I live in florida. And in an area where most power is overhead.
Storms during the rainy season usually means i experience cuts. Usually 1-2 times a month for 3-8 hours ea from May-Nov
Hurricanes are usually expected to be 3+ days at minimum of outage. Most recent ones were closer to 14 days.
I have a couple gennys, and interlock kits with 30a hookups on my house during these times. I can run 1 genny on the whole house, or even 2 since i have a sub-panel with another interlock kit.
The only thing i CANT run is my AC. But we have 2-3 window units/portables to get by.
FWIW running generators for days at a time is NOT cheap. on my setup its about 20-30 bucks a day in fuel alone.
Lived in Florida for about two years. We’d lose power due to the neighborhood transformer exploding a couple of times a year. That must have gotten expensive real quick.
The quality of the residential wiring in the original half of the house was not friendly to my hard disks. I lost four in rapid succession. Got a newer UPS, line interactive, had better luck after that until we moved out of state.
(That month of disk meltdown made me love ZFS. Didn’t lose any data.)
| FWIW running generators for days at a time is NOT cheap. on my setup its about 20-30 bucks a day in fuel alone.
What type/size of generator are you running? Might be worth taking a look at an inverter unit next time; they're much quieter and sip gas. Can't stress the quiet part enough - you can hold a conversation a few feet away easily.
I have looked at inverter generators. But they seem harder to find in larger wattages/capacities. I dont know that i trust Champion engines for long runtimes (days)
I currently have a 7kw (8750 surge) and a 6kw unit. they are dewalt gennys with Honda engines. I really only would trust a B&S, Honda or Kohler engine i feel like.
I think my next purchase will either be a bigger inverter or just a 14-17kw contractor genny and switch to double conversion Battery Backups.
Not quite sure. But what i have does work too. Just that my current generator is approaching a decent number of hours (400-500).
Floridian here as well. Our lines are buried, but the feed is above ground so if a tree takes that out, a couple thousand or so of us have no power for hours. I've thought about a generator, but I can usually keep working on battery (laptop and phone) so, I've not yes seriously considered it.
Even with my roof (which is east/west facing) the cost to just install panels would be 20-30k. And my city has a 1:1 buy back...And even assuming i sell them back power it would take a decade to recoup the costs...and by then the panels would be less efficient. And this is with buying 95% panels.
but then during an outage....
So you need something to store it... Short of rednecking a series of deep cycle batteries the Tesla Powerwalls are really the only big option.
And those arent cheap either. To run my house for 2-3 days would be in another 10-30k
I can do all of that with 2x7kw gennys and some ancillaries. With a 14-17kw i could probably run my AC (which have hard start caps on them) Even at 30 bucks a day in gas im still well south of even 10k.
Next step up would probably be a active standby generator with transfer switch and giant Propane tank to fuel it. That would be about 10-15k once permitting and all is done. And that adds complexity and cost. But it would mean i dont have to manually flip breakers and cutover. (as it is, my computers are just set to talk to a NUT server, and shutdown in the event i dont cutover within 10 minutes.)
And during storms supply chains are strained. Its hard to source diesel and LP and sometimes even petrol (in fact i warned a previous company of this, and we almost had to shutdown due to fuel levels). And you have to maintain a contract with LP providers and usually rent a tank from them.
With petrol and my little standby units i can source it myself (3-4 am is the best time during runs on gas), even siphon from one of our cars.
I may spring for a full kit standby one day. But for me, it costs about 2k in generators. Another 1k to have an electrician install the interlock kits. And i can service/manage the gennys myself. swap them out while i do maintenance during extended runs etc.
They are panels with slight manufacturing defects that you can buy and wont have a full lifetime or near the normal efficiency. So are less expensive as well.
They used to sell them last time i was looking into it, which was about 3 years ago.
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Storms during the rainy season usually means i experience cuts. Usually 1-2 times a month for 3-8 hours ea from May-Nov
Hurricanes are usually expected to be 3+ days at minimum of outage. Most recent ones were closer to 14 days.
I have a couple gennys, and interlock kits with 30a hookups on my house during these times. I can run 1 genny on the whole house, or even 2 since i have a sub-panel with another interlock kit.
The only thing i CANT run is my AC. But we have 2-3 window units/portables to get by.
FWIW running generators for days at a time is NOT cheap. on my setup its about 20-30 bucks a day in fuel alone.