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Comment by fasteddie31003 | Hacker News Reader

That is a huge generator for a residential house. I just got a 8kw natural gas generator https://www.amazon.com/Champion-Power-Equipment-100416-Gener... for like $1300. That Generac is probably north of $17k installed. You don't need your sauna, arc welder, and bitcoin mining rigs running at the same time during the couple days a year without power.

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This is my blog post, it was $20K installed

I have a 7kw portable generator that will run on Gasoline or NG, but I wanted the entire house to have power no matter what

Out of interest, why a single large unit rather than multiple smaller ones? I’m using two 5kva janky (~$1500) Honda generators that I modified to have remote start, and use a pair of victron multipluses to turn the garbage outputs into a single lovely smooth sine wave. We run one or both depending on the need - usually just one, as our OPzS batteries will do 20kW. I figured RAIG was better than going for one big genset - that and everything has to be human-luggable, as our nearest road is a few km distant. Also means that if I have a failure, I can go buy whatever junk is locally available and plug it in.

I monitor and automate the whole shebang using a venusgx, mqtt, rpi with openhab. Touch wood, two years without anything exploding.

Other nice element is that the inputs are agnostic, so hydro can run in parallel - and I can do nanogrid coupling with frequency shifting for the more remote wind inputs.

Obviously a different use case to you, but the idea of having a single and expensive point of failure doesn’t sit well with me.

I have a system built for monitoring our water tanks, built using influxdb, grafana and a bunch of custom code.

It works great, and I hope will be low/no maintenance for years.

But I'm under no illusion that anyone else will be able to do anything with it should I shuffle off this mortal coil.

Using one big genny in a straightforward way is a sensible call for a vital infrastructural component IMO.

As they say, Keep things simple because fools are very ingenious.

Yeah, influx and Grafana are the reporting end of my stuff, which includes cistern levels, fuel levels, and all the other gumph required to run tiny water and power grids - but openhab provides the underpinnings, and hasn’t required me to do anything custom beyond defining fields and logic. In theory, anyone could pick up where I left off.

How is the sound? We have a NG generator at the school (in the basement) and you can’t hear it there buried as it is underground but ima residential setting these can be very loud, no?

Not loud at all, like a high idling car. The Liquid Cooled ones are much quieter (Or at least a nice sound)

The air cooled ones are not as nice

I have the 22kW model which I believe is air cooled. Living under Texas’ “freedom grid”. I would say it’s kind of louder than I’d like, probably like standing right next to my Tacoma, but when the power goes out it sounds like sweet angels singing.

Ah, I missed that you have a liquid cooled model. Thanks!

> I wanted the entire house to have power no matter what

Why though? Do you live somewhere with unreliable electricity?

>You don't need your sauna, arc welder, and bitcoin mining rigs running at the same time during the couple days a year without power.

Says you. But who are you to tell someone that can afford the lifestyle to which one has become accustomed to be sustained under any circumstances?

You're joking right?

No. I am not. If someone has money, they can do whatever they want with it. Some rando on the internet telling someone else they shouldn't do something because they don't agree with it is the joke. There's a difference between opining on how public policy is applied, but telling a private individual what they can do is just asinine. I totally realized that this is arguing with a fence post level of conversation, as the internet is the one place to be guaranteed that logic need not apply

> But who are you to tell someone that can afford (*) the lifestyle

(*) Externalities not included

You need 13-15kw just to start a 5-ton AC unit.

4000 sqft house with high humidity 90 deg summer days (so anywhere in the SE US) will need at least 8-tons of AC, so 2 units, and that's ~24kw right there if you need to cool the whole house.

But the more common practice is to run just one of your two units and then have plenty of room to run all the small wattage things in the house without needing to actively budget power.

Having lived through more than a few week+ outages in Jul/Aug/Sept heat (including 3, 6, and 8 week outages), I certainly see the value if you can afford it.

Comfortable, but not necessarily extravagant.

ETA: We also learned our lesson relying on NG and converted to dual fuel with a 2-week supply of propane.

If you need AC in summer, I believe plenty of power is generated by solar rather than generator.

Tesla's calculation comes out to about $200k for equivalent capacity solar plus battery.

Even deducting $25k from that for the cost of the generator and another $10k in required electrical modifications, that would more than double electricity costs (vs the grid) based on 20-yr lifespan and payback, before interest.

Smaller generators give out crap waveforms, fail in tedious ways and are generally not good for things that are sensitive.

A big generator won't stall if your AC kicks in at the same time you have the oven on, or something similar.

So if you have regular outages, I can certainly see the appeal of a 27kw generator.

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