Generator issue

[Terry McDonald]

I live in South Carolina and we recently had a little visit from Irma. Knowing what was coming and anticipation power outages, I figured this would be a great opportunity to play with my new toys. Two brand new Champion 2000’s with the parallel kit.

I have too many refrigerators and a big chest freezer and trying to run extension cables to them, the tv, etc. was a real headache so I decided to feed them into the standard house wiring.

THIS CAN BE DANGEROUS!!!

First thing is to turn OFF the Main breaker. (otherwise you will try to power the entire neighborhood of fry a power technician that is trying to get the system back up and running.

Second thing is to turn OFF every every 220 breaker. The generators are standard voltage, nominally 110 volts. (The standard is now about 140. That is what I measure in my house and the generator output.)

Third is to determine how to feed your power into the house.  I had a 220 receptacle in my garage already so I made a special adapter cable to interface the generator to the house. This cable had four wires coming from a 220 male plug that would fit my 220 outlet and I wired this to a male plug that would plug into my generator.  I had one of the 110 volt 30 amp twist lock plugs that fit the generator output but I could have used a standard 30 standard RV plug also. I wired ground to ground, neutral to neutral, and both hot wires to the single hot terminal. Thus I was spreading my 30 amp generator output to both sides of my household normal 200 amp service. The difference in these two numbers means you turn off everything but the basics, No microwave, no coffee pot, no toaster, etc. (actually is you REALLY know your loads, you might get away with running one device at a time if you have the capacity, similar to trying to use a mid range inverter in the camper.)

Fourth, fire it up. My generators bogged down when I first plugged in the system as Every device that was still powered on sucked in their start up current and then everything stabilized.  Four hours later the street lights came back on and I reversed the process to get back on the grid.

WARNING and DISCLAIMER If you try this and something doesn’t work, it is your fault for trying something that you read about on the internet! I take NO responsibility for what might happen to you!

The reason I put this in the asking for help section is that after the main power was restored, I noticed my electric clocks were wrong by about 15 minutes. Does anyone know why? (I’m assuming the output frequency from the generators is not a perfect 60 hz. but don’t know for sure.) This seems that it would be true for any camper that was being on a generator but I have never seen this mentioned before. Any thoughts?

Note: I have a 30 amp fifth wheel and I am not familiar with 50 amp service so these instructions would need to be modified if you have a 50 amp output generator and you are on your own.

Thanks

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