Hunting Happiness

Madam X over at MyOpenWallet has a post running about basic emergency preparedness and mention has been made of portable generators. I have been considering for some time adding a whole-house natural gas generator and looking at options. Consumer Reports did a ratings a while back and the Kohler 12 KW and Coleman 9.7 KW models came out on top by a wide margin. They both cost around $4K, while the two much lower ranking models were closer to $2K. One of these was the Guardian, which is carried by DIY stores like Lowe’s or Home Depot. The Kohler and Coleman stationary units also blew away all the portables in the rankings.

They have an automatic transfer switch (ATS) and typically their own mini breaker panel. For breakers/circuits that you want on during a power failure, you move them from your main breaker panel to this one. If the power fails, the generator senses this and automatically comes on. Once it is up to speed, the ATS switches over the circuits in the mini panel from mains power to the generator. So you will have a short outage, typically under 10 seconds, even on protected circuits. When the mains power returns, the generator stops and the ATS cuts back over.

The obvious advantage is that everything is automated. If you are not home, you won’t lose the freezer or fridge (assuming you put those on the generator). Also, even if you are home, if it happens in the middle of the night you don’t have to do anything.  If we got a generator, I would also make sure it was sized large enough to accommodate our central heating and cooling system.  We’ve had several extended power failures where the house got hot enough to be very uncomfortable.

I found some online resources for sizing the generator.  The furnace is natural gas so it would only need the blower (about 800W).  The A/C requires substantially more, probably around 5,000W.  I figure another 2,000 W for lights, refrigerator, garage door opener, and miscellaneous other needs.  So we are right around 8 KW, probably 9-10 KW just to be safe.

Something else to consider is making sure your propane or natural gas infrastructure can adequately supply the generator up to its stated capacity.  If your natural gas feed is 1/2″, you may not be able to handle the larger home generators.  I am still investigating this aspect.

Two to four thousand dollars is a lot of money.  But it would buy quite a lot of peace of mind.  If we were in a home we were sure to stay in, I think it would be almost 100% a given.