ECN Forum Forums General Topics of the Trade General Discussion Area Gensets & Nat. Gas

"Has anyone here installed a NG/Diesel dual fuel unit yet?
Big bucks!!!"

There is such an animale????
$$$$$$ I imagine so........

My thinking on it is totally seperate deisel, or LP/NG dual fuel.

On the lighting issue, we just did a job with LV DC lighting, and remote battery packs in a seperate room. Maintenance should be real easy.... Walk into the room, all lights green = good, flip a switch, all lights red, and walk around for 90 minutes looking at the lights. Otherwise repair or replace. Other than the lights themselves, all in one room. $900 ea, + install + mark up!

As for gennies, some ought to come with green holstien patterns.

Lemme repeat what I've said in other threads on the topic, and for anyone watching the news lately on FL.

Ya ever notice, after a disaster, there ALWAYS seem to be these guys in these green trucks with green baggy clothes? They nearly always have #2 diesel with them.

Gimme oil

Next thing is... Gens are only as good as your maintenance program, which includes regular, monitored, exercise. Leaving a NG genset to fend for itself with automatic exercise and it will fail you. Diesel is a lubricant and prone to less of these such failures.

[This message has been edited by George Corron (edited 08-16-2004).]

 
Spleen venting... I always hated—
24V engine-control and 480V {voltmeter/freqmeter} wiring mixed on control-panel doors and every lead white.
Day tanks, pumps and assorted controls and alarms
480Y stators where the installer “forgot” the neutral connection,
or adding a neutral-ground connection when building had resistance-grounded service
Teardown from rotor-diode failures causing/caused by armature problems
Never a simple, reliable welding-connector disconnect on start-battery leads
All-too-short 480V crankcase-heater life versus 208V
Very expensive but still sleazy transfer-switch controls
Maddening noise during engine runs that cut though all forms of hearing protection
Sniveling building personnel regardless of scheduled test date,
but screaming bloody murder in a start failure




[This message has been edited by Bjarney (edited 08-17-2004).]

Bjarney

Oh yeah I see you have been there too.

With about 100 sites and 170 Gen-sets to connect remote monitoring to we got to see a lot of different brands, age, and voltage of both the gen-sets and the ATS.

It would be very easy if you are not careful to get messed up. All the wiring as you said would look the same, a lot of 16 AWG tapped of off the line terminals with no OCP. Some of the older ATS switches used 49 volts as the internal control wiring.

We needed to have 12 VDC, 24, 120, 240, 277 and 480 VAC relays with us to make sure we were ready for anything.

George I am not advocating Natural gas over Diesel just pointing out how it is in other areas. For better or worse it is an accepted practice in this area .

I still would prefer battery units for lighting or both as Ron stated. A diesel generator even as reliable as they are is still only one source, if it fails as many did during the last big black out your left with nothing.

Maintenance is without a doubt the biggest problem with any of the methods.

Storage of fuel on site also has it's problems, the day tank of a gen-set in an upper floor mechanical room twice overfilled and flooded the offices below with fuel oil. We got involved after the second flood as the building owners where not happy with the original installers.

We have also had to change a gen-set from Diesel to Natural Gas because of a wetlands issue.

No easy answers, I did see a fluorescent lamp that would glow for hours after power is removed, it works even if it hits the floor and breaks. That could be the next generation egress lighting.

Another long post, sorry

Bob

I live in the area of Florida that was hit by hurricane Charley. On my way home from work today my boss had me check on a genset that was recently installed by our company on a large house. When their area lost power it kicked in and did it's job-for 30 hours. It was a propane fueled unit and ran out of fuel on Sunday, leaving the homeowners in the dark again. It had a 125 gallon propane tank. My boss recommended geting a larger fuel tank. The homeowners still lost their food. How are you going to get propane fuel delivered on a Sunday after a hurricane? Diesel was available at the stations long after they sold out of gas.

fla sparkey That is very true, but that type of generator is not an emergency generator (Article 700) to the NEC.

This would be an optional standby unit (Article 702), as such fuel choice and amount of run time is entirely up to the people paying the bill.

If you are involved with selling a genset you could certainly let the customer know about the availability of diesel over propane.

The NEC is not concerned with keeping refrigerators running.

Even if this was an 'emergency' generator the NEC only requires 2 hours worth of fuel on site.

Bob

In reading the different posts, I get the impression that some of you are using gen sets as your only source of back-up power for emergency (700) systems. 700.12 says that these systems must be on-line in 10 seconds after a power failure to supply the load. It seems that battery systems and/or UPS still need to be used to carry through to successful gen set start-up (if that occurs). After all most transfer switchs delay some period of time just to make sure that the power is truly off and that the utility recloser has locked out and then the generator must come on-line successfully before being allowed to assume a load.

Having gone through Hugo and a little bit of Charlie (without power this time for two days) the odds based on historical data say that a catastrophic strike of that magnitude (Hugo, Andrew, Charlie) may only happen once in a fifty or hundred year period to a particular area. From an economic viewpoint it's hard to justify the outlay of money to put in an infinite amount of fuel supply or foresee all the possible scenarios that may occur. In these parts of South Carolina, the hospitals got priority in getting fuel and getting the utility power back on.

[This message has been edited by GamecockEE (edited 08-18-2004).]

"Has anyone here installed a NG/Diesel dual fuel unit yet?
Big bucks!!!"
There is such an animale????
$$$$$$ I imagine so........

My thinking on it is totally seperate deisel, or LP/NG dual fuel."

There is such a unit. It is called Bi-Fuel technology. It injects NG into the intake. If there is no NG the diesel just runs as normal on diesel.
My deisel mechanic has suggested this to us to extend a tank of deisel and reduce costs.
http://www.gti-aci.com/

e57,
along with jdevlin's link you can also go Here for more info.

The one time we were asked to price this option for a medical facility it doubled the price of the gen set, this was about 5 years ago. They didn't take it.

Roger



[This message has been edited by Roger (edited 08-18-2004).]

While in the Military, my main job was generators..... And did not figure that a NG / Diesel were possible do to compression / ignition and cycle, Im going to take a look at the links you guys put up.... In my head, I say that there must be some sort of modification to allow this change over of fuel. What I have no idea...

Just for S&G, FYI type thing, all those guys in the green baggy pants.... All Miltary gear, sort of aircraft are multi-fuel in this way....(Generators, tanks, Humvee's, etc.) Diesel in any form, including kerosene, then JP-A,B, and JP-1 - 5. Seeing that all of the war stock-piles are JP grade 3-5, asking for fuel from them could be at your own risk...... You could end up with Jet fuel. (Which lacks some of the lubercating properties of most deisel grades, and much lower flash point)