First post on a new acct. ( skipped the intro )
I've been doing the back up generator thing for awhile. It's been a learning experience. There's been a growth and evolution over the years. It's been a process of trial and error to see what works and figure out some kind of long term sustainability.
We're on an island off the coast of Maine. It's pretty common for us to lose our power during fall & winter. Storms rip through. Trees fall into the wires & block the roads. Sometimes they get it all put back together in a few hours. Other times it's a few days or even a week before the repairs can be completed. In a SHTF scenario it could be months. You gotta figure out what your needs are.
For us it's:
1: Heat in the winter. We've got a wood stove with about 3 years supply of firewood on the property. It keeps the house warm & we can cook on it if we have to.
2:Water: We have a drilled well w/ a submersible pump. I added a large extrol pressure tank that has about a 30 gallon draw down.If we're careful about our water usage we have running water for about a day after the power goes out.Once it runs out we fire up the generator and refill the pressure tank. It takes about five or ten minutes of runtime.
3: Refrigeration: You need a generator for that. We can get by with running the Jenny about 10 hours a day. The fridge keeps itself reasonably cool if we don't open the doors too much.We don't really need a fridge in the winter anyway. We can store stuff outside.
4: For cooking we have a regular stove & oven that runs on propane. Two 100# propane bottles ( the standard here ) will easily last us for six months.
5: Lights: I shifted over to 120 volt LED light bulbs last year. It cut our monthly electric bill by 25%. It's taken quite a load off our generator when we are on backup power.
It gets pretty tedious to keep the generator running 24/7 so we only run ours 10 hours a day at most. I've got a large truck battery that i bought on sale at Wal Mart years ago. We have some 12 volt DC LED's that we use for lighting when the generator isn't running. The battery has enough capacity to keep the low voltage lights on for a couple of days between recharging cycles.
Twenty five years ago it started out simple for us. I had a cart with 12 volt batteries and a power inverter.
From there we went to a 5000 watt gasoline generator. We had the electrician install a transfer switch at the time. It was good, but it went through a lot of fuel. It would average about a gallon of gas per hour during peak demand. Figure maybe 20 gallons per day at 2.50$ per gallon running full time ? That comes out to 50.00$/day or 1,500.00$ a month for electricity.
From there we converted the 5kw generator to run on dual fuel. ( Gasoline or propane ) Upgraded gasoline storage to 275 gallons and had a total of six 100 # propane bottles. That gave us plenty of storage but we ran into a couple of problems.
a: It's still expensive to run.
b: You don't get as much "oomph" out of a gallon of propane. It reduced the peak generator output by maybe 10% ? We had to use propane in the non peak demand times.
c: You needed either hardened valves to run on propane -or- an ashless motor oil. Hardened valves weren't available. I tried going to straight 30 weight oil but the engine wouldn't crank in the cold because the oil was so thick.
* The solution was to go to Redline full synthetic racing oil. It has a very high vaporization point. If it doesn't vaporize then it doesn't go up through the crankcase breather into the carb and form ash on the valves.
* Just about any generator these days runs hard because it's at peak RPM all the time. Use a full synthetic quality motor oil. You won't have the oil consumption problems. The other thing with air cooled small engines is that regular motor oil should be changed out every 30 hours of runtime. That means an oil change every other day if you're running 24/7. Synthetics have much longer oil change intervals and you don't have to top them off very often. This is much better during an emergency situation.
Anyway, to continue on with the saga. What we had worked okay up until about 2006 then we started running into problems. Local laws changed and they really didn't like you storing any more than ten gallons of gasoline on the property at any time. To make things more difficult they switched over to blended gas/ethanol fuel. It was the only thing available to buy. It only has a reliable shelf life of 30 days. It was a lot more corrosive and started attacking the rubber parts in the small engine carb.
We finally decided that gasoline wasn't a reliable SHTF motor fuel any more. Propane has it's pro's and con's but diesel is looking like the best choice.
We went to a 6.5 kw diesel. Most homes here have oil fired central heat. We have two -275 gallon storage tanks in the basement. Heating oil is very similar to diesel. It costs a few cents more but off road diesel burns very cleanly in an oil furnace.
That gave us a rugged diesel generator that burns 3.5 gallons every six hours of runtime. We've got 500 gallons of diesel in storage. The generator is loud and the exhaust has a pretty heavy smell but it was reliable and economical. I figured that if we only ran the generator for three hours a day we could go for almost a year before having to refill our storage tanks. The fuel keeps in storage better than gasoline and it's much safer.
Last year one of the small bolts holding the terminal block in place ( inside the generator head) vibrated loose and tore up the windings. No more diesel Jenny !
You know what they say about the best laid plans ?
Every situation is different but i'm leaning more toward solar these days. Use that to run the fridge and a few lights. Fix the diesel and only use it for a couple of hours a day for when we want to run the water pump and do the washing.
Figured i'd pass it all along in the hopes that some part of it might be helpful to someone. I had to learn the hard way.
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Originally Posted by hobo finds
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