Bob Tedeschi's experience with a generator system.
Ready to Talk Amps and Ohms?
By BOB TEDESCHI Published: March 27, 2013 From The New York Times
When the February blizzard unplugged my Connecticut home from the power grid for the fourth time in recent years, the whining started immediately: here we go again with the spoiled food, the lack of running water, the dormant oil burner.
We layered up for the first night, and cooked food in the fireplace on Day 2 like good campers. Then, heading into the second night of the storm amid plunging temperatures, we settled around the fire. All I could think of was our vulnerability to a house fire or carbon monoxide fumes from the fireplace.
Time for a generator system.
Time, in other words, to bleed money and enter a process where I’d try to conceal deep ignorance while talking to retailers and electrical contractors — all of whom, of course, knew better.
To keep the fiscal bleeding to a minimum, I sought guidance from people who know a thing or two about buying and installing generators. They included Julie Selton, a master electrician who teaches electrical technology at Saint Paul College, in St. Paul; Stephen Borrelli, president of All-Brite Electric in Connecticut; Michael McAlister, a co-author of “Wiring Complete,” a reference book for homeowners; and Lisette Rice, the Home Depot’s generator merchant. (She reminded me that the smart time to buy and install a generator system is when the forecast is free of blizzards or hurricanes, when you don’t have to fight the crowds for one.)
My experts suggested brushing up on some basic electrical knowledge, getting to know your home’s wiring and thinking hard about what you really need to get through a storm. Doing so, they said, can save you considerable amounts of money, and maybe save a life in the meantime.
We’ll get to that drama later. First, though, Ms. Selton said, homeowners should decide which parts of their homes are truly crucial. “Is it a freezer with hundreds of dollars worth of meat in it?” she said. “A well pump? A home office you have to power up?”
If the answer is that you want your entire house to work as it normally does, have an extra $8,000 to $10,000 on hand. So-called standby generator systems from manufacturers like Kohler, Caterpillar, Generac and Cummins Onan are miracles of engineering that switch on automatically when your electricity shuts off, and can power everything in your house.
Units that can power an average-size home sell for roughly $5,000, and they require a concrete slab, a propane source and wiring connections installed by an electrical contractor. If the cost of the whole house generator system alone didn’t exceed my budget by roughly 90 percent, I would have considered them. For people with similar budgetary constraints, the next step is a scavenger hunt. After you identify the electrical appliances you’ll need to withstand a power failure, tally up the wattage those appliances need to run.
Remember those teachers in high school who tried to explain the difference between a watt, an amp and a volt?
Neither do I.
My panelists reminded me that the important measure (for the purposes of evaluating generators, at least) is the number of watts your appliances consume. Voltage can also be crucial, but I’ll get to that nuance in a minute.
So check the nameplates of your major appliances and record the amps and the volts. If some part of the information is missing, call the manufacturer or retailer who sold it to you. I wanted to run the refrigerator, well pump, furnace and maybe one or two outlets for lights.
Total watts: about 3,800.
This was great news, since, in theory, I could get away with a $350 generator rated for 4,000 starting watts and 3,500 running watts. An appliance requires more wattage to start up than it does to run, so the “starting watts” measure covers that surge.
While the 3,500 measurement obviously falls short of my overall capacity of 3,800, I could simply unplug the fridge and run the well pump when we needed running water.
The bonus: it just so happened that days after the blizzard, my mother bought a 3,500-watt generator before realizing it wouldn’t suit her home. Retailers generally adopt a no-returns policy on generators, so she was stuck with it.
To read the entire article go to www.magictolight.com
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