Hi all,
I live in city limits with underground lines, but the power fails occasionally.
Which "city"? And due to what sort of causes, typically? Both of these questions will help answer a third, probably more critical, one: How long of an outage do you want to be "covered" for? Hold that thought.
My parents have always had a generator in the garage. We had an outlet specific for the generator. It was wired the less ideal way, turn the main off and let it flow.
As others have explained, that is a VERY bad idea -- as in, "so bad an idea that it can KILL people."
I'm interested in a simple 3500w portable for my own house now. I'm interested in powering my chest freezer (it has the venison in it!), my fridge, my stove, and more importantly my sump (I have foundation drains). Is 3500w sufficient?
If, and
ONLY if, that "stove" is powered by natural gas or propane, 3-3.5kW might be marginally adequate. But if it is an electric range/oven, you absolutely will need a considerably larger genset.
Also, what about your furnace and/or other heat source? If the power fails in the winter, you do NOT want to be tempted to do things like run the oven to "take the chill off". Again, people have DIED from such silliness.
I like the portable idea, because I can take it with me or loan it out if needed.
I would ONLY consider a portable genset if I was absolutely certain that my needs would never exceed the 3kW or so which can be supplied by of of the "quiet" Honda or Yamaha inverter-based models. Neither you nor your neighbors want to listen to a typical open-frame "contractor grade" portable genset for hours (or days) on end. And even then, this approach has some major down-sides. This is where those questions above come in...
At least in my area, the event which has seemingly driven more genset sales lately than for perhaps the past decade or so put together was Hurricane/"Superstorm" Sandy. As you may be aware, the power was out in MANY places for a week or more;
AND gasoline was next-to-impossible to get for a similar period of time, in part because the service stations could not run their pumps without electrical power. The upshot here is that if you want to make it through an extended power outage, you da*m well better be sure to have an "uninterruptible" supply of fuel. That in turn means either natural gas (which itself is not 100% reliable, as also proven during Sandy), OR storing enough fuel ON SITE to run the genset for the entire time, WITHOUT counting on outside replenishment. Gasoline (particularly modern ethanol-diluted gasoline) does not store well for more than a few months at a time. So, as a practical matter, we're down to propane -- and lots of it; you can effectively forget about schlepping 20-lb. barbecue cylinders back and forth to the exchange dealer, as you would be kept busy doing almost nothing else but swapping those cylinders around for the duration of the outage (even if the local supplier doesn't sell out within the first day or so, which they probably will). So to ensure a ready supply of USABLE fuel, a large-ish permanently installed propane tank is the only really practical answer.
All of which brings us to... Since the fuel source you will need cannot, as a practical matter, be portable, there is precious little point in having a "portable" generator (unless of course you need it for some other primary purpose, and backup power for the house in only a distant secondary consideration). Which in turn means a properly installed PERMANENT standby generator is THE way to go -- at which point, there's also no good reason to stop at 3-3/5kW. As a DEAD MINIMUM, you should be looking at something like:
http://www.generac.com/Residential/CorePowerSeries/7kW/
http://www.homedepot.com/p/Generac-...or-with-50-Amp-Transfer-Switch-5837/202214401
And really, at this point, the whole "In for a Penny, in for a Pound" thing starts to apply -- meaning, going still-larger (up to and including a model capable of seamlessly powering the entire house) becomes more feasible (at least by comparison) than you might imagine.
I'm not so excited about the $300+ for a switch.
Time for an attitude adjustment: If you're worried about a $300 switch, you have not budgeted NEARLY enough to do a standby generator safely and correctly.
...an unlikely scenario, it never happened in fact.