Kyle, maybe the service and care at that hospital wasn't the greatest, yet another symptom of poor management. Throwing more money at the problem wouldn't solve anything, and perhaps the voters could tell that?
Things didn't go nearly as well at the building department, where no amount of explaining to the slovenly "Jason" could convince him that the signed and stamped engineering analysis applied to the appropriately identified and addressed, but separate, detailed construction plan, even though the mechanical drawings in both were identical. My sales lady wan't too pleased to hear that, but she did agree to go one more round with the manufacturer to see if they can help. But it's far more likely that I'll be out a few hundred more bucks to have a local engineering pro put his stamp and signature on one or both of those pieces of paper. Sigh.:banghead:
The sales person did have a battery bank proposal, based on a 12 hour load of 5400 VA as measured when I was powering the house with the generator while both well pumps were running. The battery bank would have been composed of seventy-two (72!:shocked2 volt, 1215 amp hour batteries, each costing nearly $700! OK, well, er, maybe I don't need to run those pumps quite so long before the generator comes on. Besides, the pump house where the batteries will live is only 8'x10', and the stack would have covered the short wall to the ceiling and been two layers deep. Uh uh. So we'll go with one 1/3 the size, one string of 24 batteries instead of three, and only four hours of run time. The basis for the sizing was the emergency situation where a wildfire was approaching the house and the utility had already cut the electrical power. I figure if I'm there, I can time the start of the pumps so the four hours of protection will be long enough to let the fire pass, even if the generator refuses to start. And if I'm not there, unless I can come up with some kind of Buck Rogers method for detecting the fire and automatically starting the pumps, it's not a life-and-death proposition so it doesn't matter as much if they run at all.
Then she needed help on deciding on three inverters or only two, or even one, and her concern was with surge current. I have some pretty large electric motors, one of which might draw as much as 200 amps on startup, more than even three inverters could supply. But the surge lasts only a small fraction of a second, and the inverter ratings are for one, five, and thirty minutes, so we need to figure out a way to compare apples to apples. Hopefully she's up to the task, and I bet I'm the first customer she's had that has asked these kinds of questions. That poor woman; I wonder if she's figured out yet she's dealing with an engineer?:laughing:
