Generator wiring

[MossRoad]

When I wired the house we just left I drew a diagram of every circuit which showed every box and every door and window, and labelled every breaker. No boxes were served from others nearby just because they were close--logic and troubleshoot-ability were paramount. I am also a big fan of sub-panels. When given a choice, I do not run entrance cable into a big panel with a main breaker. I run the entrance cable to a main disconnect with subpanels branching off as necessary. I may very well do that sometime in the current house.

Any panel past your main disconnect would be considered a sub-panel anyway, and would have to be wired as such.

 

[franklin2]

This is a little off topic, but I bet some of you know the answer. I just bought a house built in 1979. It has a generator hook-up, but the realtor said it has never been used--not part of the issue. It was installed and wired by a reputable local electrician. Attached to the generator cable connection box is a 12-circuit load panel with a double 60 being incoming power from the main load center and a double 20 being incoming from the generator connection. The remaining 12 breakers (some are tandems) are wired to individual circuits in the main panel.

What this amounts to is circuit A being a black and white wire leaving the main panel, (but still long enough to go around the perimeter of the panel as originally wired) , but powered by a yellow (or any other color) wire from a breaker in the gen panel to the black wire, and a white wire from the gen panel to the white wire in the circuit A. With 12 out-going breakers in the gen panel there are 24 additional wires entering the main panel and wire-nutted to the existing black and white out-going wires PLUS there are circuits in the main panel that are not connected to the gen panel. The congestion of wires in the main panel is beyond anything I have ever seen.

Despite having power outages a few times per year, I have never felt it necessary to buy a generator, and I have no experience with them. I would think that a generator would just push juice into the main panel replacing what normally comes from the grid. Clearly the gen won't put out the everyday amperage, so the homeowner needs to determine what he wants to run--the water pump, freezer, refrig and furnace , but not every light and appliance in the house.

I would love to disconnect (and ultimately remove) all connections to individual circuits from the gen panel to the main panel. I am not an electrician, but I feel perfectly comfortable inside a 30 circuit 150 amp panel. Is there some good reason why I must retain this multi-colored bowl of spaghetti in my load center?

It easier sometimes to get in your mind that the 12 circuit generator panel is a subpanel. Think of it just like a 12 circuit panel located in a remote garage location.

Your spaghetti wiring problem in the main panel is coming from them taking original circuits out of the main panel, and extending them with wire nuts into the "subpanel" for the generator. If this generator panel was planned on during construction of the house, those certain circuits could have been wired directly into the subpanel, making the install a little cleaner. Since you are doing some re-wiring, you can possibly clean this up yourself.

Not sure why the generator "subpanel" is fed with a 60 amp breaker, but the generator comes through a 20 amp breaker. It seems with this setup, you will still need to "select" what the generator is going to run by turning off breakers in the generator panel. If you did a survey of what you really need to run during a power outage and added up the amperage requirements, and then bought a generator capable of driving these selected loads, then that would get rid of the manual load selection during a power outage. You will need to do this if you re-wire to a automatic transfer setup.

For example, if you want to keep the circuits you have, and they do require a 60 amp breaker to feed them, then you need to add a 60 amp breaker for the generator and buy a generator capable of at least 60 amps output.