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Comment by monstermunch | Hacker News Reader

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

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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?

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