generator
 

i was told if your power goes out to unplug your stove and run your generator to the outlet. pull the main breaker,shut off all your other breakers. start your generator and turn on what breaker you need.eg tv sump pump etc.
any ideas thoughts on this?
thanx
tom

Yes, you can. But you can also kill a lineman 10 miles away if you forgot to turn off your main breaker or a family member turns it back on accidentally. You need a component called a transfer switch to mechanically make the mistake impossible. There are many sources for transfer switches because every electrical switchgear mfg. makes them. Square D, Cutler Hammer, GE, and others. Go to an electrical wholesale house and ask. The installation of a standby generator is no simple task, unless you have the training for the project. I recommend you find a LICENSED electrician to do the job for you. Part of the hourly rate we charge is an intangible called peace of mind. Good 'lectric may seem expensive, but so are house fires and wrongful death lawsuits...

seems harbor freight has whole house transfer switches for under $300 for a 200 amp switch. northern has a 100 amp for about $200.

back feeding a 220 volt circuit (dryer, stove, air conditioner, welder) is the cheapest, most dangerous method. probably illegal in all states.

lowes, northern have the emergency circuit transfer switches for under $200, but my family wants the convience of whole house emergency power.

And Cutler Hammer & Generac offer a package deal, transfer switch, emergency panel and genset.

Well Said Ozarka. I agree completely.

I have a second plugin behind the frig and the furnce ran through a plug with a second box there. Those plugs are wired to 2 plugins outside and NOTHING else. Now when the power goes out I start the generator and plug it into the outside plugs. Then I can move where the frig and furnace are pluged in to power them. No chance of backfeeding lines and I still have heat and cold food.

Best thing is I can tell as soon as the power comes on since the lights work then. If you have to flip the main breaker you may not catch that the power came back on.

I have heard of lineman getting electrocuted from a generator on a home back feeding the line but have never known of a person even getting a shock. Just from my minor experience with electricity it would seem very unlikely that would happen. If the small home generator was somehow connected to the grid it would be severly damages in a very short time by the excess load on it. Imagine a small home generator that cannot even support the full load of the home trying to supply the electrical needs of everyone hooked to the main line.
It seems very unlikely that could happen.

unlikely,,,,yes.....but not impossible.

you can also make your own emergency transfer circuit switches by using three way light switches. not whole house transfer switch mind you, but circuit transfer switches.

Ok someone correct me if I'm wrong. To the best of my memory from talking with linemen friends. A transformer is a transformer from either direction power is supplied. If you have 220/240 coming out the low side from high tension side, then cut power off of the high side and feed it 220/240 from the low side you will get the high tension input as output backfeeding the high tension side. I know they do emergency work all over and are deathly afraid of home generators. If they think they hear one they will knock all fuses out on the poles before getting near any power lines. I believe that has become standard procedure now.

Please use caution peoples lives do depend on it.

Tony

Another danger with backfeeding a receptical is that you need a cord with male ends on both sides - so you can eaisly have live ends out in the open.

Typically a power outage gets the adreniline going a little, & a person gets kinda hyped up.

Not a good time to be fooling around with remembering special things to do or you damage your equipment or hurt someone.

Of course, many do it this way.

--->Paul

The amps will be extreemely low. Think how long that generator, the one that will not even carry the load for a full house, will run when the load is increased to many different houses. These houses will have all their appliances, heaters, air conditioners, etc on.

I haven't tried it but it looks like the small home generator would not run for very long and would not have the necessary capacities to load the main line with the power to hurt anyone. Especially with all of the other houses on the main line sucking the power from the small generator.

I am not saying a person should improperly hook up a generator but don't really think a small home generator will have the amps to power the main line long enough with the needed power to hurt a lineman.

One test for anyone who would care to try is to let the small generator try to power your whole house and see how long it will run.

The main line will overload your generator, but the time it takes to do the damage to the generator or trip the breaker is less than the time it takes to kill a lineman.

Please folks, those guys have families and kids who want them back home after they get off work. Invest the time and money to do the job the right way. Saving a couple hundred bucks isn't worth someone's life.

Another electrician popping in here, Yes CelticF you can do as you posted . . . .BUT . . . .Take heed from a lot of good advice here . . DON'T.

Spend the buck for a properly installed transfer switch.


Also from lineman school 101;

Lineman thou shall ground that line before working on it.

I posted a question/idea like this back in Jan. boy I got ripped wide open about it. I got countless cut and pastes about back feeding from the red cross info site ect.

My set up is a male plug I stick in the dryer plug($12.00), my gen is 5250 watts and will run our house for everything but the dryer just fine(because of the unplugged dryer).

Flip OFF the 200 watt main in the house (this stops it from going anywhere but the house) then plug in the male plug into the dryer outlet.

Go outside and get the gen running for a few mins till warmed up then stick in the 30amp twist plug into the gen.

We even had our porch lights on.

You can't be stupid and I was called this before, but you have to know what you are doing and be careful. Make a rundown list for the steps needed to do in case of emergency.

I have also used before I made the dryer plug a double male plug/pig tail that I could plug into any receptical and light up half of the circuts in the house. It was fast and easy to make, two male plugs and a short piece of heavy wire, plug it into a good extension cord then any outlet in the wall.

I have been thinking about making a small light I can wire into the pole so I can see when the real power comes back on so I can shut down the gen.
It is easy but you have to be smart and careful!

I know by my post that most will holler that I am 'not smart or careful' but it works and I will do it as long as the lights are out.

:bdh: Colombia, sc: since you don't even know the difference between an ampere and a watt, I strongly recommend that folks not believe anything you offer as your "truth", cause it is not code, period. There are some areas of life where frugal and chincy and stubborn and cheap just don't serve you. In spite of the aforementioned careful thought out runaround methods, the problem has already been identified and solved with 100% assurance of safety. Let me repeat myself: have a transfer switch installed by a professional, licensed electrician and be done with it. One slip of the mind, one senior moment, one slight lack of presence of mind and you could kill someone. It ain't worth it. Take the human factor out of the equasion and save your ingenuity and cleverness for the areas of life that don't risk killing someone out there on the line. Just because you don't fully understand the physics and mechanics of the electrical distribution system doesn't give you the right to jeapordise other people's lives. The National Electric code is the absolute minimum standard, yet many folks treat it like it is some gold plated fantasy standard that regular people don't have to adhere to. rant over, be safe, not stupid... I hope to not have stepped over the nice/not nice line, but I do this for a living and spend a lot of my time fixing dangerous wiring that some well-intentioned person did, either because they were ignorant or because they were cheapskates...

This is just my personal opinion but I don't think a 5250 watt home generator will back feed the line with enough amps to kill a lineman working on the line even if the main was closed. It may give him a shock if he is sloppy with his safety habits. I am not encouraging it but I don't know of a single lineman who has gotten a shock from a home generator while working on the main line. Heard a lot of stories but never any facts.

One way to do this if you live in a rural area, is to pull the meter outside and wire directly into your meter base on your side. I would only do it though if your wire from house to pole is down. This way when they come to fix your line, they will put your meter back. You will get power and have a saftey net for the linemen. If you live in a place with inspectors and such, and or you loose power frequently, you should probably go with the transfer switch.

Pancho
The problem is not the amps but the volts. If you put a 240 volt generator across the line it produces 7,200 volts on the primary of the transformer up on the pole. This voltage, regardless of the available amperes, is what they call "energising" the primary. It is more than safety or lack thereof on the part of the linemen. When there is a major outage such as Oklahoma had a few weeks back, there are hundreds of linemen working 16 hour days, far from home, in as dangerous a working environment as can be had, thousands of broken trees, telephone poles, cables scattered everywhere and they can't, shouldn't have to, worrry about some stupid & ignorant homeowner who cannot see anyfarther than his wallet or property line, creating a life threatening condition. The work is dangerous enough. Be smart, learn from the mistakes of others. Sorry to dispute your "opinion", good sir but the facts remain stacked against you. As I said earlier, the money spent on the electrician and the transfer switch is cheaper than a wrongful death lawsuit.

I will have to disagree with you on that. It is the amps that kill, not the volts. For an example look at the voltages on a fence charger. The voltages is quite high but the amps is very low. It will give a shock but will not kill. Backfeeding through the transformer at your home would be much the same. The voltage would be increased but the current would be very small.
Any electrician worth his salt will tell you voltage does not kill, current does.

There is always the possibility that a lineman would recieve a shock from a home generator but it is very unlikely that it would do any damage other than making him a little mad.

Do you know this as fact? Can you forward me some sort of proof of this statement? I work with lower voltage transformers, and am going to have to disagree with that statement. That being said, the danger lies in the lines that lie between the house and transformer, which can easily be out of sight of the lineman. I agree that it is dangerous to backfeed, especially if the homeowner doesn't know how to isolate the load, but to think that lineman is going to get 7200 volts is kinda outrageous.

I'd suppose the main line would get whatever voltage it normally carries in - 4000 & 7000 are the common values I think? Transformer works both ways, 7200 v steped down to 240 would end up stepping 240 back up to 7200. Shouldn't really need proof for something like that.

Guess a lot of homesteading folks aren't quite as caring or upstanding as we are lead to believe - linemen are on their own, we don't have to care about shocking them when they are 20 feet off the ground.

I think on that other thread I posted a link to a safety interlock company, they make a simple cheap interlock that allows a person to do this to code for a few bucks in many common main boxes - metal plate that ecases 2 switches so it functions as a transfer switch.

--->Paul

I agree about the saftey issues, no question. Look I'm not trying to be difficult here, just need to figure out if you can send 240 to a mainline transformer and turn it back into 7200 volts or whatever the voltage is. I say not possible, and trying to figure out if I'm wrong. I am not supposing anything and I need proof.

yes I did wrongly state watt instead of amp. my bad.

quote by me 'Flip OFF the 200 watt main in the house (this stops it from going anywhere but the house) then plug in the male plug into the dryer outlet.'

But I also think I quoted it correctly when I wrote this just after that
'Go outside and get the gen running for a few mins till warmed up then stick in the 30amp twist plug into the gen'.

Also I do not care for being indirrectly refferd to as 'some stupid & ignorant homeowner'.

So just to settle this down without any more insults,

I do not recomend anyone in their right mind ever to do this ever! I have done it and it works for me, but do not ever try it untill you have the $ to pay a pro electrition (wish I did, donations anyone) to do it right.

Does anyone have any data showing a recorded death caused by a home generator energizing the main line? I have heard of this happening but do not know of a single time it actually has. It would seem like someone would have some factual data to prove it has happened.

thanx to all. i trust all of you and so i wont do it. i did forget to metion(sp) its a 3500 wat generator.
again thanx.
tom

That was just comments posted on another forum. The only fact was the cause of death had not been determined. Much like this forum people are posting what they think may have happened without any proof of the facts.

Surely if this is so common some one will have documented facts of it happening.

http://www.bt.cdc.gov/disasters/powe...rkersafety.asp

It is not common. Just trying to keep it from becoming common as backfeeding does happen.

Home generators are more of a resent problem. Old days all the lineman grounded was on the power side of the place to be repaired. Didn't have to worry about power coming from the other direction. Now, power could be coming from anywhere.

I stand corrected.. If power feeds back through transformer, it will multiply the volts without multipying the amperage. It will still kill, although I never had any doubt it would. It doesn't take hardly any voltage to stop a beating heart anyway. If you get shocked and your heart is in the wrong rythym at the wrong time, you can die. Be safe for the sake of the guy working on the power lines and transfer your generator power via an isolation switch of some sort.

GO a head and plug it in and back feed the line if you want, but if some one dies be prepared to be put up on manslauder or murder chargers and spend time in the slammer.

IT IS AGAINST THE LAW.

It is against the electrical code and the code is law in ever state in some form that I am aware of, and killing some one is also against the law, even if it is an accident, and back feeding the line is not an accident. it was premeditated plan, expecily if your reading this thread, and if it can be considered premeditated it is first degree murder.

It does not matter if you think you little generator has the power to do damage or not, it will only matter that some one is dead and your responsible.

Do you know of any documentated cases where a person was killed by a home generator backfeeding the main line?
I know it is against the code, has been since for a few years. I am just curious if it has ever really been done or is it like many other things, just old wives tales.

Mr. Harris
For the sake of clarity, please let me essplain some basic transformer theory.
all transformers work pretty much the same in that they consist of two separate coils of wire wound around a steel core. The ratio of turns = the ratio of volts. A battery charger transformer or one in a desk lamp has a 120 V. primary and a 12 V. secondary or a 10:1 turns ratio and if you were to hook the transformer up backwards you would get a 10X multiplication of the input voltage, or 1200 volts. Don't try it, please. Likewise the typical household transformer takes 7,200 volt primary & transforms it down to 120/240 volts or a ratio of 30:1 and if you energize the secondary with 240 V. the primary can't help but have 7,200 volts on it. Nikola Tesla figgered this out about 1878 and the entire world's electrical distribution system depends on these physics.
I have been involved with rasselling this electrical thaing since 1967 when I discovered the volume control on the back of a juke box playing Honky tonk woman, endured serious technical schools in the Air Force. Since my early days I have spent many years working on 277/480 Volt commercial services in big box stores and industrial plants. I also played around with neon transformers a lot in high school and even on a good day with dry hands, the 15,000 volts put out by a big sign transformer will hurt worse than I can describe on this family board. Certain body parts won't respond very well for a bit... I work with control transformers, door bell transformers, and interface with household and commercial services, which are 120/240 volt, sometimes 3 phase which are 120/208 volts, every day.
Mr. South Cariolina, don't take it personally, :hobbyhors I am just trying to keep anyone else from following the penny wise/pound foolish route and causing someone to be seriously injured. In spite of the apparent skepticism of others, electricity kills and maims and sometimes the real nerve damage doesn't show up immediately. The damage is far worse than a p.o'ed. lineman. I fix foolish/ignorant/stupid/things almost daily and have learned that the customer is paying me, so even if he/she did something wrong, the obligation is for me to fix it right with a smile and be very careful how I communicate what was wrong. That way, sometimes they even invite me back...

Poncho, read through that forum for lineman, it states specifically that a guy got it from a backfeed.

Ozarka, Thanks for the info, I just had it explained to me by an electrician. Although I didn't doubt it would feed straight through the transformer, I couldn't understand how. I almost grabbed a couple of 120/24v 40va transformers and hooked them up but I thought with the low voltage, it would smoke the second one because of the low voltage input. I will try it sometime when I get a couple of salvaged ones.

I did read through the forum. It said the cause of death had not been determined. If the death was from a back feed from a home generator I would appreciate some actual data. Just a guess of a person on a forum is not quite what I call actual data.

Mr. Harris:
if you have a meter that will go to 600 volts, hook up one of your 24 volt transformers backwards and expect to see 5 x the input voltage. The units are not rated for this duty but as an experiment you can see how the turns ratio of 5:1 really works. If you used a 120:12 volt xfmr, the insulation would probably fail and you might not want to see what 1,200 volts feels like. If you try the 24 volt unit experiment, please do it on a non conductive surface and don't touch any of the leads. This is a very dangerous way to learn about the Electro Motive Force, but some of us ain't believin' them books

That explains the voltage part very well. Now could you please explain the current part. I think you will then realize why I am asking the question.

The 30-1 ratio is what I am talking about. If you do a little studying on transformers you will find the while the voltage will go up 30 times the current will decrease by the same amount. To make it simple, lets say your home generator puts out 60 amps. Backfeeding through the transformer will reduce that to 2 amps. That is for the few seconds the generator would run before tripping the breaker or stopping completely. If by some miracle it continued to run the next house would suck up those 2 amps like a sponge.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_shock It only takes milliseconds. Refer to table.

Maybe I am not explaining my question in the way it should be. My question is does anyone have any factual data that shows where a person has been killed from a home generator backfeeding the main line. I have a basic understanding of electricity. I got my first journeyman license back in the late 1970s and have worked as an electrician for many years and in powerplants for many more. I am currently working as a powerplant operator.

All I want is some data on the number of people actually killed by backfeeding. I can't find a single person but was hoping that someone might know of one.

If a tree falls in the woods and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?

My wife says, "If you beat a dead horse with a stick, will the horse still say neigh?

















































I don't think so. :)