In October 2012, Steven Harris joined Jack Spirko on The Survival Podcast for a two-part interview on the topic of generators. Here are the show recaps from those two episodes:
Steven Harris returns to TSP this time to discuss generators and I mean everything generators. As is typical with Steven he did so much research and prep that we had to break this into two episodes. Today we cover the 7 main types of generators, their uses, determining your needs and where to source generators for the best pricing.
Steven Harris is a consultant and expert in the field of energy. He is the founder and CEO of Knowledge Publications, the largest energy only publishing company in the USA.
Mr. Harris came to his current position to do full time work on the development and implementation of hydrogen, biomass and solar related energy systems after spending 10 years in the Aero-Thermal Dynamics department of the Scientific Labs of Chrysler Corporation.
Steve is always full of great ideas, knowledge and projects we can use to improve our personal energy independence and today is no exception. Today he covers generators with us in part one of a two part series.
Steven Harris returns to TSP this time to discuss generators and I mean everything generators. As is typical with Steven he did so much research and prep that we had to break this into two episodes. Today we cover fuel options and multiple ways to set up fueling and tie your generator into your home to power your critical needs.
Steven Harris is a consultant and expert in the field of energy. He is the founder and CEO of Knowledge Publications, the largest energy only publishing company in the USA.
Mr. Harris came to his current position to do full time work on the development and implementation of hydrogen, biomass and solar related energy systems after spending 10 years in the Aero-Thermal Dynamics department of the Scientific Labs of Chrysler Corporation.
Steve is always full of great ideas, knowledge and projects we can use to improve our personal energy independence and today is no exception. Today he covers generators with us in part two of a two part series.
Episode 1004 (part 1) and Episode 1005 (part 2)
If you would like to listen to each episode then here are the links:
- Episode 1004 Steven Harris on Everything Generators Part 1 of 2 – CLICK THIS LINK
- Episode-1005- Steven Harris on Everything Generators Part 2 of 2 – CLICK THIS LINK
In both of the earlier links, you also will see Steven’s replies to TSP listener questions and comments.
Steven Harris Energy Training Advanced Video Series
If you like the way Steven presents information, then go check out his advanced video training courses on topics pertaining to energy generation and storage from solar power to home battery banks to mobile electronic device charging. Get that information here:
Transcript from the original generators podcasts
If you prefer reading a raw transcript (unedited, including no spell check nor any grammar check) instead of listening to the information, then the raw transcript has been included in this section.
Hi, folks Jack Spirko here with another edition of the survival podcast. As always, we’ll make it through the changing world, the changing times the
things that we can all do to live a better life times get tough or even if they don’t. Today is October, October 24 2012. And this is Episode 1004, the survival podcast, and it is a Thursday. We’re one day away from Friday, the day that everybody waits for returning to the show today for part two of an awesome show on generators. Steven Harris, he’ll be with us in just a moment. Before that, let’s take care of our sponsors. With that wrapped up it’s my great pleasure to welcome back Mr. Steven Harris. Today we’re gonna talk about not just all those great generators things that we talked about yesterday, but how do we power them louder we hook them up. How do we run our households? Hey, Steve, man, welcome back to the survival podcast.
Thanks Jack. It seems like I was just on here a few minutes ago,
it seemed like that
okay, I’m just gonna get right into it guys because I gotta move through this content and it’s gonna be another one of those if you miss something, you’re gonna have to back up a little bit listen to it twice. I have a lot of details in here that are very very important to your safety. Okay guys, so listen carefully. This subject is life and death serious okay. Not only is it Life and Death serious because without power you might you don’t have water you don’t have sanitation. And that can be serious too. But if you hook up your power wrong and hurt yourself do it wrong. It can be life and death seriously as electricity can kill you. So I’m in no way going to suggest you do any of these methods. You are working with 120 Volts AC and 200 volts AC from inverters and generators and at your house and it can kill you instantly right now. You’re dead of a heart attack just from touching it. Make a mistake you can get dead get an electrician and get it installed properly have someone knowledgeable help you? I’m going to tell you about with extreme caution. What other people have done and has been documented. Doing this wrong can electrically electrocute you kill you dead you can kill your children if you kill your wife and kill your dog okay and triple record it comes out and it’s got what hot is hot on the other end hits your leg boom. Okay, you got problems.
So in your opinion, it was just the safest way of powering stuff in your house from a generator
extension cords Jack, you put your generator outside and put away from the house and this means not in your garage or in your shed because the exhaust from a generator has carbon monoxide in it and that can kill you the builds up in room or garage air and you walk into it. People asked me if they can run their generator in their house I go yeah, you can once then you’re dead. So don’t do it inside the house. It’s outside only but the generator outside started up and you have a bunch of yellow orange or green extension cords that you run them into your house, connect them to your TV connect the extension cord to your refrigerator, your freezer, your fans, your lights and other items you need. Just unplug them from the wall and plug them into the extension cord or your multiple sockets that you got. This is the most simple and easiest and safest way of doing this. Of course, you can still close your door on an extension cord cut the cord with the door and then electrify the door and shock yourself down as you’re holding on to the doorknob while you’re standing in a pool of water. So I mean extension cords they got their risks too.
Yeah and I think another thing is the people need to understand especially like these these generators like you know like what I have they’re not meant to run in the rain you know, you had to wait till the storms over to fire up the generator.
Yeah, that’s what you go on YouTube, you’ll see a lot of videos of people showing you how to make a doghouse for your generator. And this is what keeps it dry when it’s raining and keeps it out of the way and hopefully keeps the squirrels from making a nest of a sitting outside.
Which I think is an awesome idea. And it’s what people should do if you’re going to be long term at any location is build a generator house basically. Yep. Anybody mean to interrupt you, man?
Oh, wow. We talked about extension cords. Yep. And I talked about different collars, extension cords. And we really got to cover this a little a little quickly to tell people the difference are basically there’s three categories of extension cords, there’s orange or green ones. And we see these all the time at Home Depot or Lowe’s these are generally rated at 15 Answer currently called medium duty extension cords that are about the same amount or maximum power as you get from one outlet really one circuit in your house. orange or green extension cords are four 18 gauge wire, which is the same size wire that is in most homes going to a standard 15 amp 120 volt electrical outlet. They are called 14 slash three cords because they are 14 gauge and they got three wires in them hot neutral and ground. If you have a very long run from your generator to your house or you just got one of those really big houses that we don’t have, you’re going to use or if you’re going to use a lot of current, okay, and like you’re going to run something that takes up a lot of power, like an electric space heater, you run the generator outside, you put electric space heater in one room the same way you put an air conditioner in one room, you keep yourself warm or cold. If you’re going to use electric chainsaw, and I love electric chainsaws we go to so simple. And this is going to be 100 feet or more away from the generator, then you want to reduce the loss in the cord. And you go with a core that has a bigger wire gauge in it 12 or 10 gauge wire, these will be yellow generally, and they will be called 12 slash three or 10 slash three extension cords. They are available in Walmart, believe it or not where I bought mine. They’re at Lowe’s and they’re at Home Depot, you’ll find them especially in the contractor section are with extension cords. I’ll put some links to Amazon to these cords and solar 123 four.com. So you can get an idea of what they cost and see what they look like and then see that says 12 f3 on it so you know what you’re looking for. Or you can get it from Amazon. So you’d run the yellow cord from the generator like 100 feet to your electric chainsaw or 100 feet into your house for your electric heater. And when online looking at the stuff in stores read the tag, there are some yellow extension cords out there that are the same size as the orange orange ones. They’ll say 14 Three on them. But generally, the bigger ones are yellow, and you can you can tell them they’re thick, they’re the size of your finger or bigger.
You can tell by the weight when you pick them up. I mean if you’re sitting there looking at 250 foot cords or 200 foot courts and you pick one up and there are different games you’ll know from the weight alone and if I can throw some in here there’s two things I never buy the cheapest I can get a garden hose This is an extension cords. If you buy the best quality, heaviest duty stuff you can get there. They last longer than you do if you buy the cheap shit they last a year or two they get kinked up twisted not in the same category as far as I’m concerned.
Yep, yep, you know go with quality. For the higher current cards you if you have to run a higher current yellow card, just stick with the 12 Dash three quarts 12 slashed records okay, this will be fine. If you want to go overkill, you can get a 10 slash three chords, which is 10 wire which is 10 gauge wire, and that’s a lot thicker than 14. The lower the gauge number, the thicker the wire, the more current it can handle. And the less loss voltage loss you’ll have an a line but the more expensive the cord will be. If you go on one of my Amazon links you’ll find 100 foot yellow 10 gauge 10 slash three cord and it cost $167 Okay, so as you go off and copper is expensive right now guys, so the bigger the diameter, the lower the loss, the more expensive it’s going to be. So you might need one good yellow 12 slash three cord okay, like one 100 footer or 100 footer and a 50 footer. Then for the rest of your house, you can go with the standard orange ones from Home Depot or Lowe’s or Walmart. So from the extension cord coming from the generator into the house, you’ll put in a splitter or a multiple outlet. Now my favorite one of these are the solid orange ones, you can hold them in your hand, okay? They’re solid orange or solid green, you find that they have partly what part of the plug plugs into the wall, okay. And then you have three outlets on it. It’s it’s all one piece of solid rubbery material with three outlets on it on different sides of the splitter. So if you plug into the wall, and that’s south, there’ll be one outlet at North one outlet at ease one outlet at West. Oh, they’re also called D outlets go to solar 123 four.com. I’ll have photos of them there and links to Amazon. It’s also called the T shape adapter. Once you see it, you’ll know instantly what I’m talking about. Okay, they’re all over Home Depot, Lowe’s and Walmart. They’re awesome. Anyway, just go look at the photo you’ll know what I’m talking about. Also, if you want one of the best outlet strips you can find for plugging in six or eight or 10 things at once. You just plug these T shaped adapters into each other and you make them as big as you want. So you can plug in your phone, your iPad, your Gameboy your TV, plug everything you want into this one spot. Run an extension cord to upstairs plug into more Are these five outlets up there? Run another cord from there to the kids room plug one and have three outlets for them.
Yeah, I mean, it’s funny how you and I always come to the same gear. In that box I talked about with all our dedicated extension cords in it, there’s about 10 of them things in there just plugged into like one big long blocks, and you can’t get out and take them as you need them. And we can run everything that we’d ever want to run in our house, other than central AC off of a 60 500k generator that way. And I have thought about having a backup switch wired in. But like I said, since we’re moving, and it’s safe, like you were saying,
yes, yes, these are solid T shaped splitters. They’re very durable. Like I said, they’re like an all robbery hard plastic. You can the ones I’m talking about, you can run over with a car and we’ll just laugh at you. They’re typically only three or four bucks each. And you’ll see them at Home Depot on sale around Christmas time for like a buck 50. Okay, this is when you stock up. And generally the ones on sale at Christmas will will be will be green because they want to match your Christmas tree and not have as big oil things standing out underneath the tree.
Yeah, red says Christmas light strings. And the only thing if you run it over with your car, make sure you don’t run over with it with a brass dig and I’m gonna put a hole in your tire, but you ain’t gonna break the daggone thing. Well, I got a question for you that we always hear about what generators what is back feeding my home? What’s that mean? Well, Jack,
we’re going to talk about it. And we’re going to talk about back feeding and powering your house. And we’re going to go from what is very illegal and dangerous to what is safe and recommended up to code. So we’re going to start with what is very dangerous. And I’m not suggesting that you do this on any farm,
just to be clear that it’s not a joke. He’s serious, folks.
I’m serious. I’m just telling you what other people have done and you’ll find documented on the internet. I’m just telling it to you. And given you all the warnings and all the cautions, okay, if you can follow someone’s quick paragraph and get yourself electrocuted. Back feeding uses a special cord that you have to make, it’s also called a suicide cord. Because it’s got two male ends on it, it’s got you know, each hand has a plug on it. And if one side is energized, the other side is energized and you got open plugs, you know, open spades right there at the end of the cord, and if you touch it electrocute you and you’re dead, or you got a hole in your leg or your arm or your hair standing up and you’re not gonna have a good day, you remember this not just electrocuting yourself, it’s electrocuting your kids or your dog. Okay, you can trip over the cable, pull down the wall, it can be laying around and hit you and zap you pretty good. With back feeding, what you’re typically going to do is you’re going to go to your circuit breakers for your house, you’re going to turn off, you’re going to turn off, you’re going to throw the main breaker, the big one at the top. You do this first and you always do it. If there is a power failure and you plug your generator into your house and the main circuit breaker is on then you’re not only powering your house, but the entire electrical system and lines and the entire neighborhood all around you. Which means a line man working on what he thinks is a down and dead line trying to fix it for you might grab a line that is energized by your generator through your house back through the transformer to him. Even if he’s a mile away, this can happen and he can get himself killed. And you are then responsible for his murder or his manslaughter and you are going to prison where you won’t have to worry about food, water, shelter, or power because it’ll all be taken care of for you.
And again, this isn’t a wink wink nod nod for information purposes only Steve’s telling you what you’re gonna find if you look out there and not to do it in a very serious manner. Yes, I had Steve.
So what people do is they turn off the main breaker and electrical panel. If you don’t know what that is or what I’m talking about, and do not do it. Sit down, shut up, light a candle and suffer. If you don’t know how to do this, you might have a Tricia and try to explain it to you or have him do it for you. Having someone professionally do it will be the cheapest thing you can do. Okay, so assuming we’re like I said, What’s the most expensive what’s the most expensive form of power? No power okay, pay electrician haven’t hooked it up right and then you got power and you can watch your neighbors sit down, shut up light a candle and suffer. So assuming you know what you’re doing and you know the risks. You turn off the main breakers did I say that? You turn off the main breakers and then you turn off click click click click click all The other breakers, all breakers off and the main breaker stay off. Now if you’re doing this with an inverter off your car, like we talked about in the show where I told you how to power your inverter off your car, which is that solar 123 four.com You can go and unplug everything in your house. I mean, you switch off the main breakers, you switch off the all the regular breakers and then you go and unplug everything in the house. I mean everything you unplug the clocks you unplug the refrigerator. You Unplug the freezer, you unplug the TV, because you’re about ready to plug into your house, a low power inverter again, you don’t need something going her and kicking on your inverter will cry or frighten you. Or you’ll blow the fuse which another reason to have spare fuses and spare fuses are damn cheap on Amazon and they’re unsolder 1234. Like you then take your suicide plug, now know why it’s named that which is like a regular extension cord but it has two male ends on it. You have to make this yourself. If you are going to make one of these dangerous things you can’t apply it, you have to look at the electrical. If you look at electrical socket, you’ll see two slits for electrical plug in United States. Okay, you’ll find one rounder hole that’s the ground. The two slits will have different sizes, there is a swan slit that is a little bit smaller, and there’s a one slit that’s a little bit longer. The smaller one is hot, this is one that’s going to fry your rear end, okay, this is normally a black wire, think of black as in death. Okay, this is the hot wire, the law the longer slip is going to be neutral. This is normally a white wire, the round one on the bottom is ground, which is normally a green wire. So you hook up the small slot the black wire from one plug to a smaller prong on the other plug with the black wire, and then the longer slit the wire from it goes to the longer spade sorry, actually the lug the longer one and that is going to be a white wire the ground on one plug goes to the ground and the other plug in that will be a green wire, you now have a suicide cable with electricity exposed. If you screw this up, and for example, you wire hot, the Black Death wire from your generator to the ground in your house. You can make the metal case on everything in your house hot like your refrigerators a metal case, and it will be hot instead of ground and then you go and touch the refrigerator and you wind up dead. Okay, missing up messing up the pans and messing up the wires will get you hurt or killed. Again, if you don’t have a clue, don’t do this. Don’t do it anyways, some will end up someone will end up dead and someone will end up going to prison. I’m not telling you to do this. I am not recommending it. I’m just telling you what others have done and how dangerous does this now other people who know what they’re doing would make sure the inverter at the car or the battery bank is off. Then you plug one side of your suicide plug into the inverter and then you go plug the other end into 120 volt outlet inside your house. Now you turn the inverter on. Now you go into your house where everything is unplugged, and all the breakers are off and the main breaker is off and that always stays off. You just turn on the regular breakers the main breaker stays off. Then you go back into the house and you plug into the wall only the stuff that you want to use your TV, some compact fluorescent light bulbs, LED lights, a fan all the small stuff that you can run off your inverter in your car. This might be your refrigerator or freezer one at a time. If you got an 800 watt inverter on your car and it’s idling again, go listen to the power of your house from your car with an inverter show. If you are doing this with the 120 volt plug on a generator, you can do the same thing that I just described on the inverter except you don’t need to unplug everything from the wall in your house. But make sure you do unplug stuff you’re not going to use just so it doesn’t come on like your big AC unit, your electric heater and the refrigerator or freezer because you’re now feeding the entire house through one outlet that is designed to be only one circuit. You can’t feed your entire house through 115 amp outlet so unplug stuff you’re not using and plug it in as you need it. Make sure you don’t go over to 15 amps up that outlet can handle this would also be about 1500 watts. If you don’t want to you don’t want to go over that on a regular 15 amp four gauge wire wall outlet. You can overheat the line and burn down your house. I’m not telling you because this can happen. I’m telling you this because this has happened, okay to people who go through disasters and wired it up this way. I told you this was going to be the most dangerous show I ever talked about. There are houses that like I said, have burned down. Others have been electrocuted. There are many other people who are dead who did this and many other people who are injured. Someone else telling you this might not tell you all of these warnings. And I’m telling you these warnings and you can get hurt. That’s why I’m telling you all this because I really care about you guys. For the generator, you plugged the suicide plug into the house first with all the breakers off and of course all the mains off Miss day off. Then you start your generator and let it get running. Then you plug the other end of the suicide plug into the generator. You know you’re not plugging into a load because all the breakers are off. Okay, now you go to your electrical panel, you turn on only the circuit breakers that you want to energize in the house. This might be your furnace if it’s wintertime, it might be your kitchen outlets for the refrigerator, and microwave etc. Keep in mind that you’re only energizing one half of your panel when you’re back feeding 120 volts, you cannot energize both sides of your panels through a single 120 volt outlet. So only half the outlets and the stuff in your house will work. You can’t energize more than one outlet. Guys, you can’t plug into two outlets with the generator that you don’t feed your whole house you ended up short circuiting everything, blown your generator blowing cords and everything else. So one suicide cord from the generator to one outlet in a house will energize half the house. So you might have the extension cord inside your house to plug your refrigerator into a nearby outlet that is on the half of the house that is energized. I saw one very smart person who did a suicide cord for his house and there was an outlet on his furnace. And that’s what he wanted the power in the wintertime. So when he plugged the suicide cord into his generator and plug the suicide cord into the furnace, he knew the furnace was always going to be energized and half the outlets in the house were going to be energized. Okay. That’s what I saw someone else do. Keep in mind there are no breakers in the system when your back feeding. If you try to pull more power than your one line or outlet can handle then you risk heating up the line at the outlet or in the wall of your house and starting a fire and burning down your house. Back feeding your house with an inverter is only for powering small stuff lights, fan TV, radios, phones, iPads, and maybe you plug in your refrigerator into the outlet and then let it run for an hour or two a few times a day, then your freezer in a different time. This is not for your microwave oven that draws almost as much power as one outlet can handle. As do you sure as hell are not going to plug in your coffeemaker God had someone said I want to power my coffeemaker, my freezer and refrigerator and disaster. coffee makers draw in an incredible amount of electricity when heating up. It’s not a low power appliance it can use five to eight times more electricity than your refrigerator. Get a propane stove and an old fashioned coffee pot and make coffee on the propane or Coleman stove the old fashioned way. Don’t you agree? Jack?
Absolutely, man. Absolutely.
If you want to know more about inverters and how to use them on your car, and when you need to idle your car for more power, you can get my show on powering your house from your car with an inverter. The show is at www dot solar 123 four.com. It’s absolutely free. You can sign up and listen to it directly on your smartphone or your computer without downloading it. Or you can listen to the show and save it off on your phone or computer if you desire. You can say about to listen to when there’s no power and no internet and you run computer of your generator and you want to listen to what I told you because you didn’t take notes. Of course all my shows are on Jack’s website, the survival podcast and get them on there. I’ll also mentioned that this method of powering your house is illegal in most areas as it should be. It is most definitely against code you are responsible for everything that happens if your house burns down from this and the insurance company finds out about it. They won’t pay you or your damage. So I’ll say it again use extension cords for the generator is the best way it’s the best way and make sure you don’t slam the door or break the insulation on the cable if you have a metal door lined up Doing this pinching the extension cord can also cause a fire if you do it really hard. Basically, if you break the outside of your extension cord, guys, throw it away. Okay, the lines have been jeopardized, you don’t want to have an exposed line where someone can step on it electrocute themselves or will cause a fire.
And only extension cords if you have a plan in advance, it always makes things better last time I haven’t dedicated cords. The other thing we did, I have a piece of wood cut to length and I can put into one window and four extension cords will fit in the little spaces left open that window sits down on that that board if it does have any kind of you know you want to keep the winter mostly shut. You’ve only got a small gap there. Chords never get pinched. So much simpler than trying to worry about whether or not the kid is going to run out slam the door. That type of thing. So I was able to cover back feet in the house Man What about these frickin idiots? That backfield the whole damn house?
Yeah. Hey, Jack, that’s the best idea cut a two by four to link just let the sharpening and window shut the window on it and run the cord through the hole.
Yeah, that’s what we do knocking down that board goes in the box with the cords. I mean, it just makes things simple. Grab one box and everything’s ready to go.
Okay, good. Now, like you mentioned the back feeding the entire house. How do other people back feed their house with a generator and disaster or emergency after a hurricane or crap hits the fan situation. The most common way is you do this with another suicide port. This one more dangerous because you’re using 240 volts rather than 120 volts. If you think 120 volts will kill you. And it will 240 will fry your rear end at the same time blowing your finger off. For this, you have to have a 240 generator. Remember 230 volt generators off we’ll have 110 circuits on them. So it’s better to have a 240 volt generator, you’re not stuck with 240 It’s just a better option. The generator will have on it what’s called an L 1434 wire plug one wire is going to be ground one is going to be neutral one will be what’s called L one was called L two there is 240 volts across L one and L two. These are both hot two, okay, like I said black wire and what people do is they buy the same mail plug that their electrical stove are more common their electrical dryer uses in the garage, and they will wire neutral the neutral the bottom pin round pins on the bottom round pin and then the wire L one to one of the big spades on the dryer and then they’ll run L two to one of the big space the plug for the dryer. So now you have a male to male cord that with one end that is the same as your dryer and the other one that plugs into your generator you now have a suicide cord at 240 volts. If your dryer has four holes in it then you’ll have to you’ll hook up L one L two, neutral and ground to each other. Again if you don’t understand this you damn well better find someone who does or have electrician help you or don’t do it at all I’m going to cover the safe and legal way to do it and a little bit then go and turn off people then go and turn off all their main breakers they tend to turn off the main breaker and then they turn off all the breakers the generator is off there is no power in the house there is no power at the generator and one side of the suicide cord is plugged into the house and all the breakers are off then you go and plug the suicide cord into the generator and you start the generator there’s no load on the generator because all the breakers are off once the generators on and going they then go to their breaker panel and they start to turn on the breakers in the box that they want powered the main breaker is still off and always will be off both sides of the box are now powered by a generator at 240 volts with a neutral and that way all the circuits in the house are live because what you have is you have 240 volts across L one and l two you got 120 volts across L one and neutral and you have 120 volts across L two and neutral This is how the generator with 240 volts L one L two and neutral is back feeding the entire panel and powering everything in the house. Now you still have the same problem as you did before you are feeding the entire house through one cable. One outlet okay, that cable is now a 240 volt cable and it’s usually designed for 30 amps going into your dryer 30 amps Max 30 amps times 240 volts is 720 Watts maximum. stay below 5000 Watts if you did this, to be on the safe side and that is if I was suggesting you do do this I’m not because I’ve told you how dangerous it is and that you can electrocute yourself or your kids or your dog. Or if you pull too much power through this one line, even though it can handle up to 7200 watts by theory, you can start a fire especially you gotta you got to lose connection and will burn down your entire house.
Now look, I know a lot of people out there are wondering why Steve just took all this time to explain the intricate details of how to do something that you should not ever do. And I’m gonna tell you why even though he hasn’t told me because I know it’s because I’ve gone out and looked for this stuff myself. And if you go out and look for information on how to do it, there are Nimrods out there that make it sound a whole lot simpler than it really is make it sound a whole lot safer than it really is. And you will either kill yourself somebody else or burn your house down. So Steve’s taking the time here to put this intricate detail in to make you really understand that no matter who tells you this is a good idea. It’s not a good idea that I get that right Steve,
you got it perfectly. You got it perfectly. And in an absolute emergency. when the shit hits, the fan crap hits the fan, and there is no civilization, there’s no government, there’s no electrical codes and you have nothing. This would be still something that could be done as a last ditch effort, especially if your your wife wasn’t electrician and she knew how to do this.
Yeah, basically, I think if you need to be told how to do it, you don’t need to be doing it even in the apocalypse and if you know how to do it, then you know the risks. But as we move out of the realm of like burning houses down killing electrical workers and killing ourselves and our dog and toward the legal end of the spectrum, we move towards something called an interlock. What is that about?
Jack? Well, like you said we’re starting to move towards the legal portion of the show. Okay, I told you I was going to most dangerous Shall I ever talk to you about it is but only if you have the interlock plate installed is it getting getting towards legal or fully the legal and then you start to check your code. What people do is instead of back feeding their house with a suicide plug through the dryer plug is they might have an open 240 volt breaker like I do in my house and electrical panel. For example, I got a natural gas stove that used to have an electrical stove and we put in natural gas took out the electrical stove now I got a free 240 amp breaker and it’s a 30 amp circuit breaker and this is what went to the stove people will throw the main breaker on the box to turn on power off okay, then they will wire in to the 240 volt the wire in a 240 volt electrical socket sitting next to the breaker box and they will wire this 240 volt socket into the 240 volt breaker okay This means you’re putting lines into the breakers the power had better be off you better know what you’re doing. And actually Steve Harris does not mess around inside of his electrical box. Okay I don’t even do this myself.
i You sound like me I have a rule if I don’t completely know something I’ll try it unless it can kill me and then I don’t touch it
and try the breakers are always stay off until you back feed the house to interlock. Okay, so this little 240 volt 30 amp breaker that you just put the the back feed into from a dedicated socket. This always stays off and the interlock is what keeps it off. Now there’s several things both legal and illegal during the power failure, people will turn off the main breakers as you always do and always leave it off and the breaker to the interlock is off. They then turn off all the breakers on the panel. You plug in the suicide cord into the socket going into the 240 volt breaker and you plug the other end to the generator turned off and then you start the generator and then you turn on the 240 volt AC breaker that’s going to where your suicide cord has been wired in and you’re still leaving the main breaker off you then will start to turn on all the other individual circuit breakers are parts that you want to power in the house. Now there is this is where the word interlock comes in. There are companies that make interlocks which is just nothing but a cut sheet piece of sheet metal that is on the front of your circuit breakers in your box. The way the sheet is cut is when the main breakers are on the grid is working and there’s no power failure. It will prevent you from turning on the 240 volt breaker that goes to your back feed socket. This will be typically a recessed male socket usually with a cap on it. That way the 240 volt breaker can never be turned on and energize the socket that he could stick Your finger into okay, just like you stick your finger on a regular wall outlet. And if you’re real dexterous electrocute yourself, you can electrocute yourself, and you stuck your finger into the 240 volt socket, which is why the interlock keeps that breaker off. So that never gets energized. Now, when the power fails, you slide this sheet of metal down about an inch, and it has slots on it that lets this happen for you. And it actually forces you to turn off the main breaker and then it unblocks your 240 volt 30 amp backfeed. Breaker. It unblocked it so it can be turned up. Okay. So what interlock does is when the main breakers are on, and you got grid power, it prevents the 240 volt interlock from being on when the power is off in a failure, it forces you to turn the main breaker off and lets you turn on the 240 volt 30 amp interlock. So that’s now on and you can back through the house. You then go and start your generator and you and it’s already plugged into the house and then you go turn on all the breakers and that way you’re not turning the generator on to the load. So now you take the normal cable that has right connectors on it. And you like I said you plug into generators turned off, you plug it into your inlet that goes in the airlock, this is not a suicide plug when you have an inlet plug at this time, because you’re not having a male socket, you don’t it’s I’m sorry, I don’t like screwing this up. It’s a male socket, and you’re holding a female plug in your hand like any other extension cable. Sure makes sense, right? So you plug in the cable, start the generator, let it get going, then you go back to the panel and you start to turn on the breakers to the rest of the house to power it up. Keep the ones off that don’t need power. This can be legal depending on where you are, this is usually installed by a certified electrician. And it really should be take the cable that goes from your generator, all the way up to your house, he’ll put in the female inter connect socket, and next to the breaker panel and he’ll enter stalled interlock on your panel. And now you are getting to the point where you are a lot safer and you’re beginning to meet code.
But when I listen to all of that, I just think that there’s there’s a right way to do this, that it’s much safer, also is gonna probably involve an electrician, but you mentioned it earlier. And that’s moving into a world of a transfer switch.
Now we get to the transfer switch. And this is the right way to have it done especially if a certified electrician does the transfer switch and I mean the big one in the metal cabinet. And it’s on it’s in a metal cabinet on its own. It’s not in your breaker panel, and it’s got a big lever on the side and has an on at the top, it has an off in the middle and it has a second arm position on the bottom. What a certified electrician will do is he’ll pull your power meter off your house. And that totally disconnects you from the grid, it disconnects your panel from the grid, the electrical panel is now completely dead. He’ll take the main lines coming into the house L one L two and neutral lines going to your panel in he’ll wire it into one half of the transfer switch. And then he’ll wire from the transfer switch back to your electrical panel, this will be the top position then he’ll put a 240 volt inlet receptacle as previously described on the other half of the transfer switch box. Usually this is the bottom half. The top half is usually for grid power. So the box with the transfer switch has a big lever on the side and it’s got an up position that is on a middle position that is off and the lower position that is on it’s going to be up for normal operation for power from the grid. When the power fails, you go to the circuit breaker box, turn off the main breaker then you turn off all the individual breakers. Okay, we’re still doing that. Now you throw the transfer switch down to the middle position off and it’s going to go clunk, you’re going to hear it okay. Now nothing is powered not the breaker box, not the generator nothing. You then plug your generator cable into the generator and you plug it into the inlet plug it goes into the transfer switch, everything is still off, you turn on your generator and let it get going and then you throw the big transfer switch down to the other arm position. This is the on position for power from the generator The generator is now feeding your entire electrical panel from the top of the panel, the main wires going to into the electrical panel itself. Now you do actually turn on the main breakers. Because the transfer switch has been disconnected this disconnected you completely from the grid, okay, you’re not on the grid, the transfer switch won’t allow it in any shape or form. So the main breakers actually have to come on because it’s feeding the entire box from the top. It’s not back feeding is not interlocked. It’s going from the top the box the way God wanted it to happen. Like I said, it’s actually impossible for this type of transfer switch to feed lectricity back onto the grid and hurt alignment. Now you go and turn on your individual breakers and you leave everything on as long as the generators running, the entire house is now fed from the generator. There is a guy on YouTube who has a lot of this very well industry illustrated in his video, I’m going to put that video on solar 123 four.com in the show notes so you can see half of the stuff I’m just talking about. You’ll get to see one in let’s let’s let’s talk it looks like what an L 1430 Twistlock receptacle and plug looks like and he’s got an inexpensive interlock on his box, that might be an option for you. And now he doesn’t have the bigger one I was talking about his interlock is goes to his circuit breakers. He does not have a big transfer switch, which is what I think is best and he only powers half his circuits, the ones that he thinks are critical. So it’s an okay big deal so you can get a good overview. Actually, I now have three videos up there. Okay, I got this one. I got another one that shows another interlock. I got one that shows you the great big 200 amp transfer switch and how it works. It’s just the guy has electrician and he’s got the transfer switch box open and he’s thrown the switch the lever arm from on to off on you can see how it goes clunk, clunk back and forth. This is to give you a pretty good overall overview. Now Jack, that about covers it for hooking up your generator or your inverter to your house. I’m sorry, there was so many details. I tried to be really explicit on how I was telling it to you. I think I told it to you the best way that I can. Yeah, I’d like to
ask you one question for people to maybe understand that you know, there’s certain things that go on during power outage like you have your Tran because I think we would both just before I said we’d both be ready to transfer switch is the way to go if you’re not going to do the extension coordinate right. Okay, so you got to transfer switch generators out there Home and Away. It’s going to wait for a long time powers does not come back on you go out and look at your happy little generator that used to have a little gauge setting up on the F it’s down near the E we now need to refuel the generator we need to do everything you said basically in reverse while we shut that generator down refuel it and power backup right?
Yeah, yeah, you don’t want to turn the generator on into a load the inverter generators you can actually turn on into a load because the inverter has looked in pewter and in there it looks like this is oh I have a load it wraps itself up and then kicks gets kicked in Werner on but the general rule of thumb is you don’t want to start generator into a load a regular generator that’s why you turn off all your breakers plug everything in turn on the generator and go back into flipping turn on everything individually individually. So you’re not throwing a grid big load onto the generator at the same time.
It’s an RV mechanic I’m gonna tell you don’t go hot fuel and new generators we had very specific procedures to hot fuel vehicles, aircraft etc in the military. It was done in emergency purposes only it ain’t worth it. It takes five minutes to shut everything down let it cool a little bit and fuel your generator don’t hot fuel anything unless you absolutely have to
my hot fuel he means fueling, fueling it while it’s running.
Correct I mean it’s just it’s just not a good idea. It’s a lot different than you know if they don’t buys a hot fueling a vehicle. If you hot fuel a vehicle your your gas is going into a place very far away from your motor. And you’re sitting over a generator that screaming hot because it’s been running for eight hours and you need to refill it. You’re sitting right next to the motor. It’s just a bat. You got electrical cords and everything else. Shut it down. Fuel it up and it’s probably good to give it a little break anyway. Yeah, definitely.
So now let’s talk about fuel man. You promised to cover gasoline, diesel, natural gas and propane. Okay, gasoline and diesel generators, pretty straightforward. You poured fuel into it when it’s off and you start It covered the storage and usage of fuels in my last appearance on TSP, actually the one before the other one that we just did. And I did it in explicit detail. And you can find the fuel and fuel storage show along with the How To power your house from an inverter in your car show on solar 123 four.com, which is my dedicated radio show website. So natural gas and propane. Like I said, gasoline, diesel, you pour it and you run it. So really, we need to talk about natural gas and propane. I think natural gas is one of the most incredible fuels available to the public. Because you have an infinite supply of it going right to your house, the entire natural gas system is run and pressurized by the natural gas itself. If the crap hits the fan, the natural gas system will still be up for months without anyone doing anything to maintain it. I got this directly from the experts at the natural gas company who have worked there for over 30 years. So it’ll be there for your entire hurricane, or Blizzard, or ice storm or most disasters that are going to hit you. The exception to this is earthquake country, California, Oregon, Washington, an earthquake will rupture natural gas lines, and they will start fires. So the natural gas system is automatically shut down when an earthquake hits. So natural gas sucks for powering your house after an earthquake. But hey, that’s the price you pay for living in wonderful California. So the rest of us basically have an infinite amount of amount of fuel that we do not have to store in our house or in drums or add treatments to that will never go bad or, or change hell, natural gas is already 10s of millions of years old, okay, it’s not going to go bad or spoil. It’s just like air, how old you think that oxygen molecule is that you just your breathing that
4.5 billion years the age of the earth and it probably predates that?
It will Yeah, oxygen, all elements were formed in the middle of supernovas. And that would be the beginning of the universe and all the oxygen on the planet Earth came from comets, which deposited water on the earth. So that means that oxygen molecule you’re breathing is probably 12 billion years old. You ponder that for a while when you’re going to sleep tonight. Now for the people of propane, you usually have a 500 or 1000 gallon pig. That’s a big metal tank on your property. They’re called pigs, some one some people get clever and get two of them on their property. So one is always full and the other one is always being used. The propane is always there. It’s like natural gas it is never going to spoil it is never going to break down and you have a lot of it stored very perfectly. In fact, using my calculator here, if there’s 91,500 BTUs per gallon of propane and 120,000 BTUs and a gallon of gasoline, then your 500 gallon propane pig is like having 380 gallons of gasoline stored perfectly. This would be the same as 2615 gallon HDPE drums that we talked about in our fuel storage show. Plus, propane is a lot cheaper than gasoline or diesel. So there’s a money savings there. I should say propane is cheaper when you have a 500 gallon or 1000 gallon pig filled up by the big propane truck. It’s not cheaper when you buy 40 pound barbecue containers from Home Depot or the hardware store. Okay, so don’t think you’re gonna go get propane and a barbecue bottle then you’re gonna be saving money over gasoline you’re not you do have a big pay. Now how do you run your generator on natural gas or propane? Well, first it has to be a gasoline generator. It’s true that a diesel engine can run on natural gas or propane. Indeed, I Steve Harris have done it even in my Dodge Ram, but it still requires about 10% diesel to run at the same time for ignition purposes. Plus it does not follow up very well in the for sake of this conversation and this show will stick with the with the conversion of a gasoline generator to natural gas or propane. I know you’ve all stepped up to the edge of your seat and you’re listening very carefully now. Now, it is true that I have run gasoline motors and engines on conversions I made nothing on conversions I made that uses nothing more than pipes and pipe valves and I’ve even made an air fuel mixture for natural gas to run a gasoline generator from a block of wood Did that I drilled cut and carved out. But these were for only running the generator at one speed, you actually had to turn something or turn about the speed up or slow down the engine. And this is the same problem we talked about with PTO generators, you have to manually follow the load is not what you want to do, this is the wrong way to do it. And for a generator because it is going to go up and down a load as you turn things on and off in your house. So the generator needs to maintain a constant speed. Excuse me. To do this, you need a natural gas or propane demand regulator, okay, you use the same regulator for natural gas as you do for propane, but you adjust the regulator to allow less propane than in the natural gas. Because propane has two and a half times more energy per cubic foot the natural gas does. So you need to allow more natural gas in the end of propane. Either way, this same demand base regulator will work for what you want to do. So the heavier the load on the engine, the more the regular, the more the regulator automatically opens up and allows more fuel in excuse me, so getting more of my little bit of cold. When I said there are two things that affect an engine that is speed and load. And that is load was measured by the manifold absolute pressure our map which is more commonly called engine vacuum. That is what a demand regulator works on it works on that vacuum, the more demand for you get in the engine, the more demand for fuel, the more it will open up to do this correctly. And here’s the hard part. The carburetor on the generator needs to be drilled and a small tube needs to be silver soldered into it. This is not something you normally do at home and how to do this is beyond the scope of this show at this time. How look at how long I’ve already run I’ve already gone to shows I can’t tell you how to drill on top of your carburetor. So if you buy a this is how you run your generator natural gas. If you buy a brand new generator, what you do is you take off the carburetor, and you send it to a company and they send you back a new carburetor that’s already drilled out and they send you the demand pressure regulator and all the connectors and all the parts to make your generator run off natural gas and everything you need to run the generator. So you are swapping out a new carb for a new drill carb if you have a used generator that you want to run on natural gas, you need to take the carburetor off, send it to the company and they will drill it and send it back to you with everything else that you need. Like I just mentioned, this usually takes a week longer than if you have a new card you are just trading out you are not going to power your generator off of natural gas or propane if it’s a gasoline generator and your disaster has already hit you Sorry. So I’m sorry, but to do it right and to do it the way that you can depend on and bet your life on you got to either buy it already converted as a truck fuel generator, gasoline, propane and natural gas and ready to go or you have to send in your carburetor and then get the kit back and install it. I sent my carburetor in and had it drilled and tap and then got the kit back and put it on my Honda EU 2000 I, which I have to say is my favorite generator. It’s an inverter generator weighs 42 pounds, you can pick it up easily and runs on gasoline, natural gas or propane. The kit only cost me $179 plus shipping. So it is pretty affordable. When you do this conversion. And if done right, you do not lose and nor do you want to lose the ability to run it from gasoline. That’s always your backup method for fueling your generator to as one one is none. Plus, you might want to put the generator in your pickup truck and take it camping or you take it to your parents house that has a power outage or something. That is why it’s called a tri fuel generator it will run on gasoline natural gas or propane. If you have gasoline and you want to run on natural gas or propane, you then turn off a valve inside the cover of the generator and it turns off the gasoline so the gasoline can stay in the tank, turn off the valve and it’ll run off on natural gas or propane. And you know how generators are sometimes hard to start on gasoline if they’ve been sitting around for a while pole pole pole pole? Well that’s not true with natural gas propane you just push the priming valve and the demand regulator it squirt some natural gas in pull it and it starts up on the first pole almost every darn time you will really like starting your natural gas or propane generator.
So where’s the best place to get conversion kits or do you get a converted generator or send these things to get to get done?
Well, there’s only two places in the United States. they’d sort of worth a darn. And I like one a lot more than I do the other, but both will do the job for you. And one of them, you’ll see as more videos for people to watch, and they’re the ones actually don’t like as much. First, there’s general generator sales.com. Like I said, That’s generator s a l e s.com, is called Central diesel of Maine is a real name. These guys, I like them a lot. They have done a lot of business with me, I’ve done a lot of business with them. I’ve bought my generators from them, I’ve sent my friends there. And they have bought generators from them. And they have tried fuel kits, as well as generators ready to go on gasoline, natural gas and propane. Again, they have the trifield kits that you can install yourself. And you can send them your carburetor, and they’ll drill it or you can buy a generator from them ready to go. So they’re just not a place that helps you convert, they’re someone who’s tell you everything ready to go. So you don’t have to do it. Again, these are called try fuel generators. I think they have this, this website has the most generators of all types of all sizes in one place on the web that you’ll ever find. They also have a real clean website and they got videos on different generators under site, it’s nice place to go visit. I am not sending my friends to any place that is not excellent because they would pitch and pitch and yell at me forever. I’d never hear the end of it. I’m supposed to be the expert on the subject. If I tell people bad things, they yell at me. I send people to places that work, not places that cause problems. If Jack called me and asked me about propane, or natural gas generator or a trifle generator, this is where I would send him in a heartbeat. Their customer service has been excellent. I talked to them told them I wanted to talk about them during the this show right now. And they’re offering all tsp people a discount on shipping on anything they buy if they use the code tsp when checking out, or you can call bill directly at their phone number. Yeah, a company you can actually call and answer the phone, Tom, Steve Harris and tsp sent to you and he’ll get you taken care of and give you the discount. If you use a tsp code online, you’ll have to put it after your name and your business name field or a second address field just throw it someplace into your order. Okay, I’m going to I’m telling you everything about everyone out there that I know okay. Next, there is a US Corporation, they make and sell kits. And they will drill your carburetor. And they even have kits that don’t require drilling. But then your generator will not repeat not run off of gasoline, it’ll be natural gas and propane only. So these people sell kits, they will drill it in to send you back a kit. Or they will sell you a kit that you don’t have to drill but you’re you won’t be trifield You’ll be mono fuel, you’ll be natural gas or propane. The company is us collaboration and their website is propane dash generators.com. That’s p r o Pa n e propane, hyphen, a dash okay, generators, je e n e ra te rs.com. I’ll put a link to them, as well as generator sales.com and sober 123 four.com for you. Now, it’s my personal opinion that you need to have a secret decoder ring to figure out what kit to get from these guys. I’m talking about us corroboration and propane generators here. They have a and c kits, type one kits, type two kit, type three kids take the four kids, and they’re all different. And they all do different things. And they’re all different for different generators. And then you need different kits. I think it’s a mess to figure out on their site. But they give you a phone number you can call you can call them and talk to them. And I’m told from others that they have pretty good customer service. They’ve just not updated their website in the last 10 years. And for some reason, they want to make it cryptic for you to guess which one which conversion kit you need. If you really want to test the waters in convert yourself and not use any of these two people, God bless you, you can do that. You can go on eBay and find the conversion kits from other people. People I haven’t tested or don’t know about. You’ll find also all the parts you’ll find all the demand regulators by themselves you’ll find a lot of parts that are all used in propane forklifts. And these are all the same parts were using the run the natural generator, the National the generator, natural gas or propane. They’re all forklift propane parts, okay? And they’re not that expensive. You’re gonna spend about $100 in part probably, instead of paying $179 for an entire kit. I’m not leaving anything out out of here for you guys. Okay, some of you guys are masters of figuring stuff out and I believe in enabling you which means I tell you how it’s done. Why it’s done and where to get it. For those of you who want to see more and more of it, of all of this, go to YouTube and look underneath the following search terms. Search for us space collaboration, that’s us than a space not sphc. US Corporation. Search for a try fuel generators, that’s t ri, space Fu, el generator, search for natural gas generator and search for propane generator, you’ll see a lot of people who have done conversions, you’ll see what it looks like. And you’ll get a better feel for how it works. And what I’m talking about. This is Radio and this is audio. So it’s really kind of hard to show you things. I’m telling you where to go and look at it.
So when we switch to natural gas, do we end up losing power?
Yes, Jack. You do lose power ability because natural gas and propane is not as dense of liquid gasoline being evaporated in the carburetor. So it’s hard to shove into the cylinder as much fuel with these gases as you can with gasoline. Here are some hard numbers. I got a friend that has a Honda you use 6500 I generator, and he runs for 12 hours a day, every day. And he does it on natural gas. He got the kit directly from generator sales. He refuses to pay 24 cents a kilowatt hour for electricity in California. So he makes his own for his house with cheaper natural gas that you use 6500 Eyes of course super, super 6500 watt generator. He consistently runs 5500 Watts off of his 6500 I off natural gas. He can’t go any more than that because they’ll start to run rough and sputter because it’s getting fuel starved I conks out. So it’d be generous. You can run 5000 watts on natural gas from a 6500 watt generator, which I think what you got Jack Yeah, 6500 watt generator, absolutely. So that would run about 5000 watts on natural gas, that’s 75% Okay, so you lose 25% using natural gas. So 1000 watt generator will only output 750 watts on natural gas. These are rules of thumb that you can count on. And in the automotive field. Remember, I was a development engineer engineer for Chrysler for 10 years. So I know thing about this, that this is what is generally accepted in automotive field. And when you run on natural gas, you’ll have 75% of the power natural gas that you did on gasoline, if you use the demand style regulators that have been used for the last 30 years, and we’re talking about the forklift conversion stuff.
But now with propane, we lose some butt and we don’t lose as much as natural gas right?
That’s right, you don’t lose anywhere as near as much as you do with natural gas, you can fill a balloon with natural gas and a float away Felix Baumgartner is now famous flight 228,000 feet in the space chump could have actually done that in his balloon on natural gas and so helium, but his balloon would have been 60 million cubic feet and so 30 million cubic feet because natural gas is lighter than air but helium still lighter. If you fill a balloon with propane, it doesn’t flow it sinks right to the ground pretty quickly. Because Propane is a lot more dense than natural gas is a lot more dense than air. In fact, it’s propane is two and a half times the BTUs per cubic foot of natural gas does, but it’s still not as dense as gasoline. So you get 85 90% of the energy of a propane generator, as you do with a gasoline generator. Hey, if you think this is a problem for you, and you don’t have enough power, then get a bigger generator. That’s a small price to pay to have an infinite amount of fuel that will not spoil. One more thing. Someone actually wrote me and asked me this. They asked how much energy will a 6000 watt propane generator output? It’s like asking who’s buried in Grant’s tomb? It’s General Grant it’s a 6000 watt propane generator and it came to propane it will output 6000 Watts that’s a conversion as we’re talking about it’ll be less
sure that makes perfect sense. So we’ve talked about all these different options you know, you obviously care about this stuff because you know all this stuff. So with that said, What do you personally own we know you get to Honda, right? That’s your go to, and what else
that Honda EU 2000 i It’s my go to generator, it’s 2000 watts. It’s an inverter generator. It’s quiet. Mine has a trifield kit on it. I’ve used it many power failures, run mine off biogas and doing experiments. It’s my favorite one I’ll drive around the country in the future and have a bigger trailer I’m going to use a Honda EU 3000 I have to run the AC in the trailer So the Honda’s my favorite. I have other Honda engines like the smaller engines, not the inverter style generator, the regular frame generators I got those and I probably have about six to eight of them around the shop. Some of its to cycle one from Harbor Freight. And he’ll various different types that I’ve used for doing different conversion experiments around the different years but the type of truth. The only generator I’m really going to use is the Honda EU 2000 i It’s the number one for me, and I’m not going to hook up my house to a 240 volt generator and power the whole thing. actually gonna have a Honda sitting outside. And I got inverters on my pickup trucks with my pickup truck has dual deep cycle batteries, which I’ll talk about in the battery show. So I’ll run off a combination of battery inverter power and I’ll run off a combination of power off of my Honda EU 2000 I, like I said, I’m not going to get a big bigger generator, I’m not going to backbeat my entire panel. It’s just not something I feel I need I need to do because majority of my food preparedness is all shelf stable and doesn’t need refrigeration. I can eat everything in my refrigerator by time it warms up. So that’s what I Steve Harris is doing. Now the Honda au line is pretty much the top of the line inverter style generators there if there is anyone out there who makes one as good as the Honda, then is the Yamaha inverter style generator. I have no and of people who have written me and said How great does the Yamaha is. And if you read the feedback on Amazon about it, it’s all five star feedback. There’s very few four and three stars and there’s no two and one stars. The Yamaha is a bit cheaper than the Honda. I got one listed up on solar 123 four.com. You can also buy it from generators sales.com by itself, you can buy it already converted to try fuel and ready to go or you can buy it in the kit and install it yourself. Personally, if you’re going to go buy $1,000 Yamaha generator, spend the extra $200 and have them install the tri fuel kit for you and send it to you ready ready to go. Some of you guys are DIY, you want to know how every darn little thing works and you want to install it yourself. That’s fine, get the kit installed yourself. It’s not that hard. That way if something goes wrong, you will understand it even better. And some of you are all about that it’s all mine. I have one more thing to mention. I know that to be an excellent tool and an excellent company my Honda runs for about six hours on a full load a full tank of fuel. This is a bit of a pain. So I have an external fuel tank for it. And all my friends who have the same generators, I do have this external fuel tank for it. We all run off the external fuel tank for days. Okay, instead of running the Honda for about six hours and having to go off and refill the thing. We have six gallon external fuel tank and it plugs directly into the Honda through its cap with an adapter. I can run for about two and a half days on the external six gallon tank before I have to put more fuel into the tank. And since the fuel tank is about four feet away from the Honda, you can actually hot fuel you can pour more fuel into the tank, because it’s nowhere near the hot generator or any ignition source. Again, I’m not recommending you do that something I saw someone else do.
That won’t make sense though. I think that makes perfect sense that if you have that that distance, you’re a lot safer in doing that as opposed to pouring. You know the generators got the fuel tank on top but you’re dumping gasoline onto a hot running machine. But you’ve talked a lot about running natural gas and how we have this infinite supply to our house but that’s inside the house. So how do you how do you pull that off?
Let me let me back up for one second. The people I forgot to mention the website. The people with a great external tank is Vm sales.com. That’s Victor Michael sa L e f.com. I have no affiliation or anything with them. They have just been such a great company. Actually, I had one of their real early fuel tanks and the cap failed the pop of the bleed valve off of it just disappeared on me. I called the guy he sent me hold the acid key send me a new cap. You’ll sure he sent me a whole new dunk tank.
Oh wow. That’s great.
I mean, that’s just the way the guy is and that’s why I’m taking time to mention him on TSP is because he just been so friggin awesome. So how do you look up natural gas to your house and to the generator outside? Oh, Lord, this is about as bad this is about as bad as back feeding your house. It’s dangerous. Some of the listeners are going to have a conniption fit over What I, however, what I have seen other people do. So I’m not suggesting that you do this. We will also talk about the very legal and the very correct way to do this. But we’re going to start off with the most dangerous way first. Natural gas is a lot safer than electricity, but people are more scared of it. Maybe it’s because they see stories about houses blown up from natural gas leaks. People are not scared of propane for some reason, but they’re scared of natural gas true. If you let a bunch of natural gas leak into your house and it gets to the right air fuel ratio, and it hits the pilot flame of your furnace are your hot water heater. So it’ll blow your house into a million pieces. But there is an odorant in natural gas to let you know that it is leaking. And for it to get to the concentration where it’s dangerous to blow up your house. The odor will be so bad, you’d be puking from the odor and running out of the house like a mad person to get away from the odor and call on the gas companies that come fix us. But a bit of natural gas coming out the end of a hose outside is not going to be a problem. It’s not something you need to be scared of. But you can fill up a trash bag and watch it float away into the sky your kids will love it. If you have a problem with doing anything I’m talking about what other people have done than get a plumber plumbers work on natural gas. Get a plumber in to help you with the natural gas and even then they might not do what we’re going to talk about. Usually you have a main natural gas line running into your house in one inch iron pipe. It will then branch off and go to your furnace and your hot water heater and separate half inch iron pipes. The easiest way to get natural gas to your generator is to go to your hot water heater and turn off the natural gas valve. This will be the valve and this will be this will be the valve someplace on the line going down to the hot water heater. It is not on the water heater turning off the water heater will not turn off the natural gas going to the water heater, you have to turn off natural gas before the water heater. The natural gas line to the water heater generally runs down to the bottom of the hot water heater. And on the bottom of the half inch iron pipe is going to be going to the hot water heater you’ll find a part of the iron pipe sticking down about two or three or four inches below where it goes into the water heater. This is for any moisture that might be in the natural gas if it condenses, it drips down into that little piece of pipe which is capped off and then evaporates goes back into the gas and gets burned up in the in the burner. So this is where you’re going to tap into. What people have done is after the natural gas is turned off to the water heater is they unscrew the half inch iron cap on the bottom of this pipe. They then screw in half inch iron pipe T into the bottom and then they screw in another piece of about two inch iron pipe to the bottom of the tea and then they put the cap on the bottom and that please note that when you’re screwing on these pieces of natural gas pipe you are putting yellow colored natural gas thread sealant tape on all the threads before screwing them on. This prevents any natural gas from getting out of the threads and it will if you don’t know what this is or have not done it then do not do it ask someone like a plumber to help you. This is where you can make a big mistake and have a natural gas leak into your house that will make either a big stink or fire and explosion. Now that you have the side of the tea that is coming out Perkin perpendicular to the pipe the part that is not open towards you you screw in about two inches of half inch iron pipe you can use in yellow pipe thread sealant and I’m sure you know that you need to use a real pipe wrench to make sure all of these connections are very tight. You cannot make it tight my hand you can’t do it with a pair of pliers. You really need a pipe wrench to do it right. You can’t make a tight enough seal to do it any other way. You then screw on a half inch natural gas valve to this pipe again with yellow thread tape sealant pipe wrench. The natural gas valve is available at Home Depot or Lowe’s it’s only about four bucks. It’s brass and color as a red Turn knob handle on it make sure you have it turned off when you’re putting it on. That would be the knob perpendicular to the line when the knob is in line with the pipe the gas is flowing. So now into a natural gas valve you thread tape and you thread tape and screw in a half inch NPT brass fitting that has three eighths inch holes barb on the other end This is an off the shelf part from Home Depot, and it costs about five bucks. Now what you have done is you have put on iron pipe of valve and hose barb to the bottom of your hot water tank natural gas line. You can continue to Shop at Home Depot or Lowe’s or go to harbor freight and get a three eighths inch airline like what you get for your compressor. It comes with screw connections on each end, cut them off, so you got just got the hose get either 25 feet 50 feet or 100 feet a line just enough to go from your water heater all the way outside to where your natural gas generator is going to be outside away from your house, you will put the same three eight inch hose barb on the demand regulator on your natural gas demand regulator on your generator that is outside that you’re gonna plug natural gas line into. You should use hose clamps have both ends to screw down the airline to the holes BB so no one pulls it loose and starts letting natural gas off. Now you are wondering if you can run natural gas through an airline? The answer is yes, it’s not going to magically move through the skin of the holes and come out. Airline is normally used on 150 pounds per square inch psi air its burst rating. The psi is what the line will blow up is usually around 1200 50 psi, the natural gas you’re running through it is at four inches of water column pressure, which equates to 0.15 pounds per square inch of pressure. So the airline is overrated by 8000 times to run the natural gas through it. Methane or natural gas molecules, which is CH bar is a lot bigger than the molecule of diatomic nitrogen or oxygen that you’re breathing right now, or would be in airline. So it’s not going to magically slip through not even hydrogens must slip through the airline. So stop thinking that it will. Now the reason you don’t run airline through your house instead of iron pipe is that
in the back up here, the reason you run air run airline through your house is so iron pipe is because airline can be cut just as you’ve cut off the ends to put it in the hose barbs, it can be cut the gas is gonna leak out. If you have a fire, it can melt and then you got natural gas filling the fire. Iron Pipe won’t do this iron pipe a lot more permanent than airlines. And that’s why we are only talking about using the airline in case of a power failure. Crap hits the fan and of the world scenario. Cats and dogs living with each other all that other nice type of stuff. 100 feet is about as far as you’re going to go with a 3/8 inch airline with natural gas running through it and the pressure of the natural gas within your house. The pressure is real low, I have seen a 40,000 BTUs of natural gas run through 100 foot three eighths inch airline to a 40,000 BTUs hour theater. And to not have any problems. This will be equate to using a third of a gallon of gasoline per hour. And most generators will not use more than that. If you’re trying to run a bigger 10,000 or 220 1000 watt generator from natural gas, you’re going to have to use a bigger line or a shorter line. You’d actually use garden hose and come off your one inch line like I described half inch line if you are going to run something that big. Take my advice. I’m going to give you the end of the section on how to do it legally. But that would be the Redneck backwards third world you’re probably going to hurt yourself way of doing it. Now here is the big problem if you have kids, or you have a clumsy big oath of dog. I think Jack has a few clumsy dogs, don’t you? Yeah, yeah, big dogs, big dogs, they might accidentally hit this valve and turn it on and there won’t be anything connected to it just the hose barb there so you got natural gas steadily flowing into your house. The big problem there so if you’re stuck putting your natural gas airline in that location next to the floor low enough so the kids or dogs can get to it then you’re going to have to put in non natural gas valve but a ball valve it is also sold at Home Depot. It’s going to be a half inch ball valve and it will have a long handle on it about as long as the palm of your hand three inches. Then you have to go to granger.com GRA i n g e r.com. And there’s Granger stores also on every major city and you’ll get an act to farm Ball Valve LockOut is less than 20 bucks and they’ll let you lock the ball valve to the off position with a padlock. So no one can mess with it or accidentally turn it on. That is if you are preparing in this method. The other thing you can do is you have a basement Those usually someplace and your main one is line or your half inch line, there’ll be a tea with a plug in it. This is so you can run a gas line to a stove or natural gas dryer or something else, you can turn off natural gas to the house at the meter and unscrew the plug and then screw in the natural gas valve and BB as I had just mentioned. That way it’s in the exposed ceiling and little kids can’t get up that high to mess with it. And the big ones who can reach it know that if they mess with it, they’ll blow the house up. know if you know how to turn your natural gas on an off at the meter with a wrench. When you turn it on, turn it on very slowly take a good 10 or 15 seconds to open it up. That way the lines to your house are pressurized slowly. This is what the power company recommends. In fact, the power company says just call them they’ll come out and do it. But a lot of you guys want to know how to do this yourself. Keep in mind that since you turn off your natural gas to your entire house, if you have a pilot flaming your furnace, hot water heater or stove, you’re going to have to go through the process of realigning all those again, if you have not done this, do not do it. Ask for help if you aren’t going to do it, and I am not recommending that you do it. And neither is Jack. Again, this is not something you should be doing. It’s dangerous is not to code at all, you are probably going to have to talk with a plumber that’s friendly to you tell him what you want to do. And have them help you with some of these behind the scenes modifications that could be safer for your situation. Note, none of this will be up to code and it is all a violation of some type. And a plumber that is going to follow code will want to run an iron pipe out of the house with natural gas in it under the ground to a spot where you would put the generator outside. And he’ll give you a flex line connection to go from the iron pipe and the valve on your generator to the natural gas line. This will be exactly the same type of flex line that goes to your natural gas stove or natural gas dryer that’s Sold at Home Depot. Okay. That is how you do it to code. That is how you do it correctly. You do it just like you’re going to put in a natural gas barbecue outside your house isn’t something plumbers do all the time you have a plumber run on an iron line and have everything hooked up to code. If you can run a barbecue safely outside, you’ll be able to run your natural gas generator just as safe outside. This is the way you should be doing it if you’re going to have a natural gas generator. I love natural gas generators. If you’re serious about long term power, you want power for more than weeks you want power for months, you’re gonna have to look at a natural gas generator. Hooking up your propane to your generator is easier because the propane pig is outside the house already. Okay, you need to turn off the propane pig T into the line after the pressure regulator it gets st split into the line after the pressure regulator with iron pipe not before the pressure regulator and then run the propane through an airline like I mentioned or a hard iron gas line if you want to your generator. Make sure it’s the low pressure propane that is coming off as not coming that’s after the regulator and not off the tank. You have the same pressure that is going to your barbeque grill that is after the regulator with a propane pig. This can be all outside and none of it inside. So you can get away with the airline a lot easier. You might still want to put in a ball valve on your new T that is going into your line after your regulator and your propane tanks. And one of those lockouts that I described that way kids can’t open it up and vent all of your 500 gallons of propane into the air. You go to use your generator during an emergency and go to turn on your furnace. What’s wintertime is like there’s no propane. Again, I’m not suggesting you do any of this except for the stuff I mentioned that is legally done by licensed professionals and is up to code. This is just what I have seen other people do. And I am relating it relating it to you with all of the safety concerns. If you’re going to do the natural gas, get a hard metal line installed by a plumber outside of your house like a natural gas barbecue and connect it to your generator with a flex line. Now Jack, was the show.
Yeah, let me add to what you just said there that it ain’t that expensive to have gas run like that by a plumber and it’s the easy and safe way to do it. Imagine it’s for use at your house. It’s what you would do
Absolutely, I definitely work, especially with the wife and everything, and neighbors and stuff. How about when you move to Texas, Jackie, you gotta have natural gas, we move to Texas, it will
depend on the property that I find in with what I’m looking at, it will be highly likely that I’ll be doing bringing in a couple 1000 gallons worth of propane because it will be highly likely that I will not have gas access. If I do great if I don’t, I’ll go with propane. Are you going to put in a propane generator, like we’ve talked about? Yeah, I probably will, it’ll probably go a little lower on some other things need to be done initially. Because I already have a 6500 watt generator, and I have a 1200 watt small generator to have a battery box backup system. So it’ll be probably a second year project because there’s some other hardscaping things on the property that will come in the budget first. But that’s the long term plan is to put in a generator that could run off of that little run whole house because that’s just easier.
Yeah, yeah. So if you had natural gas or propane to it available to you, you would eventually do this. And I do it. Okay. I have natural gas hooked up, such that I can run my generator off of it both at my shop and at my house. And like I said before, natural gas burns a lot cleaner. It’s a lot easier on the oil. The generator just loves run off of it, you get a lot less wear. It’s a great fuel. It’s a wonderful fuel. Don’t believe the bad rumors about it out there. And that’s got about got me about out of breath, Jack.
Man, well, hey, I appreciate you 20 shows in two days, Steve, and I think people have a lot to think about. I’m sure it will be looking forward to your next parents.
Okay. Again, everything I talked about, I’m putting everything so you can see it and links to everything. www dot sola 123 four.com. I have all of my previous tsp shows up there, you can listen to everything I have talked about. Most of it will stream directly to your smartphone without downloading. I have buttons up there. So you can download everything directly as well. It’s a convenient place to go listen to stuff when you’re commuting, working, exercising, I’ve put it up there and made it easy for you. Of course, you can also listen to everything I’ve done on Jack’s website as well, you have the same thing. But I put everything in one spot for you. With that, guys. You’re wonderful. I’ve put a lot of work into this show is for you guys. I want you to say I want to clear up a lot of rumors. I want you to know exactly how to do it right. I want you to hear about the wrong ways to do it. So you understand it if you see it, to see your neighbor doing it wrong, you know, to stand back and not mess with it. So with that, Jack, thanks so much. Well,
Steve, again, thanks for being here, folks with that it’s been Jack spiritual today along with Steven Harris, helping you figure out a little bit better life in South Utah or even if they know
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