Whole House Generator (farm, quiet, tractor, generators)
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We finally got ours installed today after waiting seven months. The demand is so high that it took that long for the company to schedule installers. This is a game changer for me because the electricity in our small town goes out with the first wisp of wind or the first drop of rain.
I had a nearly 7 day outage due to a storm with high winds last month. I had thought the 4 day outage some years ago was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
The problem for me is that adding gas service just for the generator would mean a $30 a month base rate gas bill. I heard that running a generator for a week cost as much in natural gas as 1-2 months worth of electricity. That would be balanced out by the amount of food I had to throw out, though.
The power grid in our township goes down frequently. During our first ten years living at this location, I kept track of the power outages on calendars. Our power company is not capable of providing power for any 30-day continuous period, they simply cannot do such a feat.
All other homes in our area are either off-grid or they run generators.
The best setup I have seen for generators is to have two. One large generator capable of providing enough power to run all your appliances [freezers, refrigerator, well pump, laundry, etc], and one small generator that is only capable to power for laptops and a few lights. The big ones suck down a gallon of fuel an hour, while the little ones can run 8 hours on a single gallon of fuel.
What most homes do is run the big generator for one-hour every day, during that one hour, they do laundry, everyone takes a shower and they flush toilets, turn on freezers to keep their temps down. Once that hour is up, they shift to the small generator and stay like that until the next day.
My nearest neighbor only has a big generator, he routinely goes through $150 of fuel each month. He has not decided to get a small generator, yet.
After tracking this for 10 years and talking to our neighbors to see how they function, we decided to invest in solar power for our farm. That was in 2015.
I have a breaker that I can flip to see if the grid is up at that moment. In case we need power but our batteries are running low.
Location: We_tside PNW (Columbia Gorge) / CO / SA TX / Thailand
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I would use a pto generator ($500 at farm auction) in a rural application. A 25-30hp diesel tractor sips fuel.( <1g / hr) And you can brew your own fuel for about $1/ gal. You can make a loop of the neighborhood 1x day and keep the freezers and wells powered.
Last edited by StealthRabbit; 07-06-2022 at 11:59 AM..
The power grid in our township goes down frequently. During our first ten years living at this location, I kept track of the power outages on calendars. Our power company is not capable of providing power for any 30-day continuous period, they simply cannot do such a feat.
All other homes in our area are either off-grid or they run generators.
The best setup I have seen for generators is to have two. One large generator capable of providing enough power to run all your appliances [freezers, refrigerator, well pump, laundry, etc], and one small generator that is only capable to power for laptops and a few lights. The big ones suck down a gallon of fuel an hour, while the little ones can run 8 hours on a single gallon of fuel.
What most homes do is run the big generator for one-hour every day, during that one hour, they do laundry, everyone takes a shower and they flush toilets, turn on freezers to keep their temps down. Once that hour is up, they shift to the small generator and stay like that until the next day.
My nearest neighbor only has a big generator, he routinely goes through $150 of fuel each month. He has not decided to get a small generator, yet.
After tracking this for 10 years and talking to our neighbors to see how they function, we decided to invest in solar power for our farm. That was in 2015.
I have a breaker that I can flip to see if the grid is up at that moment. In case we need power but our batteries are running low.
We discussed solar for our home. $45,000. Does that sound accurate?
I had a nearly 7 day outage due to a storm with high winds last month. I had thought the 4 day outage some years ago was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
The problem for me is that adding gas service just for the generator would mean a $30 a month base rate gas bill. I heard that running a generator for a week cost as much in natural gas as 1-2 months worth of electricity. That would be balanced out by the amount of food I had to throw out, though.
Yes, our propane tank holds enough propane for our generator to last about four days. I just got the propane tank filled today it already had 20 in it and so they added 60 and the cost was $406. It’s expensive but so worth it in the summer here if our power goes out, or when we had the snow Mageddon this year and last year. Last year we didn’t have power for six days when It literally snowed 12 inches here in Texas. it was miserable. We had a small generator but it only ran a few things like our refrigerator and a space heater. Lugging that thing out in the snow was not my idea of fun.
We discussed solar for our home. $45,000. Does that sound accurate?
We got three quotes for our house. Every salesman tried to push us to go grid-tied net-metering, in each case the sales pitch included that by being grid-tied it is much cheaper because you do not require batteries.
But grid-tied systems only work when/if the grid is up. When the grid goes down your household system will be down as well.
We wanted an off-grid system so when the grid goes down [as it does every month] we could still have power.
There are plenty of websites offering each of the system components that you can hookup yourself. That is what we did. Including a battery bank, our system ended up costing around $20k.
The quotes we got were all right around $40k to $45k like your quote.
In our experience off-grid systems with batteries cost you about half of what a grid-tied net-metering system will cost.
It helped us to meet a bunch of other people who are on solar power, before we leaped into it.
We have frequent power outages, too. Not a lot of really long ones, but they do happen and being without power when the outdoor temperature in 10 below can be tough.
The whole house generator was expensive but not nearly what the urban myth would have you believe. Running it doubles my natural gas bill, which is more expense but well worth it to have heat and the food in the fridge and freezers safe. Usually it runs for less than a day, so adds about $6 to the gas bill. I'll happily pay it.
We paid a little more to get a quiet one. I can't hear it inside my house and outside it sounds like a well tuned car is running in the driveway. The neighbors saved a couple hundred bucks and installed one that sounds like a couple of earth movers are sitting there working on building a highway through their yard. So I can always tell when mine is running because my lights are on and I can hear their generator.
Adding, we were told there would be an 8 month wait because of back orders, but someone cancelled at the last minute and our electrician offered theirs to us, so it was more like two months.
But yes, if you think you will a want a whole house generator next winter, get it ordered right now because you are going to have to wait to get it.
A portable generator outside with an electric cord to bring the power inside will also work and it is cheaper. Not as efficient, but you can plug in your fridge and a few lights.
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