Predator Generator Running Our ENTIRE Home. (Complete Setup and Cost)

hey guys steve here from the cook family homestead and yes I look a little different I have the old four and a half weeks into my hunting beard and I'm pretty pretty stoked ten days from now is the beginning of archery but yeah love growing beard for a season so but anyway I am doing a project today that I wanted to show you it's something that I've been planning to do for a while and I wanted to hook up a generator to are to be able to power our home when we have power outages now we've been here about ten six six years and we've had well over ten power outages and I'm not talking when they flicker I'm talking out for hours and the other night we about two weeks ago we had one for about two and a half hours or so and you know was around 9:00 at night and you realize how helpless you are you know we have plenty of candles and lights and that kind of stuff and we're not you know we have tons of food preps and all this other stuff but one thing we were we've never really been up to par on in our preps was electricity and power outages you know how are you gonna survive if you were down for a week without power and we get horrendous weather here I mean we get feet and feet of snow and below zero temperatures and all this other stuff so what we what would we do so this is something I've been really researching and and looking into and I finally pulled the trigger decided after this last power outage we gotta get this done we just got to have it before winter hits because we're inevitably gonna have one or two power outages this winter at least I mean that's just the way it is and it could be for 24 hours you know what are you gonna do so I'm gonna take you along with me today show you how I'm doing this and you know I'm gonna also break down the cost if you can see there in the bed of my truck I have a brand new predator generator I just picked up from Harbor Freight so 9,000 it's the big boy and pretty excited I actually has five-star review it's it's I've done my research on this I'm pretty excited to to give this a whirl so let's get started well there is the predator I got a unbox it here but that's the 9,000 watt this is the biggest one they have now I'll tell you the cost and the things you're going to need to get started here this is this was six hundred and twenty nine dollars I had a coupon for it they normally run at $6.99 is the the list price but they had a special going on so I've got it for 629 I also got the battery now you don't need this battery if you don't want you can pull start it but I wanted the electric start that battery was 39.99 I had a cute with 20% off coupon and so I got about thirty one dollars you'll need some fuel stabilizer I bought that I think was a buck 99 and what that for is if you're going to keep fuel in your generator unless you're gonna take it out every few weeks and change it you're gonna want some stabilizer so it you know so the fuel doesn't clog up your system or anything this cord here is $49.99 it's a $50 cord this is the cord you need it's a four prong cord this is the one you'll run from your generator to your fuse box to the outlet you install this is a 10 gauge quart cord I think I picked this up before I got the generator and this one I also had a 20% coupon on so I ended up getting it for about $40 and then this is something else you might not need let me set this up here is a wheel kit because your generator does not come with the wheels or the handle now if you're gonna put it somewhere permanent obviously you don't need the wheel kit but they make two wheel kits a ten inch and an eighth inch I just got the eight inch because that's all I'm gonna need but I'm definitely not gonna have it in a permanent place so so there are the things you'll need you'll also need some 10w30 oil which i already have but you got a I get that and I think it takes a little over a court but I'll I'll confirm that once I open it up well there is my main fuse box and my main fuse box is at my garage because the garage is built first so the electric comes here and then goes underground to the house but let me show you how this is wired out very easy this is probably one of the easiest parts of the whole job here is the main switch for all the electric the power and then this is a generator breaker that I put in this is a 30 amp double breaker and and the only thing I don't have on here yet is it's called an interlock switch which I do have ordered they just didn't have it in and what that does it's kind of like an l-shaped bracket it kind of goes like that and when you turn this on it turned your main off and vice versa if you turn your main back on it shuts this one off and you the reason you have that is because you can never you don't want your generator switch pushing power back into your box and you have your main pushing it back out so you always got to turn your main off before you turn your generator power on so that's why that's on there so I'll have that on there pretty soon but let me show you that runs down here there's a piece of conduit and then here is my plug that the generator plug will plug into and it's just a four prong outlet with a cover and this whole cover box outlet piece of conduit was about $30 so 30 and eight so about 40 bucks for the breaker and all your and your plug there but I will say that interlock and device here that's gonna go here was about $60 so you're gonna need about a hundred dollars 110 dollars or so for your fuse box to get this all wired up but it is pretty simple to do okay well there it is all unboxed and it has like a QuickStart reference guide and what I like about this too is it tells you kind of estimate wattage charters for better you know lights and dryers and refrigerators and all that stuff so that gives you good starting reference of what you want to run in your house what you can run with this so there it is all unboxed and it comes with these tools ten millimeter wrench phelps that wrench and then eyes are for your battery tied down and then it also comes with this wrench which I'm not sure what that one's for yet so I'll figure that out here in a minute alright got the wheel kit on the handle on and let me tell you this thing is heavy I'm guessing 200 250 pounds I mean it is it's not light to move around but just run real quick thing the battery in the instructions if you can see right there the positive on the battery is on the right hand side negative on the left in the directions that shows you it's on the right and opposite you know on the negatives on your right and the positives on your left so just a quick little thing not that big of a deal but they don't give you a lot of play in the cord there so just heads up so let's get some fuel some oil on this run it and then we'll plug it in the house and see how it works all right let's fire this bad boy up now the one thing I will say is I put oil in there I wanted to tell you guys what it takes the gas that's an 8 gallon tank so it's a it's a pretty big tank 8 gallons and I filled it right up so that's your gas gauge right there so it's full if it's all red and then the other thing is the oil is in a very accessible spot so you need a longneck funnel and i didn't have one but i was able to get it in there but that takes a little over a quart so it's like 1.16 i believe is the actual measurement so let's fire it up ok it does have a pull start but i might use the electric start so what you're gonna do is you turn your fuel on not straight up and your choke and so if you see up here it tells you to start you want your choke all the way over and to run you'll put it back all the way over so and also tells you your fuel so I am on choke is on and then we should just push this button and it should start so let's give it up with the choke back we're runnin that is way quieter than I thought it was going to be way quieter I'll put the microphone next year that is unbelievably quieter than I thought I thought it would be twice that loud so we'll let it run for about ten minutes or so then I'm gonna hook up check the oil on everything and then I'm gonna hook up the power ok so this is the where the power comes in in the basement and this is where it comes to this panel so one of the things I am going to shut off is that this is chicken coop but that's our barn so I turn that on off but I'm gonna keep all the rest of these on and I'm just going to turn stuff off in the house but that is one I'm gonna turn off and then I'm gonna go up to the main panel the house and I'll show you that okay so these are the main this is the main power in the house and everything in our house is electric because we have propane heat so I don't even have the furnace on so I don't have to worry about turning that on but I am gonna keep everything on we're just not gonna infer though all right the one thing I am want to try out is the water pump so I'm gonna keep that on the washer in the dryer obviously we don't even we're not going to use them so I'll leave them on because I'm just not gonna pull power from that but so let's see how this works alright so we're gonna fire this up in the house or try to run the house so I got the cord plugged in a couple of other quick things on this this also has an oil shutoff so if you do get low oil it will shut off automatically by itself which is a good protective you know ability of the of it so and man it was a lot quieter and I thought it's loud but it's not as lies that's expecting some of the reviews that it was loud so I have the cord plugged in and I have a couple things turned off in the house and the other thing I'm gonna turn off are my lights in the garage so we'll shut those off just to keep a little bit power so I'm gonna turn off the main and that should take off power for everything so we'll shut that off and I'm gonna go make sure everything shot all right it's all dark in here right no power all right here we got moment of truth we'll go fire it up let's get it fired up all right let's let it run for a minute that will make the transfer ha sighs here we got all right we got lights let's see if the water pumps working we got water the well pump is working and ceiling fan yeah let's try the refrigerator I can hear the refrigerator running so there it is let's see the microwave yeah so let's turn on some lights now an average light will run you see in the basement the lights are on yep lights are all on awesome so we can have water and ceiling fans and fridges and freezers can all run stove takes a lot of power so if we were to use that don't mind our messy house it's home schooling day so all right I'm gonna try something outside now ok so right now I think I'm drawing about 35 to 4,000 lots of power with everything I have in the house so I should have plenty of what I'm gonna try is let's turn out in the garage life and I also want to try the garage door on and let's open and close the door this is my big door so that is phenomenal alright I switch back yeah my pile of garbage that's going out this week but all my word work perfect worked perfect so well I'm gonna have to do like some rough I have some rough calculations what I mean what I was using there I have two freezers two refrigerators that were going the lights some ceiling fans the water pump a couple other things and I think I was around for forty five hundred just rough estimate of watts so I had you know some more stuff I could do but that thing runs the house easily not even so so far so good now that was only like a 5-10 minute test but I'm gonna do a better test here coming up all right guys hey me just my final you know two cents on this thing so far just phenomenal investment it was about a total of eight hundred and fifty dollars so from cord from the the fuse box to the court battery to even my two quarts of oil because I paid thirteen bucks for synthetic oil for two quarts so I did include the gas so it takes eight gallons of gas on top of that so $850 which is a huge investment for us but worth it and I'm gonna do some kind of figure in here of how long I have to run it to get by each day to keep freezers and you know all that other stuff going and I'm thinking on a tank of gas I could probably get through about four days you know running it periodically three to four hours a day in a 24 hour period so I want to keep enough fuel to be able to run for a couple week or even longer so we'll have to run some tests and some figures on that but I wanted to also say hey it comes with this quick guide and it's pretty neat because I have some charts in the back to kind of tell you what things take wattage was you know computers and refrigerators and radios and things like that so you kind of can get a rough estimate what you need so if you have you know one refrigerator and you know a small house you might not even need the 9000 you might be able to get you know the 6000 and save you some money so I hope that helps you out and you know if you have any questions or comments or you know advice throw it down in the comments so take care thanks for watching god bless you all

Channel: The Cook Family Homestead

Views: 2,558,003

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Id: n68U9ER7HSU

Length: 17min 14sec (1034 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 26 2019