All electric house and a generator

[Industrial Toys]

Apparently, I am told by people in the business that keeping moisture out of the rotor and stator is important. That is why testing under good loading is important. The power source is quite secondary (for testing) in my opinion.

As far as not running life support, well, I would rather not have any back-up, than think I do, and it fails. Because that really sucks! And it's why I lean in the direction of slow running commercial style back-up systems.

 

[MossRoad]

Consider a solar system with battery backup. You will get a 30% tax break and the array will reduce your electric load everyday. If you electric company has net metering, you should look very hard at solar as backup power supply rather than all the drawbacks of a standby generator. HS

Right now my solar array is producing 4.4kwh, it's quite, no fuel, meter running backwards. HS

That's a big investment for system that only works during an outage. With enough battery backup your assertion may not hold water, by the way the array still produces in bad weather. HS

Just remember while your thinking this morning my solar has already produced over 5kwh, and is running at 3.4kw and spinning up. No fuss, no fuel, and all that's happened is the sun came up.... Incredible... HS

The OP lives in about the poorest location in the country for a solar installation.
http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/map_pv_us_annual10km_dec2008.jpg

And that's the annual picture. Don't look at the winter pictures, its way worse. Its not a good option for his location at all.

 

[Industrial Toys]

No. I am sure I pretty much have that (poorest) spot covered. Location, PLUS living in a valley on the North Side of a Forested Hill.

 

[Code54]

Yep around here you never see anything solar except a patio light or landscape lights. We are surrounded with trees so most of light comes when the sun is directly over head!
Thank you all for the wiring info, that helps make things a lot easier to figure out.
Looking tomorrow afternoon at 3 different propane systems and finding out the actual pricing.

 

[Industrial Toys]

You wouldn't see Solar around here either, except for the fact that our government threw a few billions of tax payers dollars into the scheme!

 

[zzvyb6]

I don't want to hijac this thread, but has anyone installed co-generation capability, whereby the motor cooling system is piped into the house for heating purposes? This can nearly double the thermal efficiency of your fuel usage. And a step further can be taken when you use a heat exchanger to extract heat from the exhaust. There are now commercial units that do this with standby power. Even a tractor could be modified with cooling system disconnects (via large hydraulic fittings) in order to circulate hot water into a house area.

 

[4570Man]

It doesn't seem like a worthwhile expense.

 

[Industrial Toys]

All the Mennonites around here with their own plants put the cooling water heat into the shop slabs via hydronic systems.

 

[4570Man]

Don't the Mennonites run the generators full time because they don't believe in on grid electricity? There's a big difference in a full time operation and a stand by generator that runs a few days a year. Another problem is a lot of the homeowner standby generators are air cooled.

 

[Sawyer Rob]

Don't the Mennonites run the generators full time because they don't believe in on grid electricity?

Around here, they don't have much of anything on electricity, unless you include 12V.

They run a diesel motor twice a day, it has a compressor, vacuum pump and charges 12 batts... The compressor fills two 500 gallon propane tanks, the vac pump runs their milking machines and the batts run a few other things.

All the houses/stores have propane lights in them...

SR