[perihelion]

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?

[Whitelight]

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.   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.

[Blue Lion]

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.

[Whitelight]

Our generator is a 6250 watt. But we still have to go around shutting off stuff we can do without.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

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.

[captain-custard]

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

[Blue Lion]

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.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

Oooh, you mean for central heating? Then why run the airco at the same time?

[Blue Lion]

For heating water.... for hot water.

[FreeSpaceFreak]

I see. I thought you meant the kind of water heater you make tea with.

[Blue Lion]

[Stealth]

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 ):

[perihelion]

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.

[perihelion]

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?

[Blue Lion]

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.

[Liberator]

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 is a fairly good article that sums up the problem(s) with America's infrastructure, and they're not all physical.

[Blue Lion]

Man I am super glad I live here then.

[colecampbell666]

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.

[perihelion]

@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.

[Blue Lion]

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.