Hey, everyone. Welcome
to the channel today. I'm gonna show you how I use that
portable generator back there to power my whole house stay tuned. Okay. So there's a lot of reasons why you might
need a portable generator or why your power might it go out for hours or
sometimes days or weeks at a time where I live, we can get pretty
bad snow storms in the winter, and that can cause some power to go out. We can also get some pretty bad storms
in the spring that can knock branches down and take power lines out.
So and there's also just the, the possibility of rolling blackouts
in some areas. So it's always, always a good idea to have a
backup power source at your house, especially if you have
a lot of things that, that need electricity to, to either keep food fresh or to keep
your, your family warm in the winter. So, Right. It's always a good
idea to have a portable generator. The one I've got here is a predator
6,500 starting lot generator. It's not the most powerful one you
can get from Harbor freight, but it's, it's kind of near the top. So I'm gonna show you my setup to
plug this generator into my house and how I use it to operate my entire
electrical system in the house. Hey, if you like this video today,
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uploads. Thanks a lot. So here I have a predator generator, 6,500 wat starting fi 5,500 Watts running. You can see here, it has two sets of G FCI
outlets Kind of dirty right now. And then it also Has a four prong plug for an extension
cord that goes to an electrical socket on the side of the house. And that's
what I'm gonna show you next. And then here's the cable for
that? It's a 10 gauge 30 amp cable, four prongs. I got this
from Harbor freight. I think I paid $40 for the
cable. It was discounted. I think it's usually 50 for the generator. I paid about 550 after tax, and then I've also got the wheel
kit and the handle for it that comes separately. And I think I also
paid $40 for the wheel kit. This is the 10 inch wheel kit. It's
the, the bigger one. All right, let's go check out the on
the side of the house. Okay. As you can see here, this is what I use to plug the
generator in on the side of the house. It's called a generator inlet. It's got four prongs here. I think I got that from
home Depot. I will actually, I might have gotten it on Amazon. I will put a list of links in the
description so everyone can see what my exact parts list and what
the prices were on all of these. But I think I paid $30 for this. And then I was actually
replacing or moving an air conditioner compressor.
And when I had that moved, I had, I had them put this in the spot where
the electrical components were for the air conditioner compressor.
I also had to get at some 10, three cable that ran to my electrical panel. And then I had
to get the generator interlock, which I think cost about $60. And
I'll show that to you in a little bit, Before I hook all this up to the house, I'm gonna start the generator and let
it run for are about five minutes to get warmed up. And according to the
instructions that came with the generator, that's what you're supposed to do
before you hook it up to the house. So here we go. First thing you're gonna do Turn the fuel on straight
up, turns it on and next, the choke needs to go
to the start position. And over on the front of the generator,
you need to turn the switch to on, There we go. And then usually
just one or two poles, we'll get this thing started.
Let's see what we got today Out on the first one. Okay. So if you want to power
your house with a generator, there's a few options.
You can actually have a, a full on standby generator with
a switching system that will automatically turn on when you
lose power. It could basically, it waits so many seconds
after you lose power. If it doesn't seem like
it's coming back on, it will switch to generator power and
automatically switch the generator on that's your most expensive type of system. And usually those have to
be professionally installed. I'm sure a really good DIYer
could do it themselves. There's also what you'd call
a, a generator transfer switch, where you can set up a sub-panel
an actual different panel away from your main electrical panel that
has all of your critical load circuits. And when you need to, you can turn your generator
on. You can turn your main, main power off at your main electrical box and then switch the power,
turn the transfer, switch on, switch the power to
that critical load box. They'll option I went with is
called a generator interlock, and I'll show you how
that works right here. So in these top two slots in my
electrical panel, I have a 30 amp, two 40 volt breaker. And then what we have here is
called a generator interlock. And what that does is it
keeps me from turning on the generator back feed circuit. So I'm not feeding electricity
into the utilities. All right. So I have to actually turn
the main breaker off and then I have to push this interlock
up to turn the generator backfeed on. And that will prevent me from turning
the mains on while the generator backfeed circuit is on. So what
I'm gonna do right now, I've got my generator running
and we're gonna test this out. I'm gonna turn my mains off. I'm
gonna turn the generator. Well, I I've still got a I'm gonna,
main's off. I'm gonna plug my, my cable in outside, and then I'm going to turn
the generator back feed on. So let's get started
with doing that First. I'm gonna turn off all the
circuits that I don't need. And after I turn the
generator back feed on, I will flip on the
circuits that I do need. All right, Here we go.
Let's hook the generator up. Okay. Let's work our magic
with this generator interlock. Okay, here we go. Turn the garage back on. Cause there's a refrigerator
out there. And then Some of the kitchen receptacles, Some of these other things I've got
marked already for critical load. I'm not going to bother turning. I have
water heaters or my air conditioning. I am gonna turn on the fan for my heater.
We have, we have natural gas heat, So I wanna make sure that's running
And then we'll get some lights on too. All right. I've got power back on up here, alarm Internet's working that lamp is on Lights in here. Okay. We've got power in that refrigerator Power in the garage That refrigerator's good. Wanna open the garage Door? That works. Okay. So I've got both my refrigerators going. My sump pump is on I'm not
worrying about the water heaters or the range, which are both electric. My heat is working because all I need
there is I need to be able to control the thermostat and my fan. I have
natural gas for, for my heat. Some things to consider. If you have A well pump, you're gonna need to look
at the electrical rating for that. And let me show you something here With the generator. There's a
little chart that came with it. We're not gonna be able to see
it that well there, but I'll, I'll see if I can link to something
in, in the description for this. It'll tell you some, some basic some basic utilities and appliances, and there wat ratings or, or how many
Watts they'll take to start up and, and how many Watts they'll take to run. And you need to kind of
make a little list of, of the things that you need
to run in your house and how much watage they're gonna
take. And then that, that really determines what kind
of generator you're gonna get. So if I were gonna do things a
little differently, if I had, if I had to do this all over
again, I would probably get, if I was still shopping at Harbor freight, I would get the 9,000 Watts starting
generator. And I think it's, it's either 8,000 or
80, 8500 running Watts. Just to have a little,
little more power, a little, little more flexibility in what
I can run in my house right now. I've got a lot of things on. I could probably run my water heaters if I wasn't running anything else. Could, I don't know about the stove it's,
it's it's takes up a pretty big load. I'd have to look at the,
the ratings on that, But if you've got a well, or if you've got if you wanna run air conditioning, you're gonna need something a little
bigger than a 6,500 wa starting generator. So or starting wat generator. Well, there, you have it. This is how you can run your whole house
on a Harbor freight generator with a few other supplies for less
than a thousand dollars. I've got my house hooked up. I'm
running a lot of stuff in this house. Right now my, my furnace is
going, it's a gas furnace, but it's got an electric so
I can run heat in my house. And that's really the main thing I
wanted to run refrigerators, heat, and lights, and I've got
that I've even got internet. So if my kids are super bored, when
our power's out, they can watch TV or, or whatever, if, if they need
to. So yeah. Hey, let me know, comments, if you have any additional advice
about running your house on a generator, or if you have any comments or questions
about what I've got going on here. Thanks a lot for stopping by.
