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Solar is not practical for fridge and freezer. Consider that even a $100 Harbor Freight generator will put out 800 watts day or night and use a couple quarts of gas an hour. It can (barely) keep most refrigerators running. My recycled Quad-lam solar panel was about three times more costly, put out about 75 watts during daylight hours only, and required an interface to properly charge batteries, both at additional expense. Solar simply cannot supply enough reliable power for standard household refrigerators and freezers, which is why those people who are off-grid pay big bucks for small highly efficient refrigerators.
First off you can run a whole house off of solar and wind and not have to worry about the grid and i do it in Utah along with most of the family does it there so it can be done for a full sized three bedroom house with all the creatures comforts of home ....
but there is way to cut the socalled high price of the smaller efficient refrigerators and freezer go with the new super efficient enegry star rated low wattage used of the fridge and freezer models that are out on the market now and that means in the last two year that are what are called super enegry efficient and they do not waste alot of the enegry to power them ..
when going off grid for powering a home you have to chose the right size panel in a series of 4 or 6 or 8 or 10 panels set up on multi arm trackers to catch the sun as it comes across the sun dureing the day to charge the house battery bank..
The more the wattage the panel say it is more likely it was design to work with a 24 or 48 volt system not 12.volt
At the house in Utah my sister and her husband live they run three set of 6 135 watt 12.volt panels on multi axis sun tracker mounts to follow the sun across the sun dureing the daylight hour to charge the battery bank along with a small wind turbine set up to help charge the battery bank when the night winds comes off the mountian going through the valley ..
At my small cabin i run 4-135 watt 12.volt panels to charge the battery bank dureing the day on a single tracker pole mount ...
Also talk to a company who does it for a liveing and give them what you want to run off the house battery bank in a simple emergery like a torando or bad weather to run the basic items of the house..
also talk to the company and see if the bank wireing is to be done in 12.volt or 24.volt or 48 volt set up in the battery bank stowage of the amp hours that is going to be need in the long run to power the house hold items that is needs to be powered dureing this times .. ..
1-amp hour is 13 watts of power so sit down and refigure out what you are doing wrong with the solar set up have there ..also put a kill-a-watt set up on each of the appliance that you what to run dureing a emergery and then figure out the size of solar and battery bank that you need ..
so you have to size the battery bank to be able to run what is called the peak load on the bank and still have enough power to last a full 24 hours on the bank to power all the appliances in the place .
it can be done also look at moveing your freezer items to a small travel cooler that runs of 12.volt to save as much as you can ..
Also it chreaper to use solar and wind power in the west in some areas because of the price of running a power line out to the house ..in 2000 they want about $23,507.oo dollars to run power out to my place on the border of Co/Utah area and i told them forget and use the money to install a small solar and wind system to power my cabin there in mountain and it works very well if i do say so myself ..
I'm also very into green enegry and i can tell you this is the one time where you go why do i have depend on one thing like electric power or gas fired gen set to rethink you move to a off grid power set up of your own to allways make sure you have power ..
These are good points and therefore I'm still not sure which type of fuel to take.
What happens if you connected to gas and the supply stops during a disaster. Diesel on the other hand needs to be checked, it can get old.
This is why I am going with propane: stable and won't go stale. I may opt for the 250 pound tank, which will keep the house going for several weeks (estimates vary, but it seems that at full-load these standby generators will use about one pound of propane per hour).
Of course, you can also use the smaller 20 pound tanks. Anyway, even during a disaster you should be able, if need be, to get more propane.
When all is said and done, I will probably supplement my energy with solar panels, which is an interesting idea herein.
Henry, the original post was about whole house generators for use in case of a disaster. My response was and is that solar is not PRACTICAL in the way that was described. For that matter, every reputable alternate energy system installer will be up front in telling you that if you can get a normal hookup to the grid with a streetside transformer and no long lines, that an even mildly comparable alternate energy system will cost FAR more in installation cost, and will having ongoing costs for battery replacement, repairs, etc.
I am not against alternate energy, I even have some of the original issues of Homepower magazine and was using a Trace 2KW inverter and solar setup before most people even knew such stuff was possible. That said, the idea of investing in a solar system for use only when the power goes out is beyond ludicrous. As allandall points out, panels are extremely vulnerable in a tornado, and many of these storms also generate large hail which could pulverize them. In addition, the care and feeding of batteries in an off-grid system has a steep learning curve, to the point that I regularly tell folks who are interested in such systems to start with cheap batteries, because they WILL destroy the first set with unintentional abuse. Lead-acid in off-grid situations last longest when only discharged down about 10% of their capacity, and will be irretrievably damaged is discharged past 50% even a handful of times. Learning this in the middle of a disaster is heaping insult upon injury.
For a POSSIBLE short-term requirement for electric power, the cost of the equipment and fuel has to be balanced against the time it will be used, and the reliability factor has to be high. Inexpensive small generators fit that bill. The Honda and Honda clones are fine, a 5KW generator is overkill unless you need to run a room AC, and even the cheapie Harbor Freight or Northern tool computers will last longer than the average power outage.
I see you have posted several questions about generators, so far without response. Hence I will jump in.
First, I have a portable, 5,000 watt generator, run by gasoline. Heretofore whenever we have lost power (which happens quite a bit, it seems, here in my part of north Texas) I will pull out the extension cords and hook up various items like the refrigerator, computer and television.
I am now contemplating getting a true 'standby' generator. Here is one I am probably going to buy, from Lowes (they do have an occasional sale on this generator):
If I pull the trigger I will, in addition to purchasing the generator, have to buy a transfer switch, a propane tank, and have an electrician come out to the house and install the transfer switch, hooking it up to the house's electrical box.
The advantage of such a standby generator is that when the power goes off, the generator automatically switches on (about a one second delay, is what I have read). Another advantage: I can run the central AC/heat. GE claims that this generator will prevent you from accidentally overloading the system (it is 10,000 watts). Hence, if you need to turn on the AC unit, the generator will determined if there is enough spare power to run the AC; if not, it will turn off some things (I am not sure how this part works).
As for the propane: I dislike having gallons of gas in the garage. Gas also goes stale (although I do try to remember to use a gas stablizer).
This (as well as other) propane generator will run off tanks of propane, either the common 20-pound tank (which will last about a day) and bigger (I am planning on at least a 100-pound tank, sufficient for some 4-5 days).
Note that this (as well as other brand of propane generators) will also run off natural gas. If you already have gas laid to your house, then you would merely have the natural gas people hook you up to the generator (I do not have natural gas).
That GE website has a section in which you select the size of your house, etc. and it recommends the size unit you need. Rather surprisingly, to me, although our house is 3,000 square feet, GE claims it is a 'small' house.
I hope this helps some.
That looks to be the same as a Rheem unit, I think they may all be made by Briggs & Stratton. The Rheem says it has a Vanguard V-twin, which is a very good Briggs engine.
I use 2, one is a Honda inverter type which produces clean power for electonics. One gallon of gas will go 6 - 8 hours. That is for 1000 watts, with that I get lights and TV. THose are very satisfying things to have on a day like today and you can stay informed. THe small generator will run the electonics portions of my tankless water heater (it also uses Natural gas), so yea we can have hot showers
The other is 2500 watts, that powers a fridge (1500 watts) and a few other items. The power is 'dirty' but it runs a AC motor it uses about 2 quarts of gas an hour (rough estimate)
The Honda was 639.00 and the 2500 watt one was a Chinese overhead valve one that flooded the market over the past 10 years, it was 239.00
With a little bit of conservation I get by on 4 - 5 gallons of gas per day.
Although it is counter intutitve smaller is better, the Honda is quiter than conversation and gives us what we need. But then again cold food is a nice benefit.
I'll second the use of the Honda (and clones) we ran ours for 15 days straight after Ike and had very good performance and it is very quiet comparitively speaking. Did learn NOT to use a coffee maker while running a generator though, for some reason you can run everything else but a coffee maker and a blow drier.
I normally do not look in the Alabama thread, but since I have been busy researching standby generators, your thread immediately interested me.
I will add that one issue I must address is placement of the propane tank: the city rules state that a 100+ pound propane tank must be at least 10 feet away from the residence. I assume that I can run a connection from the tank to the generator, although whether I have to bury it or not is still unknown (since I have dogs, I imagine I will have to).
Your generator and your tanks will probably be in the same spot. The generator is not located in the house. Personally I would put the propane tanks much farther from the house. Here is why:
My recommendation is to put the money you would spend on a generator (plus enough $$$ for gas to run it) into a bank account. Then every 10 or so years something like this occurs, you can go to Florida or the atlantic coast for a week long vacation until power is restored.
How often has your power gone off for more than a day???
My recommendation is to put the money you would spend on a generator (plus enough $$$ for gas to run it) into a bank account. Then every 10 or so years something like this occurs, you can go to Florida or the atlantic coast for a week long vacation until power is restored.
How often has your power gone off for more than a day???
Welllll... I paid about $550 for my 5KW generator. When I used it those 11 days in Florida after Hurricane Wilma, I used 15 gal. of gas and saved about $400 worth of refrigerated food, was able to protect my property, saved on the motel, gas, eating out, cost of people coming in to do some basic repairs, and probably half a dozen other things I'm forgetting. I never even bothered filing an insurance claim on homeowners.
As for a vacation in Florida - I lived there for twenty years. I have zero desire to vacation there.
We lost power briefly this winter, and we were snowed in for a few days, but it didn't bother me in the slightest. Generator- check. Propane wall heater for emergency heat - check. Fireplace and chainsaw for long term without power or propane - check. Freezer full of food - check. Kerosene lamps - check. LED lamps - check. Not having to deal with the world in a supplicant mode when everyone is irritable - BIG check.
So... my invested $610 could generate say 10% per year if IF I invested flawlessly and the markets didn't tank ... I might get $1,000. Dunno when you went to Florida last for a week, but hotel $100/night gas to get there...
I had a business trip for three days down there two years ago. Going as cheap as I could it cost me (one person) over $800 for two days on-site with no fun stuff or eating at fancy restaurants. A trip to Joe's and a few drinks could easily bring that over $1K.
Now that we have a freezer and stock up when the prices are right, I would lose more than that in food in two days.
Just popped by this thread and had to put up some ideas. They do make tri-fuel generators, gasoline,diesel,propane so you'd have all bases covered. We have a Kipor 6000 generator that runs very quiet (about 63db) and will power most anything in your house. In our last house we had a transfer switch installed (bought from Home Depot) and decided what mission critical circuits had to be wired to it. The well pump was obvious as was the septic pump, then the fridge and a couple of wall plugs and the gas fireplace blower. The well could be turned off and on just to fill the pressure tank as with the septic pump when needed, the fridge can be run about every 8 hrs to keep it cool, same with freezers. Hot water you say? Well, water can be heated on a bbq or pit fire like in the old days, electric water heaters (what we had) take waaay too much power.
Lights are critical imo, not only do they allow you to see they reduce fear and depression by giving some normalcy to your life.
Even though you have a transfer switch or generator you DO have to do some power management to lower the load on the genny thereby reducing fuel consumption unless you've got natural gas service that works.
The one BIG thing to remember, you will have to service that genny if power is out for a long period so keeping a couple quarts of synthetic oil and a spare filter (if it takes one) on hand is another must.
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