I wish when I was your age I pursued life safety systems I was always interested, but did not have enough self confidence. I enjoy watching your videos.
If you are switching the neutrals you should probably make sure that the contactors are designed so the neutral closes in first and opens last, otherwise you might run for a moment without neutral which would be very bad. Still unless I'm mistaken a missing neutral won't trip a GFCI so I'm not sure what's up with that. The other thing with switching the neutral is that now your generator needs a bonded neutral, before you needed a floating neutral. And unrelated to the neutral issue, I would suggest adding a delay between power out and generator start if practical. If a recloser is bringing power back on after just a couple seconds you probably don't want to wear out the generator.
The generator is and always has had a bonded neutral as far as for neutral closing in first I am not concerned about it as contactors are pretty fast even if the neutral reconnection was slow all of the sensitive electronic equipment is on UPS's to protect it as for the delay that is a change I made afterwards where it will start 10 seconds after power loss
One thing's for sure, if you lose power from the grid you will definitely hear about it! Between all those beeps and the generator kicking in it should be pretty clear 🙂 It's always interesting to me to see the different power system and standards you have in North America. in the UK, it's very rare for a house to have more than 1 phase as our phases are all 240V. Most houses also have mains gas and use that for heating and virtually nobody has AC, though this will be changing as we try to de-carbonise our energy and switch to heat pumps. We also have mandatory whole-house protection for ground faults, so no need for GFCI outlets.
In UK all earth's are protected with a earth colour sleave to stop shorting out on live or neutral when installing or taken out a fuse board. Most electric panels for UK are 230 volts shower 20/30 fuse lights 6amp fuse cookers 20/30 amp's sockets 15/20/30amps, hot water 15amps. We don't use radial on long runs, ring main on longer runs
I'm just informing you that you can get a propane tank and have a truck fill it up whenever you need it. We have a 500-gallon propane tank that we get filled 2 or 3 times a year. We run our stove, oven, water heater, and heat.
@@nics-systems-electric thanks for asking. Many have learnt the hard way that hearing is affected gradually by different power tools. It can affect different frequency ranges over time. A good rule is power tool on, hearing protection on (and other eye protection etc). Same applies for air handling system fan noise. The multi-tool cutting is a good example with the frequencies produced over an extended time. And a big thumbs up to you as you're knowledge and willingness to learn is awesome. Regards from an old "tradey" as we call them in Australia.
@@ForTheBirbsI've learnt the hard way why you should always wear hearing protection when working around loud equipment. Which is why I now have tinnitus which is annoying as all hell. I worked as light and sound engineer as well as a ground keeper. Pretty sure the only time I was ear plugs was when doing the light/sound stuff. Other than that when sitting on the lawn mover/gardening I just had my headphones in listening to music.
If my tinnitus could time travel back to when I was Nic’s age it would say “put in ear plugs.” You don’t realize the damage is cumulative until one day the ringing doesn’t go away.
Great setup. If you wanted since you left the orginal breaker in place and you can unplug the normal power wire from the generator, you could have run a temp wire from the generator to the old breaker (with the main in the panel OFF) and powered up the building. The main breaker and the unplugged cord would mean there is no power where you where working. I don't know if you would want to or its even possible.. but it might be cool to run a small circuit back to the house and use the interlock you removed to power up some circuits in the house for like the fridge and lights and a few outlets so there would be power there if your area experiences an extended outage.
4:51 Kohler makes both residential and commercial grade generators. They don’t seem as commonly used as other brands of residential generators probably due to their higher price tag.
Noticed that sub panel in the basement in your house is a FPE stab lock breaker panel. Those things are massive fire and safety hazards. You should strongly consider replacing it. Those breakers have something like a 50% failure rate and will not trip.
Yes it's a federal pioneer panel and I believe they have a 24%-38% failure to trip rate I may move the breakers over to the new panel someday. Though some articles say a 60% to 80% failure rate so who knows for sure. It could be a very expensive upgrade if I need to change breakers to ark fault protection as well
Yes it's a two pole 30 amp circuit feeding the garage subpanel which is fed off of a 100 amp sub panel in the house which is fed off a 200 amp main panel and someday maybe I will switch breakers over from the federal pioneer panel but it could be quite costly if I have to change to arc fault breakers
Damn! I'm really impressed with that setup and even the detail where you did fuse the generator signal wire, most people would not bother or not realize the hazard that would be present if you fail to do so... Question, you have a minty power setup out there but what about your house? Is there a circuit or 2 that goes back into the house just for general lighting so in the event of an outage you can at least see, charge a phone and plug in an appliance without running cords? Also I see a smoke alarm missing in your house WTF??😅🤣
Yeah the smoke alarms are always taken down they cause false alarms I am rectifying the issue with that and no there is no power in the house it would be difficult to make generator circuits as the house has four different panels and in general is a bit of a mess
I've only watched part of the video so far (I need to leave soon) but I couldn't help noticing that the breaker in the house is an old Stab-Lok. These are notorious for safety issues including failure to trip on overcurrent. You should probably look into this and for safety this will likely mean replacing the entire panel.
The FPE panels lost their UL certification. I’ve heard stories of insurance companies refusing to pay if they find out there is a FPE panel and there is an electrical fire. With your talents, it should be a relatively simple changeout.
@@nics-systems-electric damn, I forgot about that. Expensive indeed. In any case keep up the good work. You remind me of me when I was your age. I loved to do all of the stuff you’re getting to do.
@@ClearlyDigital I may just swap breakers for a one for one replacement and not go to the arc fault route as we have lots of shared circuits so you would almost have to do every single one
Like 2:00 or so. Did you're vacuum break? Ifso was it not picking up? Generac is not the best from what I've heard lol.. LOL SO MANY BACK BOXES!!! Also that saw makes funny noises.. Me the entire time he had the panel cover off: Be careful dude don't kill you're self..Let me guess, No hammer? Be thankful for emergency lighting.. Milwaukee cordless aye? (Not Canadian just think saying 'aye' is cool) Also I believe (could be wrong) in the US we use White as hot and black as neutral. Please don't quote me on this one.
Very wrong indeed. Neutral wires in the US for 120/240v (and even 120/208v 3-phase) are always white. Phase conductors can be a variety of colors other than just black.
Is there a way to keep the generator running for a bit after the utility power returns and the ATS switches the load back to utility? It’s not a good thing to start (or stop) a generator while under load, nor is it particularly good for the loads themselves to get the nasty power produced while the generator is slowing down. Large generators also run for a bit with no load before shutting down to allow the windings to cool down a bit.
I can set a time delay to return to utility however there is no way to have it transferred before the generator is turning off as the only way the transfer switch knows when to switch is by seeing power others there or not there
@@nics-systems-electric if the transfer switch relies on the utility power to be there so it knows to transfer, that’s half the battle already done. It already does that now, right? All that would be needed is for the generator controller to keep the generator running for a little while. Or am I missing something?
@@ClearlyDigital I the transfer switch will prioritize generator power so if you have both sources there it will put the load on generator power however once that generator power dips below a certain voltage it will switch over to utility power but then if there is other utility power gone or utility power and generator power it will switch to generator power
@@nics-systems-electric ah, gotcha. To make it work the way I’m suggesting it would have to prioritize utility over generator but then you’d lose your 30 second delay on startup.
