nivek
As Above So Below
On impulse power this morning. Power out. It's headed into the 90s and is humid as hell. I fired up the generator but don't have it permanently wired into the breaker panel. I ran two 12/2 UF cables down to my shed about 100' away and pounded a ground rod in down there. Each cable is connected to a hunk of 12/2 SO cord with a male 20 amp plug on it. Up inside my garage there's a surface mounted quad outlet where those two circuits terminate.
I put a plug & outlet on my boiler so that gets juice with a short extension cord. Heat & hot water.
I run another upstairs for the refrigerator and all the FIOS crap, which is how I am here today. Gasoline powered internet access.
Did it that way because I already had most of the materials so there wasn't much cost involved. Also because a good friend wired a generator panel into his house, got carried away and turned it into a copper mine. One day a bolt of lightning touched the transformer at the pole he was fed from and said 'oooo! delicious!' when it hit all that grounded wiring he put in. Smoked every bit of cable entering the house plus most of the stuff downstream from the panel. Hindsight being clear, perhaps another ground rod or two or mat would have been in order.
So today I am thinking of burying a 10/3 UF. Leave the generator end on SO cord and a 4 prong 20 amp twist lock. Most generators these days are 30 amps, hence the 10 AWG - a little future proofing. I'd drop an L14-30 outlet near my panel to terminate it inside the house, then leave an L14-30 socket cap dangling from the panel attached to - for now - a 20 amp double pole breaker. There are interlock kits that physically force a 'break before make' on the main breaker - meaning it has to be turned off before the generator breaker can be energized. If I ever buy a new generator I can just change the plug in the shed and the breaker to 20 amps. This way I can have it conveniently wired into the panel but not permanently attached.
Fascinating, eh? I'm just thinking out loud and all the extension cords are a p.i.t.a. This happens infrequently and all this crap is already in place and I have a bazillion extension cords. But it would be nice to just fire it up. plug two things in and operate a breaker to have every outlet in the house live. Just a question of how much you have on at once.
And as I write it all just came back on ........
A few months back I buried a 12/3 UF cable, 150 feet underground and 50 feet above ground on both ends, 200 feet total unbroken cable to feed 120volts on an 10 amp breaker although I will never hit 10 amps on that wire...Its mainly running a window ac unit for my workshop, fed from my house, the ac uses a max of 5.8 amps, or so it says, and I run a 2 amp fan from the same circuit but not continuously...So at any given time I'm pulling a max of about 8 amps from that line but most times I don't use the fan and the ac at the same time, only in the hottest part of the afternoon when I'm in the building, really I'm averaging about 6 amps continuous on that line when the ac is running...I have another line which I buried a few years ago, its a 10/3 UF cable connected to the house, at the same distance of 200 feet and the ac unit was on that line originally, its a 20 amp max line but I needed the power from that line for other uses...I also have my solar power system which runs all the lighting in the building, most of which is LED, some incandescent, solar also powers the circuits for my computers and servers...I need to start building more solar panels, I have all the materials to build 6 more, to keep expanding that power source and I want to buy a wind generator kit and install it with my solar panels as another back up, we have many windy days as well as cloudy days...I do not have a generator although I could also build one, it would be great to have one that ran off propane instead of gasoline, I already burn propane for my heaters in the winter and keep propane on hand along with high octane gasoline...If the grid were to fail at this moment I would have 80 lbs. of propane, 20 gallons of 93 octane pure gasoline, and my solar power system...I could jump the solar power to the 10/3 buried cable and feed power back to my house but I couldn't run the stove or dryer or central ac unit because of power requirements...I could run the frig, water heater, lights and a window unit ac with the solar power capacity I have at this moment but if a few cloudy days in a row I would have to start turning off things and conserve, I need a wind generator connected to that system and it would be great to have a propane powered generator...
...