OT Stand by Generator, what do you have?

[fish123]

below ground cables are subject to

And burrowing rodents gnawing on direct-buried cable, like the buried Aluminum cable (3' deep, no conduit) that feeds our place.

 

[cg285]

to answer the original post
cummins 17kw auto transfer, lp i was a long time onan dealer until a couple years ago
central fl. we get mild hurricanes and power can be out 2 weeks or so

 

[jim rozen]

"Not sure of the application for a hand pump if you have city water?
Doo you have a well AND city water maybe?"

Actually my neighbor has a dug well, never goes dry. The former owner used water from that to irrigate his raised beds garden. I helped him install new seals in the electric pump he used for that, but there's a hand pump (new foot valve years ago) that used to work just fine. I don't have a hand pump or an outhouse but the comments were hypothetical 'best situation' if there were long term power outages.

Gas stations can't pump fuel and credit cards and cell phones stop working after the cell site backup generators run out of fuel. So gas backup generators stop after a week or so. Hardly anyone carries cash anymore. I can always tell when the more rural areas are out of power, the gas station across the street has a line of folks filling up gas containers. We're just about at that dividing line between major transmission lines gridded up, and the rural areas with the single stinger on top of the poles.

EPA's comments about running the genset UNDER LOAD regularly is well taken.

 

[CarbideBob]

Who the heck in their right hand drives their own well anymore? How deep can one go with a hand pump well and get it to suck up?
Or digs the pit for the outhouse. Five years later you have to move it and dig again. BTDT a few times.

Putting all local electric lines underground is an impossible feat . Great idea but the cost would be.....Somebody has to pay for it and it will not be the power company.
Want this add on in your bill because there are trees growing? Maybe we should outlaw trees over 20 foot tall.
Look up when you plant. I did not think about this when I was younger.
Now those maples are big and want to take out power lines. Big fun cutting back along a couple power lines, that make me nervous.
Bob

 

[Ox]

Well, anyone in Flint would have liked to have had their own well eh?

Our well is 40' or so, but the table is only around 10' down. So the first pump is only a 10' pull and should easily keep prime after that.

Amish around here seem to have old skewl pumps, but they fit it with a Briggs for watering the garden.
THAT is an odd sight the first time you watch that sprinkler!


--------------------

Think Snow Eh!
Ox

 

[drcoelho]

I have two 80KW generators, one is Cummins, the other is Kohler. They are configure as primary and secondary, e.g. if one fails, the other takes over. Both run on diesel. I previous had a Generac/Olympia running on natural gas and it was a lemon from the day it arrived brand new, gave up on it and replaced with the Kohler which is flawless.

I'm in Silicon Valley, and one would expect good quality electrical supply, but this is not the case. Power goes out all the time, generators are invaluable. And of course we have systemic outages due to grid supply problems here in california as well.

 

[gbent]

How deep can one go with a hand pump well and get it to suck up?

Bob

I don't know how deep you can go, but I know you can go 160'. You aren't sucking water, the pump is submerged. There is a sucker rod that goes to the pump on the bottom of the well. The pump is a simple hydraulic cylinder with a leather seal between the piston and the barrel (prolly synthetic today) and a couple of one way valves (foot valve). Most every windmill had a means to disconnect the windmill from the sucker rod and connect the handle to allow the well to be pumped by hand.

 

[wheels17]

We have underground utilities in our neighborhood, dating from the late '60s, but get frequent power outages due to the feed to the neighborhood coming in on overhead lines. A downside to this is that since there are no poles, the fiber companies that could compete with cable can't afford the cost for underground at this point and are focusing on the MUCH easier install where there are poles.

We have had two outages within the neighborhood, both due to plumbing companies either breaking (that was exciting) or nicking the line. The nick resulted in water leakage and corrosion that cut the line. It never got to be enough of a short to ground to trip anything.

We use an old Coleman/Honda gasoline engine generator for longer duration outages. I store it with fuel completely drained, with fresh oil and boat storage seal spray in the intakes and cylinder. It has a little mark so you can set the piston with the valves closed for storage. I never run it except in outages and once it took two pulls to start instead of just one once I gassed it up.

 

[jim rozen]

Interestingly my neighbors dug well has water less than to feet down,or less all the time. On old time maps of the area there was a pond behind our houses. His house is one of the earliest in the area and there was apparently a barn and an outhouse in his back yard. My house was a bit later (1895) and was originally owned by a plumber, so probably had indoor plumbing from the start.

There are however trash pits in the backyard with kitchen stove ashes ,bottles, pottery sharsd and so on. The house probably predates city trash pickup.

 

[moonlight machine]

I keep hearing bad things about Generac, I think I am leaning towards Cummins or Kohler, what do you think? I want auto start, auto transfer because my wife can not physically do it.

 

[neilho]

Who the heck in their right hand drives their own well anymore? How deep can one go with a hand pump well and get it to suck up?

I have. Guess I'm just nuts. :-) Gravity water running down into the house, 2 sources. Water under pressure, always and no pump to fail or suck juice and money. Lots of power outages here, usually 10 or more a year.

39', theoretically. The point where atmospheric pressure won't force water up to the top of the pipe. In practice, quite a bit less.

Or digs the pit for the outhouse. Five years later you have to move it and dig again. BTDT a few times.

Beats the hell out of digging up a failed leach field, eh? BTDT
Where's that city sewer when you need it, anyway?

 

[scsmith42]

I keep hearing bad things about Generac, I think I am leaning towards Cummins or Kohler, what do you think? I want auto start, auto transfer because my wife can not physically do it.

Twenty years ago I managed the generator standardization program for a large telecom company. We had 1000+ generators across the country from all of the major suppliers.

Hands down, there were more failures on the Generac units than all of the others combined. Usually not major failures, typically some $10 or $100 part going bad and shutting the generator down or preventing it from starting.

We standardized on Kohler units, with Cummins Onan being our second choice.

 

[jim rozen]

"Where's that city sewer when you need it, anyway?"

That's why I live where I do. City sewer, city water, city gas, reliable power, city trash pickup. Lots the houses we looked at needed either a roof, a septic tank, or both.

 

[CarbideBob]

Power goes out. It will come back in a few days.
How much electric do you need to ride it out?
Fridge, furnace fan, some lights, the tv and of course the microwave?
You can do this with a tiny guy that you can carry like a suitcase that sips gasoline and makes not so much noise.

 

[moonlight machine]

Power goes out. It will come back in a few days.
How much electric do you need to ride it out?
Fridge, furnace fan, some lights, the tv and of course the microwave?
You can do this with a tiny guy that you can carry like a suitcase that sips gasoline and makes not so much noise.

As I have said several times in this thread I go on the road fairly often and my wife is not physically able to get a generator out, hooked up, gassed up and maintained alone.

 

[Gordon Heaton]

Power goes out. It will come back in a few days.
How much electric do you need to ride it out?
Fridge, furnace fan, some lights, the tv and of course the microwave?
You can do this with a tiny guy that you can carry like a suitcase that sips gasoline and makes not so much noise.

Around here we can do without the furnace, but NOT the AC and that's always a power hog. Fortunately our power is very reliable and a rare 'long' outage might be 4 hours or so.

 

[Scottl]

"Where I live we don't need items 2 and 3 because the city supplies water..."

I still figure there's an electric pump and various electric items that allow city water to show up at my house. For a long enough outage, I'm honestly not sure the water will keep flowing forever.

Our municipality maintains the water pressure and they have a large backup generator (diesel, I believe) plus the city has several large portable generators they can deploy in an emergency to keep various city functions going. If the diesel and natural gas become unavailable a long outage would shut most everything down.

 

[Scottl]

RE: Power outages in the US and overhead lines.

As I said, I have frequently worked in places with standby generators. And "downed" power lines were the number one cause of the outages we experienced.

At one TV station, which did not have a generator at the studio building and had a non-functioning one at the transmitter site, I made a study of a full year's off air or lost time. IIRC, every single outage was due to "downed" power lines. This was usually from trees combined with high winds and a lack of diligence in tree trimming on the part of the electric company. At one of my jobs I literally shamed the power company with numerous photos of trees growing into lines. Their tree trimming program and the area's power outage count both improved significantly after that. But one incident in my study, the longest one, was due to a tractor-trailer going off a country road and taking a pole out.

So would underground power lines solve this? I am not so sure. For one thing, below ground cables are subject to flooding with ground water, rain water, ocean/river water, or just plain city water from broken pipes. And they can take a lot longer to repair. Another point may be the amount of copper needed and therefore the cost for just the wires. Open air provides good cooling but underground wires in some kind of conduit does not have that advantage. So larger gauge wires, requiring more copper and costing more, would probably be needed. This would be very significant if all power were underground.

I don't have any actual statistics. And the statistics would probably vary from location to location. What works in one place may not in another. In any case, I don't expect to see a large scale change to underground power lines anytime soon.

That is one of the best analyses of the situation I have seen re advantages and disadvantages of overhead vs underground power cables. I would add that underground cables are more dangerous for power company workers due to the confined space. Fire, smoke, and arc dangers are more likely to result in casualties.

 

[eKretz]

I have recently picked up an 8KW nat gas Generac that I got secondhand for $300 that has 14 hours on it. Runs great and is plenty for our whole house other than A/C. Don't use it much but after a winter where we were without continuous power for almost a week figured what the heck. I have a portable 5K that ran the house just fine too but lugging it out and hooking it up is a pain compared to just flipping a couple switches.

 

[EPAIII]

29 feet is the limit for sucking water up from the top with any kind of pump. That limit is due to atmospheric pressure: with a perfect vacuum in the pipe, only 29 feet of water will ever be pushed up.

20 feet is considered a shallow well and not safe from surface contaminants. Most authorities recommend a well that is 50 to 100 feet deep for drinking water. And at those depths, the pump must be at the bottom. At the bottom it will push the water up and the weight of the column of water will determine the power of the pump being used. In theory there is no limit to how deep you can go, but at some point booster pumps at intervals will be the more economical choice.

Who does their own well? People who are off grid with no "city water" available. Farmers - big time. Just look at crop circles - the real ones, not the UFO ones.

Who the heck in their right hand drives their own well anymore? How deep can one go with a hand pump well and get it to suck up?
Or digs the pit for the outhouse. Five years later you have to move it and dig again. BTDT a few times.

Putting all local electric lines underground is an impossible feat . Great idea but the cost would be.....Somebody has to pay for it and it will not be the power company.
Want this add on in your bill because there are trees growing? Maybe we should outlaw trees over 20 foot tall.
Look up when you plant. I did not think about this when I was younger.
Now those maples are big and want to take out power lines. Big fun cutting back along a couple power lines, that make me nervous.
Bob