How to wire a generator to an electrical panel

how's it going guys this is double wide 6 and today we're talking about how to hook up a generator to your panel the first thing that you want to do is uh find yourself a certified electrician that can do the work for you but we'll show you how mine is wired up so we'll open up the door and up top there right there is the most important thing this is called the generator interlock and basically what it is is it's a safety device if you hook up your generator wrong to your panel and let's say you're running power into your panel and uh the power's turned off at your house cuz uh the wire got knocked down what you can do accidentally is you can back feed the power lines and actually electrocute someone so you want to have this interlock device and basically what this does if you look here it I cannot turn on my generator right now because this switch is physically blocked it will not go on the only way I can turn on the switch is if my inter loock slides up see this is made to go up but it will not go off up unless my man is turned off by turning off that main breaker what you're doing is if you're back feeding your generator into here you're preventing power from going out to the power lines and electrocuting some someone to hook up your generator directly to the panel without an interlock is illegal you could kill someone and you could actually do jail time there's a website I think it's called like in or interlock decom something like that if you search for interlock you can find these devices you have to figure out what type of electric panel that you have you can look on a door there should be a sticker mine's a Seamans and the interlock website is pretty handy because it shows all kinds of good pictures so you can make sure it's the exact panel that you have and you can buy that part and uh that's important all right guys now we're outside the house and you're looking at my generator Inlet box this thing is is a pb30 it's a 30 amp Inlet device for a generator it's made by Reliance controls basically all I have to do is take the extension cord that's plugged into my generator and plug it into here so the extension cord goes from here to the generator into the four-prong outlet pretty simple so here's a look look in here how the uh panels wired up that 30 amp breaker it's a double 30 and uh you got to look at what type of generator and what size how many amps breaker you need um it has a black and a red they're both hot wires and uh there's also a white and a ground and all those wires are 10 gauge and they run down to the uh bottom of my panel where they actually go through the panel and and out the wall to uh outside to the uh Inlet box so in the event of a power outage what you want to do is you want to take your generator and you want to wheel the thing outside fill it up with gas start it up let it run for 5 to 10 minutes that'll get all the electricity flowing right so it's producing the right Hertz and amount of electricity let it run outside okay the next thing you want to do is go to your main panel when you get to your main panel the first thing you're going to do is you're going to turn off your House's main so you're going to go up here to this switch and you're going to turn it off that's your main breaker that'll turn off any power coming into the house it will also prevent any power that's coming out of the generator from going to the electrical lines once that is off what you can do is slide up this interlock device you can slide it all the way up and then at that point when this breaker is off um that will allow you to turn on your generator uh um breaker okay but before you turn that on once your main power's off you are going to turn off every single breaker in the house every single one you're going to push them all over to the left all right I'm not flipping the breakers because my wife will be out here freaking out at me you turn off all the breakers on this side too so everything is off okay then now that everything is completely off you take the other end of the extension cord from the generator and you're going to plug that in on the outside of the house all right so we're at the inlet box now what you want to do is you want to remember that that brake is still turned off inside you're going to plug the other end of this extension cord your 10 gauge 4 extension cord will get plugged in there and lock in place okay now that there is power flowing from the generator to the inlet box and all other Breakers are turned off including the House's main at that point you're going to be able to flip on your generator at uh breaker so you'll you'll flip this 30 amp breaker and what that will do is energize the panel so now um everything in the panel is basically getting power however there's no power going to any devices in the house because all the breakers are flipped to the off position and then what you would do is turn on your appliances basically one at a time so like I would need my well pump so I'd flip that one on okay I don't need my central heat or uh air conditioning so those would just stay in the off position uh the Water Heater I want to leave that off the dryer I'd probably leave off but lights Outlets things like that um the sewage ejector pump all that type of stuff the range you can probably keep off cuz that's I'm going to use use a lot of uh wattage but like the septic system I need that stuff running so the essential things that you need you'll turn on and it' probably be a good idea to color code the breakers that you want turned on in an event of an emergency all right guys so basically in in conclusion I think what you should know is uh a generator is a nice device to use when your power's out it can power your house and make things a lot better you're probably not going to be able to power everything in your house unless you have uh another alternative source of energy besides electricity or if you have a very small house so for instance if you have like propane heat uh you know that you'll be really comfortable during a power outage where I'm on all electric so I'm not able to power everything um basically I think you can get a generator um anywhere from about 600 $0000 up to uh about $1,500 uh about the size of the one that I have um and uh to wire up your panel uh you can have an electrician out and they'll probably charge you somewhere between $3 and $600 to wire up the generator so uh I think overall um probably under you know $2,000 I would say say it's pretty cheap insurance if your power is going to be out for over a week we were out for about 5 and 1/2 days with Sandy and I wish I had my generator then but I haven't now and uh next time there's an outage it should really be a walk in the park for us so I hope you found this video interesting I hope you learned a few things and uh you should check out my other videos on my channel I'm double wide 6 thanks for watching watching see you

Channel: doublewide6 Repairs LLC

Views: 1,263,877

Keywords: generator, generator hook up, generator wiring, generator connection, pb 30, inlet box generator, how do you wire a generator

Id: 0-RPJ3qOKPs

Length: 9min 5sec (545 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 10 2013