Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: perihelion on July 03, 2009, 12:25:58 pm
-
We had a near miss with a large hurricane last year. Our town didn't really get more than a little wind and a tiny bit of rain out of it, but our families living in Houston got nailed. They were without power for nearly a month. Now my wife is feeling a little paranoid with tropical storm activity in the Atlantic starting to ramp up again, and she wants us to get a generator.
Personally, I'm not sure I see the point. I could get something to run the lights and the refridgerator easily enough I guess, but if we're out of power for three weeks, in Corpus Christi, in the middle of the summer, no A/C?... that's going to be a living nightmare. I've been measuring temperatures over 105ºF in the shade earlier this week. To me, the smart thing to do is just get the heck out of the way until things calm down. What good is power for lights and a fridge in that kind of environment?
So... I'm considering getting something with enough horsepower to run the A/C, but that's basically talking about a static (non-portable) solution. I'm not sure I can bring myself to do that. Not just from a cost perspective, but I've been hoping in the back of my mind to save up enough to eventually buy some kind of alternative power generator (solar, small-scale wind, something to, you know, actually reduce load on the fossil fuel plants down the road).
I guess, from a practical perspective, has anyone here had to get a generator before? What did you get, why, and how did you power things with it? Did you tie it into the house's power circuit somehow, or did you just run individual extension cords?
-
We have power problems a little more than most areas, some time for days.. Be it an ice storm during the winter or just an outage.. Our last outage lasted for 4 days, not that its the only problem, our basement houses our furnace, water heater and a series of 4 sump pumps. During just a heavy rain our basement will flood, sometimes just a few inches, which causes no problems, but the furnace has been flooded out before and we spent a good $375.00 to replace the blower motor.
Well that was because of an ice storm that put our power out for 3 days, the basement had 11 inches of water by the second day. The problem was we were at work when the power came back on and our furnace tried to run, but it fried the motor, as stated above 375.00 dollars and a new hot water heater for about half that price. Me and my wife talked about it and made a decision to buy a generator, made the mistake of setting it up in the basement the first time. That was my worst idea, but a quick fix, we got carbon dioxide poisoning, almost killed our pets and we were sick for a couple days. :sigh: I got the idea to set it up in the garage, but how was i to run the power to the house? I have an air compressor set up in the garage on a 220 volt line. I talked to a friend at work and he told me to run a line to the 220 volt outlet, that would run power to the house. BUT he told me i`d have to shut off the mains (in the fuse box) from the utility company that send power comming into the house from the pole. See you cannot have the power come on while the generator is running, this would be BAD VERY VERY BAD. Its best to have a doubble throw switch. Throw the switch one way for the main power and the other way for the generator, this way if the power came on while the generator was on it cant do any harm.
It would be best to have an electrician do the work for you. Its safer that way.
-
The A/C and water heater are gonna kill you, they'll run 4000+ watts each. Fridge will run about 500, everything else will run about that too.
If you're dealing with a few days of no power, I'd find a nice 3500-6000 watt generator and just run fridge, TV, lights, fans, etc etc. Odds and ends stuff. You can probably get one for 500 bucks if not less.
If you have a ton of stuff that needs power (sump pump or well water/filtration or crazy stuff like dialysis and oxygen tanks) and you lose power for weeks at a time you may want to think about that alternative power thing.
-
Our generator is a 6250 watt. But we still have to go around shutting off stuff we can do without.
-
Boy, what kind of water heaters do you have in the USA? Mine costed about € 20 and I don't think it consumes as much as an airco.
-
your best bet is to spend a week or so looking at what you consume electricity wise , the longer you look the better you will understand your electricity needs , ive spent half of my life living with generators and my basic advice is you dont want the thing running at full tilt all the time as it will quickly die ...
pick something that will be running at a max of 70% to fulfil your needs and that way it can cope with any surges in ypur demand , my personal choice for backup generators are electric start diesel ones (only problem is there cost) after that if your looking at being nice to the planet you may consider gas generator ..;
if you want to make sure it kicks in automaticaly then you need to get a sensor that will kick in and out as the mains electricity dies and comes back on line
other than that , solar is expensive and if you loose your electricity due to high winds i doubt there would be much left of your windturbine .....
maybe using a solar water heater to make hot water would also put less demand on your water heating needs and less pressure on the generator afterwards in case of a power out
any way good luck and i hope you stay storm free
-
Boy, what kind of water heaters do you have in the USA? Mine costed about € 20 and I don't think it consumes as much as an airco.
A 50 gallon water heater (which is usually for a family of 4 or 5) runs on about 4000-4500 watts. They have 2 elements. I'm not entirely sure what you use.
*edit* Not being snarky, I really don't know what you use.
-
Oooh, you mean for central heating? Then why run the airco at the same time?
-
For heating water.... for hot water.
-
I see. I thought you meant the kind of water heater you make tea with.
-
(http://www.neontetra.com/houseblog_images/club_fizz/water_heater.jpg)
-
to get a generator (a "static" one) to power your whole house is going to cost more than you'd be willing to spend, i can almost guarantee it.
what you may want to consider doing, is getting one and sharing it with your one or two neighbors. that's what we did in Houston during hurricane Ike. a 40KVA generator, and it powered our entire house, as well as the neighbors. Of course a generator like that would cost easily $12,000, and i just can't justify spending that much on one (plus maintenance) to be used once every couple of years for a week or two.
What you should do instead, is rent one as soon as you HEAR of a hurricane coming. it doesn't cost that much to rent a 50kva from, say, sunbelt rentals, and it saves you having to pay for, place, and maintain a generator (including installing a transfer switch, etc. which can get expensive). For everything (shelter for the generator, transfer switch, electricians hooking everything up) you'd be looking at almost $20k.
Just rent one, and don't wait till the hurricane is 12 hours away before you try to rent one. As soon as you hear of it coming, rent it. And put it behind your house. And don't start it up till you have to, because you DON'T want everyone knowing you have a generator until you absolutely have to.
feel free to PM me about any of this. i have a looot of experience in this area ):
-
Considering where I live, it is a crime not have a natural-gas powered water heater and dryer (and furnace, for that matter, though I only have to use it maybe 8 weeks out of a year...) Unfortunately, the genius developers of this neighborhood included no infrastructure to get natural gas to us. I live in the natural gas capital of the United States, and I can't get natural gas to my house.
But that's a rant for another day. Blue Lion hit it on the head. The A/C and hot water will kill me if I have to keep them running off the grid. The best solar array you can buy for a house my size will not come close to running both at the same time. Really, it would be quite a stretch to even run one of them.
I could do without hot water for a few weeks, I think. "Cold" water around here isn't, by most people's standards. As long as the shower is relatively quick, I could manage just fine. I think the girls would complain, but if city power is out we need to be conserving water anyway in case the city pumps go out.
A natural gas generator would be ideal, but again, I don't have a line to my house to use it. Propane also is a decent option, but I don't have a tank or a sane place to put one of decent size. Honestly, if I get this thing, I'm either going to be running it on my driveway (keep it in the garage when not in use) or I'm going to have to look at laying a slab by the A/C compressor out back. I can't put it on the back porch or the near-constant breeze from the Gulf will blow the exhaust right into the house!
It's just looking like a huge project for very questionable gain.
Please keep posting your stories. It is giving me a better picture of what's going to be involved. I'm doing some of my own research in the meantime. Biggest debate right now is do I want to even mess with something I plug into the house electric system or just something with a bunch of extension cords.
-
Stealth, about how much did it cost to rent something like that? And how did you tie it into your house without paying up front for a transfer switch etc?
-
I'm curious as to how and why you live in an area that loses power for weeks at a time in what I assume to be a regular basis for you to be considering this.
-
BL it's all an extension of how old and crumbling the infrastructure of the US is. In many parts of the country, the poles, wires and transformers that you see lining the road go way back, no 10 or 20 years, but in some case almost 50 or 60. Most do not receive regular maintenance checks and fail semi-regularly.
You know this internet thingy? It's running on wiring that was never designed to do what it's doing, that it does is awesome, but it's going to fail one day, soon.
This (http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-08-03ng.html) is a fairly good article that sums up the problem(s) with America's infrastructure, and they're not all physical.
-
Man I am super glad I live here then.
-
Nova Scotia has the worst power coverage in North America, I'd guess, we lose power every time someone sneezes. We bought a 6k watt generator in 2004, and it runs the well pump, old fridge and stuff fine. We just run it for 1 hour on/1 off to keep the fridge cold etc. You have the AC to worry abut, but I'd suggest as Stealth said or getting a cheap 6 or 7k generator. We paid 1000$ for ours.
-
@Blue Lion: Well, I was growing up in Houston when Hurricane Alicia hit in '83. The eye passed directly over my house. We were without power for less than a week, despite extensive damage all over the place. When Ike hit Houston last year, I was not living there, but our families still do. A huge part of Houston and the surrounding area was without power nearly a month later. I'm still shocked that the damage took so much longer to repair this time around. There were still blue tarps in some of the poorer outlying areas (like Liberty County) when I drove through there about 2 months ago.
It's a risk you take living on the gulf coast. There are other risks in other parts of the world. This one is ours. Every year, mother nature hurls a few hundred-mile-wide darts at the gulf coast. Eventually, you are going to get hit. Sometimes even a direct hit is soft enough that it is just bringing some much needed rain with some intense wind. Sometimes a direct hit can wipe out a city. There is no "regular basis" here.
The lack of "regular basis" is a good part of my reluctance to go through with this. Stealth's suggestion of pre-emptive rental is very attractive for this reason. I'll only ever need this if a big enough storm comes through and totals the electric distribution grid. Corpus is a fraction of the size of Houston, so I have every reason to expect repairs would proceed much more quickly. All in all, I'm looking at needing this thing for a couple weeks every what, ten years? If that? Corpus hasn't been hit by a major storm in over 30 years. That's luck for you. Brownsville gets nailed, Houston and Beaumont get nailed every few years. We keep getting lucky.
As for why I live here anyway? My wife is a professor of civil engineering, and I am a mechanical design engineer with 7 years of experience in the oil field. There aren't that many tenure-track positions in her field nation-wide. Unless you are willing to wait for the perfect job for years on end, you go where you find work. Anyway, we tried moving up north for two years (north being anything north of Oklahoma as far as I'm concerned) and absolutely hated it. Swore we were staying either south or west from here on out. Combine all that and you don't have a lot of options left.
-
My suggestion would be to make a list of things you would absolutely run in a long power outage and see how much you use. Then buy a portable generator. As I said unless you're running some weird power hungry stuff, you could probably get away with one for about 500, maybe less maybe more.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say you could probably get away with not running an awful lot. I don't wanna turn this into some feel good thread but I think you may be shocked to see how well things can go if you aren't attached to a lot of gadgets.
-
(http://www.neontetra.com/houseblog_images/club_fizz/water_heater.jpg)
Be careful that you don't turn that into a rocket. :p
-
That was just the first hit off google, but point taken. I will not do that. :p
-
Mythbusters busted that one a while back, it's more likely to explode than turn into a rocket.
-
That's where I got that off in the first place. You would probably have to deliberately turn it into a rocket.
-
Mythbusters busted that one a while back, it's more likely to explode than turn into a rocket.
You mean they episode where they showed that, with a malfunctioning thermostat and safety valve, a hot water heater had the potential to rip through a built-to-code roof like butter and fly a few hundred feet into the air? Because that didn't seem much like a "bust" to me. :p
-
That.... was an awesome episode. :D
-
my inlaws out here use a big diesel generator to power a few buildings on their property out in the bush. they only run it for a few hours a day, turn it off at night and bring it online again when everyone gets home from work. during the time its running they use the excess power to charge two forklift batteries, when the generator goes off the inverters come on and it supplies enough power at night to run a few lights and some computers. for being completely off the power grid they manage to keep their buildings powered quite well. im not sure what the fuel costs are, or any of the technical details. heat is usually generated with wood or propane stoves, and one building has a propane water heater, but ive seen them use a few small electric heaters during the day time.
-
There is a reason people pay for power instead of running their own generators. It's damned expensive. I'm sure they spend a lot running that thing.
-
its not the only expensive thing they run. they also have a gravel crushing operation and probably own at least 4 big diesel generators that i know of. they have one in the shed where , their house and shop is, one at their gravel pit (and their rock crusher also runs on its own engine), one at their loader and one on the barge they use. on top of that they have several pieces of heavy equipment to maintain. but without that income from their gravel business, im sure the cost would be impossible.
-
They probably have a fuel tank somewhere then that it runs off of. Either through fuel lines or they do it manually.
I can't believe they go to the local gas station all the time for fuel at that point.
-
well we did once load up about 30 gas containers in the boat once to take out there. but i think that was regular for the vehicles and whatnot. i think they get their diesel fuel from somewhere else. the house generator has a pretty large fuel tank attached to it.
-
Stealth, about how much did it cost to rent something like that? And how did you tie it into your house without paying up front for a transfer switch etc?
about $1350/week. And yes, that sounds ridiculous (and it is), but when you're splitting it several ways, it becomes more managable. That was for a 40KW generator.
You don't need a transfer switch to tie it into the house - the transfer switch is only necessary if you want it to be a failover, where it's already wired into the house. The generator comes with a good 60ft of cables, so i just ran it from the generator, to the feed into the house. the main circuit breaker (outside where the electric meter is) has its own breaker. i flipped that to 'off', and then connected the wires directly to each other. that way when main power went live again, it wouldn't "back feed" through the generator. that would be REALLY ugly.
In theory, you could just plug the generator right into any of your outside power outlets, but you'd be limited to running only what that wiring of the internal outlet could handle. That would be OK if you were only going to be running, say, your hairdryer, coffee maker, and toaster, and you'd just control what got power and what didn't from the house's main circuit breaker panel, but in our case, in order to run any device in the house (lights, A/C, fridge) it had to be connected to the house feed. Plus if you use this method, you have to worry about combining phases, and that can be ugly too.
If you plan on doing this, don't do that i did - i didn't do things the "code" way. The only way to stick to code, is to have a doublepole doublethrow transfer switch. doesn't have to be automatic of course. i now have one, but at the time, it was necessary to just get power back. If you're planning this, i definately suggest you do it the right way. Not only will it be legal, but it will make hooking everything up a lot easier when you actually have to power on the generator.
-
Thanks for the feedback, everyone. At this point, I'm leaning more towards a compromise where we still have some modicum of comfort without the horrendous waste of a generator with the capacity to run the entire house.
The master bedroom is probably the best insulated room in the house. It is on the south-east corner, but it is in some measure of shade starting in mid-afternoon. I can get a portable A/C unit (kind of like a window unit, but more manageable) and close off the main A/C vents in the room. Something like that shouldn't need more than 1200 W to run. Add 800 W for the fridge, an additional 300 W (massive overkill) for lights, and 1000 W (again, overkill) for the microwave, and I think we're in decent shape again. We can wash and dry clothes the old fashion way for awhile. That makes a 4kW generator look pretty well up to the challenge. We could run everything off extension cords.
-
Might I suggest (if you want to invest 30000$) buying a solar/wind/geothermal combined system to power and cool your house off of the grid?
-
Thanks for the feedback, everyone. At this point, I'm leaning more towards a compromise where we still have some modicum of comfort without the horrendous waste of a generator with the capacity to run the entire house.
The master bedroom is probably the best insulated room in the house. It is on the south-east corner, but it is in some measure of shade starting in mid-afternoon. I can get a portable A/C unit (kind of like a window unit, but more manageable) and close off the main A/C vents in the room. Something like that shouldn't need more than 1200 W to run. Add 800 W for the fridge, an additional 300 W (massive overkill) for lights, and 1000 W (again, overkill) for the microwave, and I think we're in decent shape again. We can wash and dry clothes the old fashion way for awhile. That makes a 4kW generator look pretty well up to the challenge. We could run everything off extension cords.
bingo ;)
if you live in Houston (do you, by the way?) and are just worried about the occasional (read: once every 2 or 3 years) hurricane that will knock power out for a week or so, then that's definately the way to go. shoot, since you're saving so much money, get 2 generators, identical, so you can load balance ;)
-
And also, get compact fluorescent lights, the curly ones.
-
bingo ;)
if you live in Houston (do you, by the way?) and are just worried about the occasional (read: once every 2 or 3 years) hurricane that will knock power out for a week or so, then that's definately the way to go. shoot, since you're saving so much money, get 2 generators, identical, so you can load balance ;)
I grew up in Houston, so I'm quite familiar with the occasional hurricane, but in the 18 years I lived there, I only recall one hurricane that actual caused us to lose power for more than a day, and that was Alicia in '83. It was only recent years (Rita and Ike) that I've actually started thinking that kind of preparation might be worthwhile, and I don't live there anymore. I did move back to the coast again after roughly a decade, but I'm down in Corpus Christi this time. Corpus hasn't had a major hurricane in almost 40 years (Celia, 1970). We're kind of overdue.
@colecampbell666: I switched most of my house over to CFL's a couple years back. The only places where I haven't been able to are the ceiling fans. I want to shoot whoever mandated a switch to candelabra sockets for ceiling fan light fixtures. It makes it almost impossible to find bulbs that will fit and still create enough light to be worthwhile. Still, most of the house is fairly efficient for light. I'm a bit of a heliophile, so I particularly like CFL's because I could switch from a 60W incandescent to a 75 - 100W equivalent CFL (<22W) and get more light for 1/3 the power or less. :yes:
-
And in 3 years I`ve yet to see one die in our house.
-
Avg lifespan is about 5 years, but you gotta get the ones with the right spectrum, or it feels...wrong...
-
I'd say they've done a pretty good job of fixing the spectrum problem, its just that you cannot make a good judgment on the spectrum until the CFL has been turned on for at least a couple minutes. Both the intensity and the overall color change an awful lot in the first couple minutes. They are getting better on this front as well. No joke, the 1st and 2nd generation CFL's were just awful.
-
you also got to make sure you dont turn them on and off too frequently. people dont realize that they eat tones of power at startup, probably more than leaving it on all day.
-
Most items have a startup listing too. Well, it's not hard to find what it is.
-
you also got to make sure you dont turn them on and off too frequently. people dont realize that they eat tones of power at startup, probably more than leaving it on all day.
More "power" during start up than "leaving it on all day?" ... I assume you meant "energy" as "power" makes no sense in that context. And if so, I'm going to have to call bull****? I mean, no question, they use significantly more power and energy both during startup than during steady-state operation, but there's no way in hell it uses more energy in the first couple minutes than that expended by running it an entire day.
Do the math. A 12W lightbulb uses 518.400 kJ in a 12 hour day. Assuming the startup is two minutes long, that would be 518.400kJ in two minutes. That's 4320 W. Thru a light socket? Really?
-
Mythbusters did a thing on this for lightbulbs
-
you also got to make sure you dont turn them on and off too frequently. people dont realize that they eat tones of power at startup, probably more than leaving it on all day.
More "power" during start up than "leaving it on all day?" ... I assume you meant "energy" as "power" makes no sense in that context. And if so, I'm going to have to call bull****? I mean, no question, they use significantly more power and energy both during startup than during steady-state operation, but there's no way in hell it uses more energy in the first couple minutes than that expended by running it an entire day.
Do the math. A 12W lightbulb uses 518.400 kJ in a 12 hour day. Assuming the startup is two minutes long, that would be 518.400kJ in two minutes. That's 4320 W. Thru a light socket? Really?
ok maybe not, but my point remains. blinking the damn things will reduce their life and eat power like a mother****er. apparently the newer electronic ballasts used are a lot more efficient than the old skool magnetic ones that im familiar with.
-
No argument there. The same truth holds for pretty much any piece of equipment, electrical or otherwise. Most things run best in steady-state. Frequent on/off cycling will reduce your MTTF (mean time to failure) whether it is a lightbulb or an air-conditioner or a computer or a lawnmower.
-
I don't know about the longevities of computers, last 3 computers my parents had lasted something like 10 years each. Each of them used the same hard disk all the time. And they were frequently turned on and off, probably something like 6-8 times a day, sitting most of the time off. The CRT monitors they had still work. My CRT tube (7 years old by now) seems to show more red and red colors, though this still can be offset with ATI controllers. Which doesn't seem to remember which corrections I made.
Strangely, the only computers in my experience that had HDD failures were the ones that were not turned on and off all the time. That would be my former laptop and desktop machines at work that were basically on all the time. At some point I did learn to switch off the power saving mode for HDD, which would have been the contributing case.
How can you exactly break a lawnmower? Briggs & Stratton powered ones have been quite reliable. Don't get me started on Aspera, though...
One thing about Compact Fluorsecent Lamps, be careful when they break down. Some of them do contain stuff that would be considered poisonous. And if this is power saving depends on the location where you live. Some people say here that banning incandescent lamps will not lower the energy consumption. Why? The released heat will heat up the house, and this being a cold area, it is a positive thing. Otherwise heating system has to compensate for the change.
Mika
-
[checks outdoor thermometer] No. I don't need anything putting extra heat into this house. My A/C is already running almost full-time as it is.
As for breaking the lawnmower... you know, that made more sense in my head at the time I was typing it. I think I was thinking about how I've had some lawnmowers seize up on me after not having run them for several months, but that's not really the same thing as on/off'ing them to death. [shakes head] Blame it on trying to substitute caffeine for sleep, I guess.
-
i find that computers go obsolete long before they fail if they were well designed and handled when built even with constant on off cycles. it was a consensus when i went to networking school that it was better to leave your computers on all the time. i thought that was rediculous, and even more so now. if you consider the power usage of a high performance computer, which can be 300 watts at idle. you save more money by shutting it down when not in use than you would replacing parts because of failure. with low performance computers it really doesnt matter because the stresses on the system are much lower, as is the power usage.
-
I know I'd never be able to leave my computer on at night, even if I wanted to. With Dell's crappy case design and the P4 in there, my sole variable-speed fan would be making its annoying whine all night long and keep me up quite nicely. Not to mention the fact that, especially in summer, it turns my room into a furnace. :p
-
I had the same problem, except that my room turned into a furnace anyway, it's the only upstairs room in a partially finished attic in Alabama. I had a 5200 BTU window unit and it did it's thing for about 8 or 9 years. It slowly over the last couple of years got to where it wouldn't work any more so while it was cooler in my room it was like 90 or 95 inside my door(kept shut at all times) and 120 or 130 outside my door. Replaced it about a month ago with a 8000 BTW unit.