Tag Archives: generator

Generator Day

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Reminder to self: Today is Generator Day.

Took advantage of the nice weather to go out and do some yard cleaning. Took out the EU2000i , fired it up, plugged in an electric leaf blower, and spent an hour playing hockey with the leaves. Generator gets a workout and I get a better looking yard.

That Eu2000, by the by, has been a useful item. I put a run clock on it when I first got it and it has only about a dozen hours on the clock. This makes sense because I’ve only actually had to use it twice for emergencies, which turned out to be only of an hour or two duration, and the rest of the time are little 20-30 minute episodes of me running it every few months to verify it’s function.

For my needs, it’s enough generator..for now. The only thing I absolutely need to run is the freezer and maybe the security cams. Ive lighting that will last me a month on battery power, so no point in using the generator for that. I wouldn’t mind creating another small battery bank to keep the router running, though. Sure, its likely that a large enough power outage will take out local internet access but in the past the outages have been rather localized and I still had internet. (I was the only place in the neighborhood, actually, to still have wireless….made me very popular with the neighbors.)

It seems like every year for the past fifteen years I keep saying I’m going to get some big batteries, run a panel on the roof, and have a nice bank of backup power on hand. And, like a lot of things, I never seem to get to it. This year is proving to be the year of I-Should-Have-Taken-Care-Of-That. No blackouts or rolling brownouts yet, but fire season will be here soon and you never know what’s gonna happen next.

Whatever I wind up doing, it won’t be cheap. And right now is not the time to be spending money unnecessarily. But, I suppose I can keep an eye on Craigslist for panels or similar items that wind up hitting the market as people start seeing their cash reserves drop. Or as the local renewable energy* places try to drum up revenue.

* = As I recall, you cannot create or destroy energy, you can only change it. Thus, wouldn’t it seem that energy is not ‘renewable’? You’re not ‘making’ energy, you’re simply taking it from somewhere else.

Generator day

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Rather nice day out there today. Good day to crack open the Hardigg case where I store the EU2000 and make today into Generator Day.

I’ve had the Eu2000 for about five or so years now and I have been quite pleased with it. There have been a fw short-term outages where I’ve had to run it for a few hours and I’ve been very pleased with it. I have no real need to run the entire house, rather my needs are extremely simple..keep the freezers freezing, and the router routing. Thats pretty much it. Heating is taken care of with the kerosene heaters, lighting is taken care of with the Goal0 lights and some AGM batteries, and everything else is mostly a non-critical system.

Although the EU2000 has been a reliable piece of gear, I will probably at some point get a second one. There’s a lot of piece of mind to not having all my eggs in one basket and the two generators can be daisychained to provide higher output should the need arise.

When I got mine, I think they were on sale for about a grand. They’re a bit more nowdays but still, in my opinion, a very good purchase. If you decide to get one, don’t forget all the ancillary gear that goes with them..air filters, oil, gas can, fuel funnel, heavy-duty extension cords, cable lock, etc, etc.

Battery inspection and generator run

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Well, its the first of the month. Two things I gotta do today – battery checks and generator run. I decided that every month Im going to check he batteries in the devices that I leave batteries in. Ideally, this will be frequent enough that if a battery does crap the bed it won’t have time to really do the horrible corrosive damage that usually occurs. We shall see.

Generator run is just a good idea. Haul it out every other month or so, run it for a half hour under various loads, clean it up and put it back in storage. Simple.

Yeah, sometimes its a pain in the ass but its one of those things where a lousy thirty minutes of minimal effort will save you a metric buttload of headache further down the road.

So, I’ve got about a dozen devices on my checklist for inspection, and then a half hour on the generator. Nothing sexy about it, but this sort of thing is what you do when youre a survivalist.

Some folks just Will Not Learn

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The world is populated by idiots.

Im in the bank this morning and the teller and the woman next to me are talking about the power outages that continue in many areas around here. This woman is saying how she hasn’t been able to charge her laptop, that she has no water (well pump), that she’s going to lose the food in her freezer, and how she hates being in the dark.

I gently steered the conversation to ask her if, when this is over, if it will change her behaviors and perhaps she’ll keep some battery-powered chargers around for her cell phone. “Oh, no..this almost never happens.”

You know, your house almost never burns down, you almost never have your car stolen, you almost never get cancer, and you almost never get disabled from your job….yet you have insurance in place for that, so why not this?

For these… clueless idiots…. it appears it truly is better to curse the darkness than buy generator.

My buddy on the other side of town is still without power after a transmission tower (not a power pole, mind you…a transmission tower) decided to go horizontal not far from him. Is he inconvenienced? Yes. He has no internet. Is he still in the game? Absolutely. He has not one but two of the Honda generators. He’s got his freezer, fridge, lights, cell phone charger, and all the other accoutrements of civilization up and running. And he has some stored gas on hand to keep it that way. As his neighbors live out the lifestyle of “Home & Garden: North Korea Edition”, my buddy drinks hot coffee, has lights, has communication, and can continue to run his business. (And also the means to keep it if someone decides his bit of civilization needs to become their bit of civilization.)

I still need to do some after action things… I need to top off the tank on the generator, get all the cords in one place, put some emergency lighting in that one place, log the run time for the generator, pick up some accessories for the extension cords, etc. But, all in all, the generator did the trick.

The EU2000 is too small to run the entire house, but Im thinking of picking one circuit in the house and seeing if I can’t have an electrician come in and set that one circuit up with a transfer switch. That way, I can have one room of the house with the outlets running. The alternative, which I’m also seriously considering, is an entirely new circuit throughout the house of emergency ‘red outlets’ that are completely independent of the house panel and would solely be connected to the generator.

The Honda EU2000 usually runs right around a grand. Worth it.