Wow. :smack: Is insurance actually going to cover that damage?
It never occurred to me to start the generator with the cord not plugged in, so the outside receptacle would be female. Could be male, though.
There is no 240v or any other voltage to the receptacles. Just a box with sockets. The generator plugs into the outside one and an extension cord plugs into the inside one. Just a neater version of drilling a hole in the wall and putting an extension cord through it, or running an extension cord out an open door.
Three reasons I haven’t done it: 1) I’m lazy. 2) It’s freezing outside. 3) With my luck I’d find the house wiring with the drill bit.
Do not do it. The item in B is called a suicide cord.
If you do not have good wiring experience leave your main panel alone. If you have to ask how to do it, don’t. I do not mean to be hard, but I do not want your family going to a funeral.
Also 1500 watts is only 12.5 amps.
Watch out for the kerosene heaters inside. They consume O2 and put out Co2 and CO.
oops I miss read the wattage.
Opening the main and connecting the generator to your panel does not make it safe for the line men. YOur house has three lines. Two hots and a neutral. The breaker only opens the two hots. And your generator has a floating neutral unless you put in a ground rod.
This.
Unless you know very well what you are doing don’t even get near the panel. When the professional employees do these things they have detailed safety precautions and procedures which they they are trained to follow scrupulously. And even then there are accidents.
With your average home user having little knowledge or discipline (or even common sense) I would say “don’t do it” is the best advice.
I can echo the sentiments here: Don’t do it.
You start pulling greater than 20A (which is certainly possible since the generator has well beyond that in capacity), and you’re going to start melting your wires and potentially cause a fire. Because you’ll have bypassed the overcurrent protection for these lines, the first sign of a problem will likely be the smell of smoke as your house catches on fire.
Your plugs are part of branch circuits, only rated for 20A (most of them), and the wires are too small for any higher amperage.
What you need is a Generator Transfer Switch. See this link:
Thanks to all for the good advice! Went out today and got a better extension cord and a battery powered carbon monoxide detector. I won’t be in this house long enough to worry about wiring in a transfer switch but will probably do it at the next place.
If you dont want to drill holes in the wall or leave a door or window cracked open you can do this.
take a piece of wood a few inches high and make it the right size and shape to lay in the bottom of a window frame. And such that you can bring the window pane back down on it. Cut a hole in the piece of wood for your extension cord to go through.
Even better, drill a hole (or holes) the diameter of the extension cord body, not the head, and then cut the board in half bisecting the hole(s). You can use a 2x4 with the holes drilled 4" long through the 2" face.
Lay 1/2 of the board on the sill, lay the extension cords through the ~3/8" diameter troughs, lay the other half of the board on top, then pull the window closed. For sideways-sliding windows the same idea works with theboard vertical, it’s just a little more difficult to install the cords. Hint: duct tape.
My house has a big hole in the outside wall where the dryer duct goes. Disconnect the duct and run the cords thru the hole. Pack insulation to keep the outside out.
I’ve been meaning to ask and it looks like this is the right thread to do so. Ages ago when the internet was young, a buddy of mine was looking to buy a generator. Using a gopher (remember those?) he found a 10-kw unit for about $800 When he showed me the site, I laughed out loud. As a train-nut I recognized the gern instantly: I was off of a refirgerator car. We were guessing they were refurbished ones.
He wound up going with something more portable so the site is long lost. In the generator market now, myself I’ve been trying to google it up without siccess. So, can anybody out there direct me to a company selling refurbished railroad generators?
Our landlord hooked up a 7 KW 220v generator during the recent long power outage here in NH. He didn’t want his pipes to freeze which also avoided us freezing as an added benefit. He had a friend with him who I think is an electrician who seemed to know what he was doing.
Luckily there is an old hot tub out the back that doesn’t work but it has a four wire 220 volt cable and a 50 amp circuit breaker on the switchboard. That was a perfect place to feed the power into and that got the whole house up and running including the oil furnace and water pump etc.
Obviously we kept the main switch off but … comments above are correct. It was just one switch position away from very bad things potentially happening. Of course electrocuting someone outside would be the worst thing but I was also a little concerned after we got the grid power back and the generator was still connected with the breaker off that someone might thoughtlessly throw the “hot tub” breaker back on. I shudder to think what would happen to the generator then. Hopefully just a breaker would trip but who knows …
It was still somewhat “jury rigged” because during the early part of the outage, you could not buy a four pin plug anywhere so they just jammed the wires into the socket on the generator without a plug.
I overheard someone in Burger King talking about feeding a generator into his dryer socket.
If I didn’t have expert help, I would just use the generator independent of the house with a good thick extension cord through a window or something that would at least let me run a little heater, lights and microwave etc.
I run an extension cord through the window and with a power strip plug the TV, satellite receiver and a floor lamp in. The water pump a unplug from a standard outlet in the pump house and plug into the generator.
The Winter we had no power for two weeks wired the gas furnace to a cord and plugged it into the above power strip.
Just an anecdote to liven up the holidays, but my grandfather was a nut about being prepared for the worst, even though he lived in suburban St. Louis. When he built his new house in the 1930’s, he installed an enormous diesel generator in the basement for emergencies. It was big enough to power the entire 2-story house continuously and completely, and it wasn’t hard for him to build since he was an accomplished electrical inventor and had a complete machine shop at his disposal.
He never had a real chance to use it in a serious disaster, but he would fire it up about once a month just to make sure everything worked and to scare the neighbors. It sure was a bad-ass machine; the whole house rumbled and rattled until his wife yelled at him to turn it off before the roof fell in.
Someday, let me tell you about that roof…
Is this where we make electrical carvings and switch off the potatoes?
They have one of those at the place I work. They fire it up about once a month for testing. It’s loud as hell and diesel fumes leak into the building (it’s right next to the loading dock doors that are opened a lot.). Can’t imagine having that in the house!
Now you know how my long-suffering grandmother felt.
I had to rig a generator to my house last year during an extended power outage, but I’m an electrician so the following things I did were not out of my realm.
- turned off main breaker, remove meter from its socket, then took off the panel cover
- disconnected the neutral wire from the panel
- brought 6500watt generator from the shed to the garage (it’s on wheels now!)
- made a 75’ cord from 6/3 SO cable with a 30 amp twist lock male connector on one end and plugged that into the 30 amp generator outlet
- disconnected the 30 amp electric dryer wiring from its breaker in the main panel (have gas dryer, don’t even need the circuit)
- used the 30 amp breaker (from 5 above) to back-feed the panel with the 75’ cord coming from the generator
- made sure all connections were tight and safe
- located the generator close to the overhead garage door
- opened garage door about 18 inches
- positioned large box fan so it would cool the generator as it ran and also blow exhaust out of garage
- start generator and enjoy the sweet, delicious electrons that flowed throughout my humble abode
- power came back on ten minutes later (jk! it was more like 12 hours later.)
When using a transfer switch or killing the main breakers, how do you find out then when utility power has been restored?