That’s permit work which means a layer of approvals and costs. And in my case the gas meter and electrical panel are on opposite sides of the house so I’d be looking at a heck of a lot of piping (or more likely buried UF-B) to capitalize on it.
If you absolutely must have backup power I could understand it. But at that point you’re probably into automatic generator territory which sort of begs why not get solar and a big LFP battery bank which will at least nominally pay for itself?
Part of the issue here is that the oderant condenses out at higher pressures. That and it’s a tradeoff of plant cost and line pressure - higher pressures require more steel so they tradeoff pressure, pipe diameter and wall thickness for lowest overall cost for a given capacity. And safety of course, pipes will break. I’m continually amazed at the level of design detail considered when these standards were set in place in the late 1800s.
I worked in Hunt oil HQ a number of years ago. I remember they had this posted for the adding mercaptan. Nearly three hundred die in New London school explosion
This and another school gas explosion are what drove the formation of the Professional Engineering license in Texas.
Randy, I own this generator: Duromax dual fuel XP12000EH. It is 12000 startup watts and 9000 running watts. (it is a little less running on propane and probably natural gas, too) Still, this at least gives me some indoor heat when I need it. I have NOT wired it into the home electrical in any way. I bought some extension cords (heavy duty cords)
It runs on propane very well. I have NOT run it on gasoline, as I wanted to avoid the mess of dealing with pouring it and storing it. (Although I do have five, five gallon tanks I bought for another purpose) I also have six of the propane tanks for my grill. Everything, is on my covered porch and in a breezeway.
This conversion kit is supposed to work for the Duromax XP12000EH although I haven’t bought one yet. I have a natural gas tap just off of my patio. It was installed when the home was built for an outside in-place BBQ grill, which I never built. I have considered buying it to give it a try. It would be nice to have a source of power that didn’t require me changing tanks or filling up the gasoline tanks.
Thankfully, in the recent power outage, it was not necessary to start it up. We had power restored after breakfast on Tuesday.
My heart goes out to those whose power has taken days to be restored.
I know a few people who have converted their Honda EU2000 to run on propane and are very happy with it. And a couple people with dual or tri fuel running on propane with good results.
But as noted, it does reduce the rating when running on propane, as you can’t get as much energy out of the maximum amount of propane that you can fit in the cylinder with the proper amount of air at atmospheric pressure.
I have two 20lb propane tanks and a natural gas line right next to where I run the generator. Propane and natural gas does derate the generator. I’m also using extension cords, with good intentions to someday put in a switch panel. In the last 4ish years I’ve only needed a generator twice so this is still low priority. My main worry with gasoline is if we had a city wide power outage could I get it. Not sure if natural gas would be anymore reliable in an emergency.
Not sure I’d be all that enthused about feeding that beast with gasoline either:
Runtime at 50% Load 8
[…]
Fuel Tank Capacity Gasoline 8.3 Gallons
About a gallon per hour or effectively 5 jerry cans per day. And of course there’s going to be lengthy downtime because it’s advisable to let it cool off before refueling. Some sort of external tank could obviate the downtime but that’s still a lot of schlepping fuel around.
I went the interlock breaker route and feed both phases of the panel with single-phase 120V (imperative to verify your panel doesn’t have any multiwire branch circuits before doing this). It’s the least expensive route and extremely versatile relative to individual transfer switches, but less-capable than a main transfer switch … although you’re probably not going to be feeding in more than 240V/50A with a portable generator.
I keep multiple jerry cans of stabilized gasoline around for the generators. If you’ve got gas-powered lawn equipment you’ll have a steady means to dispose of old fuel with a basic rotation schedule.
Gas system is less susceptible to disruption than electric grid. Residential demand for gas also plummets when there’s a power outage since furnaces stop running.
The Hondas have decent pulse operated fuel pumps. Unfortunately the EU2000 and EU2200 fuel tanks seem to have different threads, so the caps that will vacuum pull fuel from an external tank with the 2000 won’t properly seal on the 2200. Either that, or the cap I bought for the purpose is junk. If I ever get that solved, I’ll probably go with a 3.5 or 5 gallon boat fuel tank, since their detachable hose fittings seem to be well proven.
Hoping that parallel-capable 120V/240V inverter generators become more common. If the starting/running wattages worked out I’d consider a pair in the 6-7kW running range for the house: run both to start HVAC compressor (with a soft start natch), drop down to one unit running once startup is over with or just run 120V loads.
I switched over to a dual setup with a pair of these. The combined output is like 48 amps at 240 volts and the parallel kit has a 50 amp outlet. I haven’t tried the air conditioning with it yet but in theory it should work (especially with a slow start kit).
Nice find. My casual searching had those at closer to $1500.
The thing that’s got me confused about that parallel kit is the lack of a neutral wire. I’ve only encountered the Powerhorse kit that has the neutral wire, and even then it’s presumably supplementing a 240V outlet on the ‘primary’ generator.
I think it’s bonded neutral versus floating neutral use case (e.g. stand alone use versus plugged into a building). Don’t need all the wires unless the use case is stand alone and the generator is grounded.
The thing that’s got me confused about that parallel kit is the lack of a neutral wire. I’ve only encountered the Powerhorse kit that has the neutral wire, and even then it’s presumably supplementing a 240V outlet on the ‘primary’ generator.
You are correct that the lack of the neutral connection is a problem.
The A-iPower PK12000 parallel kit is not suitable to connect to your house through an inlet/interlock and provide 120/240V split service. It would work fine if you only wanted to power purely 240V loads. You can see that the box only shows 240V on it (vs 120/240v on the generator output). The neutral connection on the 14-50R in the box has no connection so you are missing the equivalent of the center tap necessary to run 120v branch circuits.
If you were to draw out the wiring diagram of this parallel setup and your home, a 120v home circuit would use one of hot legs, but the neutral wiring would go back to the neutral-ground bond in your panel. With no neutral path back to the generator, the circuit would not be complete. The only path is now through ground wiring (unquestionably against code), and the generators are floating neutral so you still have no return path to the source.
I bought this parallel setup and then realized the issue so I ended up altering this kit to include proper neutral wiring to support 120/240v.
How did you alter the kit? Can your mod be used with a double-throw transfer switch?
Also curious how you did this. One gets the feeling that one could simply Use the L14-30 outlets to rig parallel operation with a “Y” adapter, but that’s a touch ill-advised as that’s essentially a suicide cord (could be made safer with individual switches to the leads).
The manual for the GXS7100iRD is a touch ambiguous on 120V/240V operation as well:
The parallel section on the other hand is not at all ambiguous - it’s only single-phase 240V.
- Plug in the 240 Volt AC, single phase, 60Hz electrical loads into parallel kit receptacles and turn on first load. Allow generator output to stabilize before plugging in the next load.
Still a bit of a hack job, but this is what I did:
The main reason I swapped in the L14-30R is so that I had a place to add a neutral-ground bond. While my main use is to connect to my house, I have a EV charger that is a great way to exercise and test the parallel setup since it can pull 40 amps. When charging the car like this, I need a neutral-ground bond or the charger shows a wiring fault (as expected). So my exercise setup is this parallel kit with the EV charger on the 14-50R, and a bonding plug (jumper between W and G) on the L14-30R. Works great. When connected to the house, I leave the neutral floating and rely on the bond in the panel.
Here are the issues with this setup that I am willing to accept:
The 50a and 30a breakers in the parallel box are only wired to one hot leg each. That was fine when this was a 240v only kit since killing either leg breaks the 240V circuit. But now that I made it 120/240v capable, a tripped breaker is only going to cut power to one leg. Any 120V loads on the other leg would still be live. I am OK with this because my main use case is into a house inlet with interlock, and the house connection is already on a 50amp double pole breaker in my panel. The breakers in the box are redundant in my setup.
Using the L14-30P extensions cords to replace the parallel cables makes the altered kit effectively a 30a suicide cable with a couple extra receptacles in it. The reason they make separate parallel ports on generators to avoid the possibility of someone doing something dumb. I understand why I did what I did, and know to only use this kit for my intended purpose.
So with a simple 50a generator inlet and interlock, the kit works great for 120/240V and remains neutral floating - the bond is in my house panel.
Double throw would be fine too. Just remember if your transfer is switching neutral (3 pole), then you would need to bond neutral to ground on the kit side like I do when EV charging with the L14-30R.
I was thinking something like that, just completely DIY using a big watertight J-box with switches for each generator cord to disable suicide cord functionality should I wish to pull a generator for refueling.
