Running An Entire House On An Amazon Generator

this is how my whole house backup system works it's a 9 500 watt Westinghouse generator that I just wheel out into my driveway then I grab my 30 amp extension cord plug that into the 240 volt 30 amp plug and then I also flip on the generator and also the circuit breaker for the 240. then I find out my cord's not quite long enough this is 25 feet you want to make sure your generator is at least 20 feet away from your home to make sure no exhaust comes in the living space then I'll take the extension cord I'll plug it into my 30 amp generator Inlet box which is located on the inside of my house and don't forget to rotate that in the clockwise direction to lock it into place once everything is connected up then I'll turn off my 200 amp breaker disconnecting from the grid interlock plate goes down and then I turn on my 30 amp Inlet breaker from the Gen set then we'll turn off all of our other Breakers making sure that we're only running the critical circuits that I've identified ahead of time that I'll need up and running in a blackout scenario flip all of those to on and then once I get the critical circuits to the on position I'll just use a handy little feature here of the Westinghouse and that's the remote start feature start up the generator and now I'm back up and running now will this setup work for you and your situation there's a few things you need to consider that I want to run you through one what does your power needs understanding your critical circuits and how much power those are actually going to need is going to help you select your generator but also things like the generator Inlet box behind me number two how do you actually want to plug in something like this Westinghouse 9500 watt generator into your house you do have a few options when it comes to that as well and then we'll finish off with pricing what does it cost for a setup such as this and some of the other options you have going all the way up into some setups that can be twelve or fifteen thousand dollars so let's jump into understanding your power needs so you can select the right system for your home so there's kind of two parts to the overall understanding how much power you're going to need in a backup scenario first we need to identify the circuits once circuits are identified we need to figure out how much power those are actually taking for each circuit now hopefully you have good labels on the back side of your door so you can just go down and identify which circuits are going to be applicable to your scenario so let me write down mine which will give you an example first up I have my sump pump so in a scenario where I have an outage there's probably some rain in the area maybe we had a bad storm roll through so I want to make sure if I'm getting any water in my basement then I can get that out of the home and I don't have any flooding issues second up my family room this is going to power my TV it's going to give me some lights in the main part of the home a few Outlets to go off of and it also runs my Wi-Fi router because we have fiber coming into the house so in a power outage actually I just have to have my Wi-Fi up and running and I'm still probably connected to the internet number three is my furnace so I have a gas powered furnace so I just need to give it 120 volts so I can run the blower motor and get warm air throughout the house again for me it's a good possibility a power outages could come in an ice storm when it's cold outside I want heat in the home number four I'm actually turning on a 240 volt circuit which is to the cooktop I'm not going to run all the different burners but I want to have the ability to run one small burner which would just help with any cooking during a power out number five is going to be some kitchen gfcis so the kitchen I'm also going to have some lights on again main part of the home I want to have some lights and then those are going to be my Main outlets which I can power my cell phone and charge it up or my laptop and charge it up number six is going to be living room dining room just with those lights and outlets in the main area of the home I'm going to power my refrigerator of course making sure that our freezer and refrigerator stays cold during a power outages so we're not spoiling a bunch of food keep in mind if you also have a deep freezer you're going to want to account for that as well and then in those rural scenarios you might have a few other critical circuits like that well pump that you need to keep going so identify all of those and once you've identified there's two different ways that you can now get the power consumption for each of those the first way is the easiest way not necessarily my preferred method but let me show you how to estimate the power consumption for each circuit so you can just quickly Google something like list of Home Appliances power consumption or power consumption for common home appliances and then usually you can run across these types of lists which will give you an estimate from a minimum and maximum of how much power in Watts will be consumed by each Appliance so if you wanted to run your TV and you also wanted to run an air purifier for some reason and you want to also make some coffee in the morning you can just add these up right start accumulating these now some are going to be a constant draw if it's a light or if you're running that TV if you're watching TV the whole time that's going to be a constant draw but if it's something else that's going to be a intermittent draw like a sump pump that's something you need to consider but you can add up all those I would go with the higher the maximum draw and what you're going to quickly see is anything with a heating element like if you have electric heat a boiler system well you can see that is just a massive amount of power if I had that kind of setup and I needed to go towards this maximum of 14 000 Watts or 14 kilowatts that would be well beyond my capacity just for that one Appliance alone so you are going to have to add those up and again you're not going to be running all the circuits in your house and then the second way the one I prefer is whether or not you feel comfortable working in a panel with the power on that is on you to decide if you're safe doing that because then I'm going to actually use a current clamp to understand the amperage that's coming when I'm actually running these critical circuits so I'm going to go through a scenario I'm going to run all the different things I want to run in a blackout scenario and then see if I'm below the amperage that I need to be so that my backup generator and my selection for that generator and like box are correct to meet my needs [Music] now I should have mentioned before I remove that cover I actually turned on my critical circuits why I did that is I want to use this current clamp to clamp around the two different 120 phases that come into our panel to make sure both of these phases are below 30 amps now it can be a little confusing because we're jumping from power in Watts or kilowatts and then we're going over to current and amperage just know that power equals voltage times current so if we're multiplying a 240 volt system times 30 amps that's going to be 7200 Watts right 240 times 30 equals 7 200 Watts so that's how I would know right now testing to make sure my amperage is below 30. so on the one phase I have 11 amps right now running all of my critical circuits in the house so I'm actually running them right now I'm doing a real scenario and then I have about 15 amps on my other side right now in my current scenario I'm well below so I have a little bit more capacity I could go throughout the house see what other lights I might want to run or maybe some other clients go through the real world scenario and test to make sure I'm below the threshold I'm testing amperage and then I'm balancing and averaging the amps across those two different phases and multiplying that by 240 volts to get the power consumption and then that power consumption you would want to make sure it's lower than your generator that you're buying now once you've identified those circuits We Now understand our power consumption needs believe it or not there's a little Pro tip using some caulk to easily identify those in the future to know which ones to turn on in case the power goes out using any white interior exterior caulk you'll just put a small dab on each of the numbers and what we're trying to do here is we're going to then wipe off the excess caulk and don't press too hard because you want to leave the white caulk in the grooves for each of the numbers you can clean it up a little bit but it doesn't have to be perfect and this makes now the critical circuits extremely easy to identify so you can quickly flip those out in a power outage and get your power back up and running so how do we actually plug this thing in our house what are the options we have and I'm assuming you're not going to be running extension cords from the generator inside the house sometimes we have to do that but as obviously not an ideal scenario the two main options you have the first one is the one I went with it was the easiest to install and it met all the needs that I would have that is a simple 30 amp Inlet box and then that silver bracket on the lower left hand corner of my square dqo panel that's called an interlock kit now simply an interlock kit just make sure you cannot have power on from the grid and power on from a generator at the same time that can introduce some safety issues so if you were powering your house from a generator and you also have your main power grid on but you had a power outage you could have linemen outside your home working on the power lines and you're back feeding power into those lines obviously that's not something we want to do and we want to make sure everybody's safe inside and outside our home as well now this is what I recommend but the same setup also works if you did your power calculations and yours went over that 7 200 Watts you might need to step up to a 50 amp generator Inlet and a 50 amp breaker same interlock kit and that's why on our Amazon store you can see a link below this video in the description if you go over to the solar backup power section you're going to see the setup that I have with the Westinghouse 9500 a 30 amp extension cord the 30 amp generator Inlet that's the setup I did with that interlock kit but you could do a 50 amp setup with a Westinghouse 12 500 watt generator a 50 amp Inlet box a 50 amp extension cord in that same interlock kit it'd be the same overall setup you're going to have to have a little thicker gauge wire for wiring in that Inlet box but it's a very similar scenario now your other main option for connecting things up could be a transfer switch so instead of just the interlock kit here leveraging our electrical panel and that Inlet box so you could have an inlet box and then a transfer switch where you actually are breaking out your critical circuits that you need inside this transfer switch so when grid power is there you would have the selection down to a line let's say that's powering your refrigerator so Power is coming into this box it's going through this in the line selection and then it's going back through the circuits in your home now in a power outage what you do is you would connect your generator to an inlet box like we have behind there and then for your transfer switch you would be switching these over to the Gen or generator selection so then you can power the critical selections and you have some monitoring here in terms of power consumption so there's a few more features here but this is a much more complex install and if you're hiring this out this is going to be some additional labor usually these 30 amps will have about five different circuits it has four 120 bolt circuits and one 240 and then if you go with the 50 amp option you're looking at about 10 different circuits now let me know down in the comments do you have any feedback for my overall setup here but all also maybe you have a few questions on your own setup you need some help with I'd love to jump in and help you out now when it comes to price overall my setup here for this generator Inlet box the breaker the interlock kit and the Romex the 10-3 Romex connecting up is only about 175 dollars in material cost now if I add another 75 dollars for my 30 amp extension cord I'm at about 250 and then adding on the Westinghouse 9500 this is currently at 950 on Amazon so adding all that up I have a whole house backup system for twelve hundred dollars and to be honest with you not a ton of Labor in one week and you can easily knock this project out and now have a whole house backup system and then you have a portable generator that you can use for camping for tailgating maybe you have a job site that the power isn't on yet this thing has four 120 volt Outlet takeoff and then it has that 30 amp 240 volts so it is more than capable I can't really speak to the longevity and durability of this but overall the ratings are really good on Amazon and for the price it's really hard to go wrong now for a 50 amp setup I think you need to add about 400 now you could argue why would you not just go with the 50 amp setup it's going to be pretty much the same exact setup 50 amp Inlet same interlock 50 amp circuit breaker a little bit thicker extension cord and then that bigger Westinghouse 12 500 watt generator you're going to have a much more capable system you're going to be able to run a lot more in your house during a power outage now it's really hard to beat this right so you can compare this to a classic Generac setup you see those stationary generators with the nice enclosures outside of houses those can be very capable systems directly plumbed into your natural gas they start themselves up and check all this systems every so often they're really nice setups but you're talking about five thousand or six thousand material and usually you need those professionally installed so really it's more like a ten thousand dollar system for me we just simply do not have that many power outages where I can justify that type of cost so this is more than what I need now if you want to do this exact project and you need a little help check out this video right here and that is going to help you if you need to move around any circuit breakers to get that interlock kit set up and then check out this video right here which shows this exact 30 amp generator Inlet and interlock installation which will help you through your project so thanks for joining me on this video and we'll catch you on the next one take care

Channel: Everyday Home Repairs

Views: 48,073

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Id: 4AvYZY9GYi4

Length: 15min 1sec (901 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 22 2023