Natural Gas Generators

With the power outages going on in Texas, hopefully you guys put one in, if so, how is your generator working out for you?
 
Running since 730 :cool:

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Huge damage across the city

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Still out here! I doubt it will be weeks, but you never know
 
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Power did come back!

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Well just had both my local Kohler and Generac dealer/electricians come out for a quote. Still waiting on both quotes. Kohler wants to do 26kw (I could probably size down to the 20kw) and the Generac dude wants to do a 24kw. These are the air cooled NG models. We will see how many zeros they want to add to the quote but I'm guessing somewhere in the neighborhood of $13k - $15k.

I thought about buying the biggest portable inverter type generator and having a manual transfer switch and 50A inlet wired to the outside panel but you can only get about 30A out of those inverter generators on NG which isn't ideal. I'd have to wire up a soft start to my A/C and I'm not really keen on doing that since the unit is brand new and I don't want to fub up the warranty by bolting aftermarket parts onto the outside condenser.
 
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biggen said:
Well just had both my local Kohler and Generac dealer/electricians come out for a quote. Still waiting on both quotes. Kohler wants to do 26kw (I could probably size down to the 20kw) and the Generac dude wants to do a 24kw. These are the air cooled NG models. We will see how many zeros they want to add to the quote but I'm guessing somewhere in the neighborhood of $13k - $15k.

I thought about buying the biggest portable inverter type generator and having a manual transfer switch and inlet wired to the outside panel but you can only get about 30A out of those inverter generators which isn't ideal. I'd have to wire up a soft start to my A/C and I'm not really keen on doing that since the unit is brand new and I don't want to fub up the warranty by bolting aftermarket parts onto the outside condenser.
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Do you really need more than 30a?

Personally, I have both! Good to have some redundancy.
 
IReallyLikePizza2 said:
Do you really need more than 30a?

Personally, I have both! Good to have some redundancy.
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The A/C is on a 30A breaker. The RLA on the outside unit shows 20A. In-rush current is much higher without a soft start wired in. I'd have to ask my HVAC company that did my A/C install if they could wire it in.
 
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My Generac Install

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biggen said:
The A/C is on a 30A breaker. The RLA on the outside unit shows 20A. In-rush current is much higher without a soft start wired in. I'd have to ask my HVAC company that did my A/C install if they could wire it in.
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Could always add some mini splits to the house. Those will run easily on a portable generator, and add some cooling redundancy too
 
Yeah your setup is sweet. That is a liquid cooled monster. You could run your neighbor's house and yours at the same time!
 
This shows the portable generator plugged into the 30a inlet, with the interlock kit. Pretty handy

 
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IReallyLikePizza2 said:
This shows the portable generator plugged into the 30a inlet, with the interlock kit. Pretty handy

Click to expand...

Yeah, I've looked into an even bigger one from the same company:


The issue is on NG, it can only supply ~5900w which is ~24.5A. It would basically allow us to power everything EXCEPT the A/C and dryer. Dryer I don't care about obviously.
 
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Ouch, yeah 5900w isn't all that much
 
It's too bad there isn't a true 50A tri-fuel inverter portable generator. Even priced at $5k they would fly off the shelves. I've not seen any tri-fuel generator rated for more than about~30A and that is running on gasoline only.
 
biggen said:
Well just had both my local Kohler and Generac dealer/electricians come out for a quote. Still waiting on both quotes. Kohler wants to do 26kw (I could probably size down to the 20kw) and the Generac dude wants to do a 24kw. These are the air cooled NG models. We will see how many zeros they want to add to the quote but I'm guessing somewhere in the neighborhood of $13k - $15k.

I thought about buying the biggest portable inverter type generator and having a manual transfer switch and 50A inlet wired to the outside panel but you can only get about 30A out of those inverter generators on NG which isn't ideal. I'd have to wire up a soft start to my A/C and I'm not really keen on doing that since the unit is brand new and I don't want to fub up the warranty by bolting aftermarket parts onto the outside condenser.
Click to expand...
I bought a 20,000kw from generac in 2011, The first thing I had to do was upgrade my Natural gas meter, something to check into. On natural gas it does 18,000KW . I wanted it especially for A/C Unit, Mine is 2 tons so it does start it but I did end up putting
the BIG Capacitor in for starting , It pretty much does the whole house minus my garage and workshop, Glad I have it especially in the summertime.
 
If I were looking into portable generators, I would also look at batteries too. I just got an Ecoflow River 2 Pro on sale for $260, and while its too small to backup a house, its really opened my eyes to how cool these things are

Testing with an old dud panel that got replaced under warranty

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