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Cutover Box: Needs 220?

P

(PeteCresswell)

Jan 1, 1970
0
I'm kind of clueless about generators.

Last year I got my dinky little Honda 2kw and 150' of #10 extension cord.

Seems to fit the stated need, which is to keep from losing the contents of a
couple of refrigerators and a freezer - and maybe a little TV time and some
billable hours at the PC.


But after reading a few hundred posts on the subject I'm coming around to the
belief that my first outlay should have been for a cut over box - mainly because
it would allow me to run my gas furnace without hand-wiring it into a generator
and because that #10 extension cord has to enter the house *somewhere* and that
means considerable cold air coming in wherever it does.


If I had gone the cut over box route, and then still opted for the EU2000, would
I be able to attach it - as long as I monitored the power consumption carefully?

What I'm tripping over is the knowledge that some of my stuff (like the furnace
blower?) take 220. Is there some magic in the panel that makes 220 out of
120? or does the stuff coming in have tb 220? Can the EU2000 somehow supply
220?
 
C

clare at snyder.on.ca

Jan 1, 1970
0
I'm kind of clueless about generators.

Last year I got my dinky little Honda 2kw and 150' of #10 extension cord.

Seems to fit the stated need, which is to keep from losing the contents of a
couple of refrigerators and a freezer - and maybe a little TV time and some
billable hours at the PC.


But after reading a few hundred posts on the subject I'm coming around to the
belief that my first outlay should have been for a cut over box - mainly because
it would allow me to run my gas furnace without hand-wiring it into a generator
and because that #10 extension cord has to enter the house *somewhere* and that
means considerable cold air coming in wherever it does.


If I had gone the cut over box route, and then still opted for the EU2000, would
I be able to attach it - as long as I monitored the power consumption carefully?

What I'm tripping over is the knowledge that some of my stuff (like the furnace
blower?) take 220. Is there some magic in the panel that makes 220 out of
120? or does the stuff coming in have tb 220? Can the EU2000 somehow supply
220?
The EU2000 is 110 only, unless you use a transformer.
You could power one side of your panel with one EU2000. The furnace
doesn't need 220. Only the kitchen range and electric drier, electric
water heater, and possibly a deep well pump (and even tose would be
rare) require 220. Oh yes - and Air Conditioning, electric heat, and a
few other odd things. Your biggest problem will be only having power
on half the house.
 
V

Vaughn Simon

Jan 1, 1970
0
The EU2000 is 110 only, unless you use a transformer.
You could power one side of your panel with one EU2000. The furnace
doesn't need 220. Only the kitchen range and electric drier, electric
water heater, and possibly a deep well pump (and even tose would be
rare) require 220. Oh yes - and Air Conditioning, electric heat, and a
few other odd things. Your biggest problem will be only having power
on half the house.

Ditto everything Clare said.

I have an EU2000 that I sometimes connect to my transfer switch. My
transfer switch does not solve the "draft from the cord" problem because it is
meant to be installed indoors and has a cord connector.
http://www.nbmc.com/emergen/6-5001.html There are several ways to route the
cord inside your house if you just give a bit of advance thought to the problem.
One of the neatest is to install a capped-off 2" conduit stub through your wall
near your electrical panel. Is your electrical panel in your laundry room?
Then disconnect the dryer hose and run the cord through the vent.

Beyond a heavy transformer, there is no simple, convenient and cheap way to
make 220 from 110. One possibility is to place all of the loads that you want
to have access to the generator on one side of your panel. It would take an
electrician to do that.

The EU2000 is a wonderful machine. If you ever have a long power outage,
you will greatly appreciate its fuel efficiency and its low noise level.


Vaughn
 
P

(PeteCresswell)

Jan 1, 1970
0
Per clare at snyder.on.ca:
The EU2000 is 110 only, unless you use a transformer.
You could power one side of your panel with one EU2000. The furnace
doesn't need 220. Only the kitchen range and electric drier, electric
water heater, and possibly a deep well pump (and even tose would be
rare) require 220. Oh yes - and Air Conditioning, electric heat, and a
few other odd things. Your biggest problem will be only having power
on half the house.

In light of that and Vaughn's post, I'm feeling better about the EU2000.

The gas consumption was the primary consideration with I chose it. Low noise
level and portability were close seconds.

I think if I want more capacity I'll go the natural-gas-powered
mounted-on-a-slab route. But we'd have to have the prospect of a lot more
outages that we have been getting for that to seem sensible.

I'm glad to hear that the furnace blower takes 120. The 220 stuff, I think we
do not need. Have municipal water, can live without the electric dryer, can
cook on gas, have a gas hot water heater, and in the summer would get by with a
window box in an extended outage.

Sounds to me like a cutover box wired to just the 120 circuits would do the job
for us. My assumption being that 220 circuits are dedicated and not somehow
split off from somewhere down the line: i.e. only 220 stuff is supplied by them.

The 2" PVC idea sounds pretty good. Bore the hole, run the pipe, do a little
caulking, put a screw cap on each end... and wait...
 
P

(PeteCresswell)

Jan 1, 1970
0
Per (PeteCresswell):
The 2" PVC idea sounds pretty good. Bore the hole, run the pipe, do a little
caulking, put a screw cap on each end... and wait...


Now that I've stumbled on http://www.nbmc.com/images/emergenistall.jpg,
a slightly more elegant non-cutover-box solution seems doable.

Split level house with a crawl space. Couple feet of concrete block showing
above the grade of the property.

Mount the rainproof inlet box on the cinder block outside somewhere convenient
but out of sight - like next to the AC compressor.

Run Romex from the box through the cinder block into the crawl space and into a
junction box. From the junction box, run feed wires to the rooms where
generator power would be used. In our case, the kitchen, the garage (freezer
and beer refrigerator) the rec room, and maybe the living room. In each of
those rooms, install a wall receptacle dedicated to the feed from the generator.
When outage time comes, fire up the gennie, run the extension cord from gennie
to the inlet box and plug it in. Then just plug whatever appliances need tb
powered into their respective room's dedicated outlet.

A lot of man hours - but doable by the homeowner and not requiring that much of
a cash outlay.

Only thing missing seems tb some more elegant way to measure steady-state
consumption that running out to the gennie and checking an inline Kill-A-Watt.


OTOH, if I can get a cutover panel installed for $500 or less I'll probably go
for it....
 
C

clare at snyder.on.ca

Jan 1, 1970
0
Per clare at snyder.on.ca:

In light of that and Vaughn's post, I'm feeling better about the EU2000.

The gas consumption was the primary consideration with I chose it. Low noise
level and portability were close seconds.

I think if I want more capacity I'll go the natural-gas-powered
mounted-on-a-slab route. But we'd have to have the prospect of a lot more
outages that we have been getting for that to seem sensible.

I'm glad to hear that the furnace blower takes 120. The 220 stuff, I think we
do not need. Have municipal water, can live without the electric dryer, can
cook on gas, have a gas hot water heater, and in the summer would get by with a
window box in an extended outage.

Sounds to me like a cutover box wired to just the 120 circuits would do the job
for us. My assumption being that 220 circuits are dedicated and not somehow
split off from somewhere down the line: i.e. only 220 stuff is supplied by them.

You need to understand the power distribution system in your home. It
is a 3 wire distribution system. from neutral to each line is 110.
From line to line is 220. Your generator will only connect from one
line to neutral. Your breaker panel or fuse box has half the circuits
running off of each line to neutral pair.
 
Tom Horne said:
There was an after market kit available that would allow you to operate
two of the EUs end to end and thus have 120/240 volt power. It involved
connecting the synchronization wire at a different spot on one of the
EUs then the manufacturer intended. You also had to open the bonding
point on one of them and connect them to the load in a manor that
reestablished the bonding for that set to the other end of it's winding.

Can we use a 1:1 isolation transformer as a phase inverter instead?

Nick
 
P

(PeteCresswell)

Jan 1, 1970
0
Per clare at snyder.on.ca:
You need to understand the power distribution system in your home. It
is a 3 wire distribution system. from neutral to each line is 110.
From line to line is 220. Your generator will only connect from one
line to neutral. Your breaker panel or fuse box has half the circuits
running off of each line to neutral pair.

Does that suggest that the stuff coming in from the pole is 220?
 
B

Bruce in Alaska

Jan 1, 1970
0
Vaughn Simon said:
Ditto everything Clare said.

I have an EU2000 that I sometimes connect to my transfer switch. My
transfer switch does not solve the "draft from the cord" problem because it
is
meant to be installed indoors and has a cord connector.
http://www.nbmc.com/emergen/6-5001.html There are several ways to route the
cord inside your house if you just give a bit of advance thought to the
problem.
One of the neatest is to install a capped-off 2" conduit stub through your
wall
near your electrical panel. Is your electrical panel in your laundry room?
Then disconnect the dryer hose and run the cord through the vent.

Beyond a heavy transformer, there is no simple, convenient and cheap way
to
make 220 from 110. One possibility is to place all of the loads that you
want
to have access to the generator on one side of your panel. It would take an
electrician to do that.

The EU2000 is a wonderful machine. If you ever have a long power
outage,
you will greatly appreciate its fuel efficiency and its low noise level.


Vaughn

Split Winding 2:1 3Kw Dry Transformers can be had for less than $100US,
and sometimes a lot cheaper than that if you have a Recycle Junkyard
in the neighborhood. This would solve all your 120/240Vac problems, but
you still will be limited by the Total Capacity of the Genset. Also
a you will get the added bonas of having all your loads, from either leg,
distributed across the 120Vac Genset, where as if you powered you house
directly from a 120/240 Genset, you could only load each leg to 115% of
half the total power of the genset, while also not Exceeding the Total
Load Rating of that genset.

Bruce in alaska
 
V

Vaughn Simon

Jan 1, 1970
0
(PeteCresswell) said:
Does that suggest that the stuff coming in from the pole is 220?

In north America, it is usually split 110/220. It has three wires; two
hots, and one neutral. Across the two hots you have 220, and from either hot to
neutral you have 110. Half of your 110 loads are normally on one side of the
line and the other half are on the other. With your 110 volt generator, you
will have to decide which half of the house you prefer to power. As I mentioned
earlier, you may want to have an electrician rearrange your loads so the ones
you want to back up with your genny are all on one side.

Vaughn



 
Tom Horne said:
If you're talking about running the two EUs in the way that Honda
designed the interlock kit to work and then using that to supply a 1 to
1, I don't see how that helps. Would you mind fleshing out what your
suggesting? You might be on to something.

As I understand this, the usual way of paralleling 2 EU2000s is to simply
connect the 120 VAC outputs in-phase, with no special sync signals or wires.
(Given their 12K hour lifetime, we might plug a single EU2000 into a wall
socket for grid-tie cogen.) We might make 240 by putting a 1:1 transformer
between 2 of them to invert the phase, but it seems even simpler to unbond
and connect them with a phase-inverting cable, as you seem to suggest below.

Nick
 
V

Vaughn Simon

Jan 1, 1970
0
(Given their 12K hour lifetime, we might plug a single EU2000 into a wall
socket for grid-tie cogen.)

Even forgetting the capital and maintenance expenses, even though the
EU2000 is one of the more efficient generators you can buy, just the fuel cost
would make that idea a non-starter. The grid is the best energy deal you will
ever get.

In addition, the efficiency advantage of inverter generators tends to
disappear at high loads where the engine is running at max rpm.

Vaughn
 
Vaughn Simon said:
Even forgetting the capital and maintenance expenses, even though the
EU2000 is one of the more efficient generators you can buy, just the fuel cost
would make that idea a non-starter. The grid is the best energy deal you will
ever get.

I disagree, if we use the "waste heat."

Nick
 
M

Mike Swift

Jan 1, 1970
0
Tom Horne said:
There was an after market kit available that would allow you to operate
two of the EUs end to end and thus have 120/240 volt power. It involved
connecting the synchronization wire at a different spot on one of the
EUs then the manufacturer intended. You also had to open the bonding
point on one of them and connect them to the load in a manor that
reestablished the bonding for that set to the other end of it's winding.
I don't remember who made the kit. If your furnace blower actually
requires 240 volts to run I will confess that I hadn't seen that yet.
Is it part of a unit that needs the 240 for something else like
supplemental or emergency resistance heating.

If you can get by without the use of any 220v appliances here is a trick
I use for powering our house during power outages. On the transfer
switches' "generator" input connect the 120 volt hot lead to both hot
leads on the generator side of the circuit. Now all 120 volt loads in
the house will have power, but no 220 volt loads will. Turning on any
of the 220 volt loads will not cause any problems other than they will
not work as there are zero volts between the two hot leads. 120 volt
loads can be added up to the capacity of the 120 volt generator.

--
Mike

Some say we must tax corporations more. What they do not understand is that
corporations do not pay taxes. One of our governments conditions for their
existence is they collect the taxes from their customers and pass them to
the government.
Mike Swift
 
L

Lectron_Nuis

Jan 1, 1970
0
"Solar Flare" <[email protected]>, blew the buffoon horn
with:

[top post corrected]

[fuxord MOE dlmt fixed]
You must be lost here. Tom is from "down here in the good ole US of A"
and yet, one of your best electricians.

Since you are both from the south, where does the kettle and pot come
into the racial war?
You would have to be happy at your success with confusion, Gimmebutt?
You got 100% score on "over rated", up there in the high 80% with
Insurance and totally kafukled yourself with MSW sales terminology.
Now you go right ahead in chatting merrily to yourself in an attempt
to keep the topic going - you fool no one. Not even GG it seems <bfg>

..some days are pure Gold!!

Ln
 
V

Vaughn Simon

Jan 1, 1970
0
My transfer switch is wired exactly like Tom suggests, but I seldom mention
it because of the consideration that Mike mentions below, and also because some
Internet "expert" will come along to tell me how my insurance company (if I had
one) will not pay if my house burns down.
Mike
If you have multi wire branch circuits in your home that technique can
overload the neutral of such circuits. Since neutral conductors do not have
over current protective devices that can kindle a fire. It is not the most
likely ignition scenario I can think of but it is one that has happened.

But actually Mike is technically correct here. That said, since I don't
have any multiwire branch circuits in my house, and I don't own a generator big
enough to seriously overload any conductor in my house, the cavet does not apply
in my case.


Vaughn
 
M

m II

Jan 1, 1970
0
However, I did use the term USanians. I do not find this derrogatory
in any way, shape or form. If you find this offensive, please state
how this is so. This has become a common term as Mexicans call
themselves Americans also and they also live in the United States. All
North American and South American people have as much right to call
themselves "Americans" as the US citizens. USanians are stated, in
many countries of the world, as citizens with no name. I find Usanians
is very fitting and an affectionate term..

/delurk

Where did you find it? Fitted like a glove, warmed your hand even?
This is what citizens of the USA L O V E about you, you are so
_easy_ to hate!
You watch out for them black choppers over the trailer tonight Gimmebutt!

ROTFLMGDAO

/lurk
 
L

Lectron_Nuis

Jan 1, 1970
0
m II said:
/delurk

Where did you find it? Fitted like a glove, warmed your hand even?
This is what citizens of the USA L O V E about you, you are so
_easy_ to hate!
You watch out for them black choppers over the trailer tonight
Gimmebutt!

ROTFLMGDAO

/lurk

Maybe I will send in some of our Aussie chopters to join you <snarf>

Ln
 
L

Lectron_Nuis

Jan 1, 1970
0
/delurk

Where did you find it? Fitted like a glove, warmed your hand even?
This is what citizens of the USA L O V E about you, you are so
_easy_ to hate!
You watch out for them black choppers over the trailer tonight
Gimmebutt!

ROTFLMGDAO

/lurk

America has a new nigger. We call them Canadians.[LOOSE USE]

Ln
 
L

Lectron_Nuis

Jan 1, 1970
0
Gymmy Bob//JP Bengi//Solar Flare ++++++,,"Lectron_Nuis"
/delurk

Where did you find it? Fitted like a glove, warmed your hand even?
This is what citizens of the USA L O V E about you, you are so
_easy_ to hate!
You watch out for them black choppers over the trailer tonight
Gimmebutt!

ROTFLMGDAO

/lurk

snip lame advert

America has a new nigger. We call them Canadians.[LOOSE USE]
frogged sig snipped

This bastardisation of use of Usenet is just simply not right.
You, Gymmy Bob//J P Bengi//Solar F******,, ask folks to accept what
you publish as credible feedback on many topics and then you go an
post shit as per the response above!!??.
Posting from AIOE using the same MO you do everywhere else you are
challenged..!!
FFS..gimme a fsckn Break..! Just _who_ is the thick-head here?

Hear this, ..._you_ cannot imitate my postings. You simply do not
have the skills. I have unique identifiable lines in my headers you
cannot duplicate.
I have posted information _with links_ that identify you and your past
shenanigans throughout Usenet. What you do to yourself in posting the
malicious hateful racist shit you do (above) is _prove_ to one and
all you are ***exactly*** the sick fuckup that I have documented and
logged on Google.
I cannot control others who pick up on my posts but I am able, and
will publish, further exposures as you make the posts.
You change.
That simple.

Ln
--
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http://tinyurl.com/yv8wp3
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