ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area Sizeing a whole house generator

That's funny, Greg. I have a similar situation here, as my best friend is an area supervisor for Dominion-Virginia Power. Whenever there are widespread outages, he makes sure that his crews hit the critical areas first, then they are instructed to hit my area. Since I met him, I think our longest outage has been about four hours and that was due to a major substation issue.

I feel sorry for him since where he lives, they are served by a co-op where he is just a customer and has no control. While he goes out of his way to make sure we are warm and dry, his family sits on the "whenever we get to it" list.

I also have a large UPS that powers all of our TV's, electronics and smoke detectors that is connected behind the transfer panel. It does a good job of smoothing the irregular power output of the generator. Not to mention, it sure is nice to not have to have flashing "12:00" on all of the devices with a clock whenever there is so much as a flicker!

There's no reason any clock or VCR should have been flashing "12:00" since many years ago. Battery powered timing circuits are cheap. They can use the battery only to keep the timer oscillator and counter working, and power the display only with the wall cord supplied power. When there is AC power, recharge the battery. Now days they have those multi-farad capacitors that can do it. The only time when "12:00" should ever be flashing is when plugging in while also holding in the hidden "factory reset" button that erases all memories.

I'm still looking for a decent wall or large desk clock with big LED digits powered by the AC (and intermittent by battery while a "display" button is pressed when the AC is off), which keeps time under battery control when the AC is off. It needs to also have seconds on the display and sync to WWVB.

Hey... That’s a great idea putting in that emergency light unit.
I don't know why I didn't think of doing that in my basement, since that's where I have to go to get to the transfer panel.
Definitely going to put one of those in. I might also run a remote head to the basement stairway as well to keep me from falling on my arse. Thanks.

I have an emergency light in the hall that goes to the guest room. I figure they are the ones who need the most help in a problem. It also does a fair job lighting up the egress from the master end of the house.

I have a 200A service so I installed a 200A transfer switch but my gen is 6.5kw. Works fine. When I start the gen I throw the AC breaker - I figure that I can run the house or the AC. Otherwise life goes on as usual. I wanted the flexability of using anything in the house with a little discresion and it works fine. Using a two pole tran sw so I had to remove the ground - neutral bond at the gen.