help you guys understand of how you can use a generator such as this this is a 7 500 watt generator that i have and i will run my entire home with it now i have an average 2 000 square foot house i've got a 4 ton central air unit i've got a deep freezer a couple of refrigerators and this guy can run it no problem but there's a few things you need to do to ensure that it does run it and run it safely now first thing you'll notice on this this champion it is brand new uh we had two storms that were bearing down looked like they were going to come to louisiana i pulled my gener generator out to start it it wouldn't start so i did have to go buy a brand new one but there are there's a couple of things towards the end of the video i'm going to show you how to avoid those issues that i had with having an old generator that wouldn't run and how to keep your generator running but this 7 500 watt generator it comes with a 50 amp receptacle on the front now this 50 amp receptacle is on 230 amp breakers so that's the number i want you guys to remember we're going to cut to a clip right now of me showing you how many amps my home is running at present with the air conditioner running and everything running inside including a couple of tvs and lights hey guys so i just want to show you a real-time amp reading of my house with my air conditioner running everything running two refrigerators in a freezer with 20.8 amps and that is why a 30 amp breaker will be sufficient for what we're about to do so as you can see guys i'm pulling 20 21 amps um so this third this 30 amp breaker on this this generator is gonna be more than capable of doing what i needed to do so let me show you what i did inside in my breaker panel i hooked up a permanent breaker for this inside and i'm gonna cut to a clip and show you guys that right now all right y'all so the hardest part of this job is actually hooking up to your breaker panel you want to go ahead and turn off your main first kill all the power um i have a 30 amp double pole right there that's where i hooked up the wire going to the receptacle your black and your red will be your hot and then your neutral and your ground will go to your ground bar be sure to turn off your power for this because these pieces of metal right underneath is where your breaker clips in that is hot that is 220. so get it hooked up and you're ready to move on now that 30 amp breaker inside my house i have wired it up to a 50 amp rv receptacle it's hardwired okay so in the event of a storm all i would have to do is plug my generator into this guy and i can backfeed my breaker panel to power my home and i'll show you how i go about doing that right after this so guys when you're hooking up your receptacle let's see if my camera get in there you can see it's labeled the black and the red are on x and y and the white is on a screw labeled y and my ground wire was hooked to a green painted screw and also labeled green so that's how you want it to look you want your black and red on your x and y which is your line you're hot and your white neutral is on a screw labeled white so guys if you go about doing it the same way i've done it where you've got a breaker in your house and you've hooked up to a an outside receptacle the next thing you're going to want to do is make a whip or buy a whip for your specific generator and if you don't know anything about these plugs like i know this one's a 50 amp only because i'm electrician i've been around this stuff all my life i know it's a 50 amp you can see down here it actually says 50 amp on the cover but there are several different kind of plugs you can get and if you're unsure or unfamiliar simply take a picture of this plug and bring it down to your local hardware store those guys will be able to show you what you need so what i did was i got a 50 amp plug for it and i made a whip i made a 25 foot whip that i can simply plug my generator into and plug into my receptacle on the other side this is also 50 amp everything's 50 amp it all matches up um but that's going to be the easiest way guys make your whip get it to where you can plug your generator in my whip is 25 feet long i can pretty much put it anywhere under this carport that i need to that does a couple of things for you it keeps the fumes out of my garage it also keeps it where i can move this thing around and make sure it's out the rain if rain's coming in here sideways i can roll this thing all over this carport with this 25 foot whip and i'm good to go okay guys so let's say the power's out power's going out and i need to crank up my generator and get it hooked the first and most important thing you have to do is turn off your main breaker in the event of an electrical outage and you're using a portable generator you have to turn this main breaker off you do not want to back feed to the line outside and cause any safety concerns for any lineman working in your neighborhood or your area this is the number one most important thing to do is turn this main breaker off now after that's off if you've got a portable generator i suggest turning off every load in your breaker panel and i'm explaining why here very shortly um with a larger generator an automatic throw switch you do not have to do this uh the generator can handle load the load of the entire house coming on at the same time with a smaller portable generator you're gonna have to come through here and turn on your larger loads first to get those settled in and running and then you can follow up with your house all right so we've got our main off and we've got our loads off now the next thing we want to do before we even think about starting our generator is plug our our whip in now with the whip like this you don't want to plug it in then start your generator because what will happen is people in the business will call this a suicide cord if i have my generator plugged in and i start started i now have 220 volts on this plug on this male end that is very easy to touch so let's get it plugged in so we've got it plugged in here let's go plug in our generator okay guys our next step here will be to plug in our generator now that our generator end is plugged in our home is plugged in now and only now is it safe to start this generator so let's see let's see where my choke is telling us a brand new generator i'm not real familiar with it yet okay so we want to choke it want to go ahead and start it okay guys now we got the generator running we can head back inside we've got it plugged in and i'll show you how you want to fire up your breaker panel in a certain order to get everything running correctly okay guys on the 30 amp breaker that i have hooked to my generator receptacle outside you can see i've labeled it generator now we can go ahead and safely turn this on now what we have is power to our breaker panel now the first thing you're going to want to do and i've got mine marked is you want to turn on the inside part of your air conditioner your attic blower is what i got mine labeled as turn that on first now to get your attic fan running now the next thing you want to do is turn on your compressor for your air conditioner [Music] i don't know if you heard it but my generator took the hit my air conditioner is now running now i can come in here and turn on all my loads okay guys my whole house is running the only thing i did not turn on is this 30 amp and that's from a dryer in the case of in the case of an emergency uh if i were to really need my dryer i would have to come turn off my air conditioning to use it with the small generator but i think we can go for a while without drawing clothes in an emergency okay guys generators running freezer is on this is the number one reason that i keep a generator at my house i've got a lot of deer meat that i want to last all right y'all when you're running your portable generator go ahead and turn that air conditioner down as low as you possibly can you want to leave your air conditioner running let your house get cold if that compressor unit starts going on and off you can mess up your generator or cause power surges so let your air conditioner run guys you're burning gas anyway let it roll all right y'all as you can see refrigerator's on and it's cooling now one thing i'll tell you a pro tip is use led lighting led lights will be a lot easier on your generator than using incandescents i can turn every light on in this house and there won't be an issue all right y'all so i've showed you how to set up your generator how to get it cranked up and you can run your whole house on a 7500 watt generator i've just showed you it's really not hard to do but now i can see the alignment outside they're giving me the thumbs up power's coming back on all right so what we want to do now is we want to do the exact opposite thing we just did okay so i'm going to show you that stick with me we want to come in here and turn off all our load well you take that ac off you can hear that generator make a big difference outside okay so our loads off so we're gonna head out to the generator we're gonna shut it down you probably want to let it run for a few minutes give it five minutes or so let it cool down then we can uh we could turn it off and then and only then can we safely unplug our our generator all right so we've got our generator shut down now we can go ahead unplug it we know that even though we got power back at the house our main is still off all our loads are disconnected there will be no power on this plug when we go to unplug it okay guys so we know the generator is safely unplugged our generator breaker is in the off position we can go ahead and turn our main breaker back on after our mains on we're back on commercial power we can go ahead and turn all our breakers back on except for our generator we never turn this on as long as the mains on ever ever ever very important we don't want to we don't want to uh power up that plug outside unless we were actually going to plug in a rv or something all right y'all we're back on commercial power the storm has come and gone and we can run this generator as long as we need to as long as we keep fueling it now that's the only pain about having a portable generator you got to keep fueling it now they do make kits where you can hook them up to natural gas but you have to remember they will de-rate them it won't be 7 500 watts anymore okay so i choose to run monogasoline i drive around enough i can go find gas usually so the storm is passed and we want to set this generator up and we want to set it up where we can use it next time where it will start next time one of the most important things you can do is use stabil okay these carburetors if you let that fuel sit in there too long they'll get gummed up stay built we'll keep it in operation another thing that's really easy and cheap to do is use a battery tender i got this one for about 20 on amazon i will put a link down below in fact i'm gonna put a link for everything down below that i've used including the generator the wire that i used the breakers the receptacles everything i will have in the description down below so if you want to do it you can do it the same but like i was saying this battery tender it was 20. you plug this into your battery on your generator to keep it plugged into your wall you'll never have a dead battery guys and this is really as easy as that um all in all i i ran the wire i hooked up the breaker i hooked up the receptacle literally in about an hour by myself um it's really not hard to do to set yourself up for success when dealing with a portable generator and guys if you if you know anybody that needs to see this video please share it i've been electrician for a long time man and i've seen some people hook up their generators in really unsafe ways and i can assure you this is the safest way that i know how to hook up this portable generator guys if you're still here and you like my video man give me a thumbs up think about subscribing and like i said please share with this with anybody you think may need it this is something a lot of people need right now so please get this video out there and guys until next time on everyday man i'll see you [Music] you

Channel: Everyday Man

Views: 829,009

Keywords: portable generator, champion generator, generator hook up to house, generator safety, whole home generator, hook up generator, 7500w generator, power outage, hurricane prep

Id: KYBIQlLMImw

Length: 16min 42sec (1002 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/MrLancaster]

laughs in suicide cord