12kw Isuzu Diesel Generator

[Industrial Toys]

I have a 5K, 110/220 ALPHA telecom surplus inverter, (transformer based). Weighs a ton! I had a lead acid bank of 48volt worth of batteries. Nice for overnight power when pretty much only the fridge is running and occasionally the water pump. The electric water heater gets shut off, having hot water stored anyway. My problem was that once the batteries die, the ALPHA inverter charger didn't like the Onan/Kubota power, probably as the freq wasn't PERFECT. I never did figure a way around that.

Those (free) batteries finally died and now I use my JD Electric (48V) Gator as a bank, which is quite handy.

 

[RNeumann]

That's the thing. I'm not sure what size generator I'm going to need for the battery bank I'd like. I'm thinking in the 6-12kw range. I emailed the guys at Hardy Diesel(will most likely buy from them) asking about the expected life of their 7kw Kubota at constant use 24/7. They replied with 28k-30k hours before top end rebuild.

That's the thing. Several folks here have intimated that the 4500w constant load seems way high. Your only response was computers/servers. A hot computer is about 250w and and a dual quad core server may bump that to 300w since those don't typically have screens and other peripherals all the time.
List what you need to run and I'm thinking you will get some great responses with regards to design, sizing and ways to reduce loads.

 

[rbstern]

Yeah it is a huge load - I'm a website software designer by trade so I have multiple computers running at any given time.

I do the same gig for a living. With my i7 cpu, three 24" monitors, a home built Linux NAS (AMD Kabini...25 watts!), routers, switches, mfc printer, laptops, some other minor equipment, I'm probably pulling less than 10 amps total. That's without trying to optimize power use. If watts are hard to come by, you could easily help yourself by building a purpose-built, low-powered workstation, with the best power sipping CPU, RAM and SSDs available. You could probably come in under 125 watts, maybe 150 watts total if you need a bit more graphics processing power.

It may be easier for you to save on the conservation side than the power source side, particularly when it comes to fuel. With an ultra efficient setup, you might be able to get away with two identical, smaller diesel gensets, one as a backup or overload unit. Rotating the loads between two generators would extend the lifespan of both, and you'd have excellent redundancy.

If you are in the southern half of the U.S., solar panels and a big battery bank will dramatically extend the life of a generator. If you're efficient, there may be days when you don't need a generator.

 

[TractorGuy]

The only way to know the current consumption of any system is to measure it.

I had a request at work a few years back to add recepticles for several high power towers to run computations. I was concerned we didn't have the resources because the towers were fitted with 1200 watt power supplies. I made a short open wire extension to clamp my ammeter on. With one tower running the most complex computation I added an HD streaming video and it was only pulling 1.2 amps.