Whole House Generators

[aliva]

Years ago I used to work as a service and installation tech for an Onan generator distributor Onan was the go generator for backup power and main power for many homes and cottages here in Northern Ontario. Onan manufactured gasoline, diesel, and propane. For years Winnebago motor homes had nothing but Onan generators . The Canadian National Railways only used Onan on their work trains for main power. Many hospitals in our area along with shopping malls, fire departments used Onan for emergency backup. Onan was made in Minneapolis Minnesota. I believe they still are. They have been making generators since I think1939. As far as I know Onan was bought out by Cummins. So its now known as Cummins Onan. They've always been a very reliable and well built product. I don't know if they still manufactured their own gas and diesel engines for smaller generators 3-17KW On their larger generators 25KW and above they used mostly Ford engines. The big 500 KW an above was Waukesha engines.

In your case, for a home a 12KW will power everything you need with some to spare. Cummins Onan is one you should at least look at for your needs. Which ever you decide on consider an Automatic Transfer Switch, and auto exercise. The transfer switch automatically start your generator, stabilize the output voltage then switch over to power the house. While on generator power the switch will sense when power comes back on from your utility, wait a few moments to be sure the power is stable and switch you back to the main grid, and shut the generator down. It also has a built battery charging function An other item to consider in an exerciser. What this does is start the generator at a predetermined time and run the generator for a specific duration. This ensures the battery is in good order and that the generator is available when needed.
Hope this helps

 

[BGHansen]

My in-laws have a Generac natural gas bypass 20kW unit. They've had it for 8 or 10 years and have had zero issues. No idea what the install price was, but not having power for a week with no end in sight for repeat outages makes the price more palatable.

We have a solar panel setup with ~9500W peak output and a battery bank of 18kWh. It's a crapshoot for solar here in Michigan as our worst 5-day solar total has been about 20kWh or barely enough to get the batteries charged. Our panels are SilFab, inverter and batteries are Generac(Panasonic batteries). We've had no issues and have had it kick on a few times for a few hours.

If I had to choose between a solar panel setup and a bypass generator, I'd go with the bypass generator. Our local power company charges $0.126/kWh and pays us $0.056/kWh that we send back. In 2023, we generated 12.2 MWh of solar, we bought 277 kWh from the grid, and our house used 10.6 MWh. Our electric bills for the year used to run around $2100 and are now about $400 with the solar. However, our solar package ran about $45K so we're looking at an over 25-year payback. The payback depends on what you're paying for power; it's shorter if you pay more than us.

Another consideration for solar is capacity. Our solar switch box does 4 circuits; NOT EVEN close to one of the 20-22kW whole house generators. We switch our well, a frig, modem, and our propane furnace. We have geothermal heating & A/C but the batteries would not make it through the night even when fully charged.

As an aside on the solar, HOPEFULLY EV cars will help with home battery backup system costs. The rough cost for home battery backups is about $1000/ kWh of storage. Yeah, our 18 kWh of storage was close to $18K. Google tells me that a GM Silverado EV pickup has ~200 kWh of battery storage. That'd be about $200K worth of batteries for a house, but the truck costs $75K and you get a lot more than just batteries. My hope is the home systems can somehow use the more cheaper car/truck systems at some point.

Good luck! Modern conveniences are not overrated!

 

[markba633csi]

My brother has tried several and he says Champion and Honda are his two faves
Personally I would stick with gasoline- if you have a propane system and it leaks you could potentially lose all your fuel and not know it

 

[projectnut]

I have a whole house 22kw Generac run from propane. I’m not sure what brand the engine is, everything visible says Generac. It is 2.5 years old and has been fine, but that is not much time to really evaluate it. Our longest outage so far was about 3 hours. We do get moisture in the oil from exercising it for 5 minutes each week without load, Generac says that is normal and nothing to worry about. I believe we paid $14k installed with the transfer switch, getting a smaller unit running only the vital circuits was only $1k cheaper, so we went whole house. We bought it during the height of covid shortages, so don’t know if prices have come down any. At the time we bought it, the electrical contractor we bought it through had 50 generators on back order and delivery was about 4-6 months, so you might not to wait too long to decide on what you want, many of your neighbors might be thinking the same thing. We got lucky ours came two months earlier than expected.

Being up north, it is very comforting knowing if the power goes out in the winter when we are away will not result in frozen pipes, if you need to worry about that where you live, the rest of us are screwed lol.

We have a 5500 watt Cummins Onan in our motorhome. Cummins recommends running it a minimum of 1 hr a month at half load to keep moisture out of the windings and oil

 

[400bird]

Sounds like you've got plenty of option and options for a natural gas generator and don't want anything to do with solar and a battery, but for anyone else interested there's plenty of options outside of one of the stupid "solar generator" boxes. What a load of crap, those things are good for glamping and not much more.

You can get a 12-15kW inverter with built in 200 amp transfer switch.

My home is smaller, about 1400 sq ft, a 6kW inverter, solar, and battery can run the house as normal (the garage/shop just isn't wired into the critical power side, but it could run the shop to as long as I'm not running multiple machines at once along with AC and kitchen appliances)

 

[mksj]

It is not just about the brand, but the type of power you need, what your fuel source is, how long it will be running, etc. I would recommend generators with water cooled 1800 RPM motors by Kohler, Onan (Cummins) over Generac, much better built, more durable. Many of the lower priced generates use higher 3600 RPM air cooled motors that are not really designed for multiple day use, and will not last very long. Reviews of the Generac generators are OK when they are working, but lots of negative reviews otherwise and lots of complaints as to fit/finish/durability in their residential line. There are also difference in voltage regulation and sign wave output. You also need to look at the transfer switched used/cost, most are automatic and also have exercisers built in. You also need to look at run costs and fuel consumption, more impactful if running for several days. I installed a smaller 15kW air cooled generator at a previous house, it was relatively quiet, but its ability to handle load and voltage regulation was less than satisfactory. These days for my current house, I am considering the Kohler 24RCLA or 30RCLA, Cummins RS25. If looking at diesel there are quite a few options that use mainstream diesel motors, some come with skid plate tanks. If you plan to run an AC unit, the better generators have a much higher motor starting capacity.

Kohler Vs Generac Vs Cummins Standby Generators - Find Out

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[Ischgl99]

My brother has tried several and he says Champion and Honda are his two faves
Personally I would stick with gasoline- if you have a propane system and it leaks you could potentially lose all your fuel and not know it

We have an automatic level monitor that notifies the propane company to come fill it up. If it drops quicker than expected, then we would know the system needs to be checked. I’m sure there are possible issues with that not working properly, so I manually check the level periodically to make sure we still have enough. Our propane supplier has their own backup generator, so they claim they will be able to deliver during a long term outage, I hope I don’t need to test that theory.

We have a 5500 watt Cummins Onan in our motorhome. Cummins recommends running it a minimum of 1 hr a month at half load to keep moisture out of the windings and oil

I have been considering that, but haven’t done it yet. I switched to every other week exercising and watching it to see if I see any difference in the oil and battery charge.

 

[jcp]

I also have a whole house Generac running on natural gas. It was installed new when we built a new house. It's been with us for 16 years with zero problems or incidents. Being in Oklahoma it gets a work out at least once or twice a year. Longest run was 10 days after an ice storm. Wouldn't consider living here (tornado alley, ice storm central) without one.
The engine in mine is a vee twin built by Generac.

 

[matthewsx]

We’ve been without electricity for over a full week. Our neighborhood used to never lose power but this is the third time this year that we’ve been without for more than 2-3 hours. It’s time to replace our portable generator with a natural gas powered whole house generator.

Generac has the big name and obviously a lot of units in the field but they also seem to have a spotty reputation. Are they a good brand? Is the reputation problem due to the individual business that installs them? What other brands should we consider?

I used to be a dealer for Briggs standby generators. Mostly the wife was the one that insisted on it, northern Michigan winters and all. Without power your pipes will freeze even if the furnace is propane or NG.

Find a dealer you trust to do the install and maintenance, this is one of those purchases where service makes or breaks the product.

Or, select and install one yourself. It’ll have to be pretty big to run AC units along with your refrigerator and lighting.

If you get an air cooled unit shut it down and check the oil every day. They can and will burn themselves up with a constant supply of fuel.

Water cooled may be a better choice with your requirements. If in doubt go bigger, the better transfer switches can be programmed to manage loads.

I’m sure demand will be high right now so it might take some time before you can get someone out to consult. Look around the neighborhood and see if anyone has trucks out servicing the units they’ve sold, that’ll give you an idea of who to talk with and maybe even knock on the door and ask how they like the company.

During the big ice storm we had in 2011? I spent a lot of time servicing both standby units and portables. I was joined by our local HVAC company, the other standby dealer was on vacation in Florida. If you have a good HVAC guy ask them for recommendations.

Joh

 

[pdentrem]

We had a real blizzard last Christmas week. The only issue people were having is the air filter icing over from the wind blown snow entering the cabinet and freezing on the face. Not all were affected. It depended on whether the filter is vertical or horizontal. The fix was the set up a space around the unit with a wind break to stop the wind hitting the unit directly.
Some of the units were running continuously for days to a full week before power was restored.
Pierre