I bought a tarp today at horrible fright a man and his teenage son were returning a hf generator. I asked whats wrong with it. Brand new they could not get it to start. Not a ringing endorsement of HF quality.
Bill D
Contributor
I bought a tarp today at horrible fright a man and his teenage son were returning a hf generator. I asked whats wrong with it. Brand new they could not get it to start. Not a ringing endorsement of HF quality.
Bill D
Contributor
Maybe someone neglected to do something correctly. Botch-uh- lism can be a hobby for “fun and profit”. And there is the fact that the store took it back. That’s how good stores work , they don’t interogate people…. but it might be because it’s against the law. I think the
system is working.
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Neighbour about a block away got a Generac installed, probably in the 7-9 KW size, and we had a power failure about a month ago. I was surprised at how loud it was - seemed much louder than the portable generators.Originally Posted by Jack Frederick
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How do solar panels combined with a battery system such as from Tesla compare to gas-powered generators? I would think sunlight would allow longer power than a fuel tank, but I don't know. Some friends of mine used to live near Cripple Creek, Colorado in an area where no electricity was available. They were truly, "Off the Grid" and had two solar panels on stands with batteries. This allowed them to power their entire house and garage, to include power tools, just as if they had city power. I was very surprised by this considering all the negatives I hear about solar power.
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Pat, I actually looked into that before opting for the 22K backup generator here. The cost of solar plus battery bank to provide three day's of power (to account for the possibility of bad weather inhibiting the solar panels) was in the $35K range for our home. Now that's for true "whole house" backup since we are 100% electric; it could have cost less if we didn't account for AC and a few other things, but that wasn't desirable for us. The 22k generator was $10K installed. We did have a little extra cost because we needed a second propane tank installed to meet the required 200 gallon minimum for a generator install, but all in all, we came in at less than half the equivalent solar install. Since we will not likely be here for more than 10 years, the numbers didn't work for us to buy the solar solution, despite it being our personal preference over a gas powered solution.
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The most expensive tool is the one you buy "cheaply" and often...
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I got a 25% off coupon good for anything a month ago and bought one of their inverter generators. I had thought about a diesel home generator (since I have plenty of diesel around for the tractor and heating the house). The generator starts and runs just fine. I'm not one who trusts HF tools that use electricity or gas. But almost 20 years ago while building my house I bought a 10" tile saw cheaper than I could rent one from HF figuring I would be done with it before the return period was up. That saw has been loaned out dozens of times and has yet to fail. I took another chance on a small gas engine water pump that never has failed to run in the last 10 years. Now I have a jig saw and 4" belt sander (Bauer brand) that also work just fine as well as a 1hp dust collector. So I took a chance on the generator.
I assume that home standby generators are also taking advantage of inverter technology. If so that's the direction I would go. It takes a little getting use to the engine not just screaming away even though there's little load but once you do. I have a nice o scope that I used to look at the AC sign wave from the generator to see how much noise is present. Compared to the older Generac Honda powered generator it's replacing the wave is extremely clean. It's also right on the money at 60 hz where as my old generator would need to have the engine speed occasionally adjusted (every couple of years I would check).
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Thank you for that thorough and polite answer. I was afraid I would get angry, anti-green energy screeds.
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From some research I did, I don't think solar with battery backup would be too reliable - unless you had some really big batteries. Those battery backup systems can take you through a short power outage but there's a limit on the lenght of time it can provide power. A backup generator can provide power as long as you have fuel.
Mike
Go into the world and do well. But more importantly, go into the world and do good.
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My pleasure. We really, really, really did want to go solar, but in our particular situation, it just wasn't going to make sense financially as I noted. If we were planning on being here for 20+ years...it would already be in-service. But I'd be in my late 80s at that point.
It's all about design and sizing, Mike. When I was looking at it, I had it designed for three day battery holdover with no charging from the sun, and a lot longer with at least some available sun during daylight hours. That's about the limit I'd get with our whole house generator because at this house, it's propane, not NG like we had at the previous property. NG was essentially "unlimited" run time. No so with propane 'cause, well...tanks that get empty.
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The most expensive tool is the one you buy "cheaply" and often...
Contributor
Pat, there are so many options today. We had a couple neighbors who put a Tesla roof on their house with Powerwalls. With this last winters Sierra storms they made it almost two days before they had to go to the generator. These folks have vast resources. They learned a lot about load shedding requirements. Another friend, the contractor who re-built my house and built my shop has been totally off-grid since ‘72. If there is a person who is truly Gyro Gearloose, it is him. He runs his house and shop on his solar and the small hydro he built on the creek which runs in the winter months but not summer. He cannot, or at least does not, run 220 tools due to system limitations. For my part, I did the grid tied system on my 7.5kwh system. I zeroed my electric bill, which with PG&E is a real number. It is really a pretty cool time for alternatives. Do the research, do it again and figure how much you can spend to achieve your goals.
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Rumor is in 5-10 years used electric car batteries will be sold for cheap. A car battery that is only holding 50% of new charge will be discarded and replaced with a new one. The old ones will be plenty good for home use at scrap price. Size and weight are not really an issue for home use.
Tesla will not install solar unless you also buy at least one Tesla brand battery. Tesla claims a powerwall battery will run a home for 10-15 hour each.
Bill D
Moderator
The problem with that rumor is the format of the batteries that many EVs use...it's not like they can just easily be pulled out and replaced. It's a major operation, at least for current generation battery technologies used which are under a whole lot of the vehicle floor and not accessible from the outside with many vehicle platforms in use. Most will likely go ten years or more and then you get into the time frame when vehicles are less likely to remain on the road and in use anyway. Now as battery tech shifts to newer, smaller formats that are more easily exchanged, I can see more of a "renewed" market. But even there, recycling the materials may still be the direction taken.
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The most expensive tool is the one you buy "cheaply" and often...
Contributor
I had also extensively looked into Tesla Powerwalls for my home. I run a significant surplus daily with my solar panels (I have a very large array), and it's mostly sunny here in Florida, so that combo sounded great in theory. But...
Having full house coverage would involve having 4 Tesla Powerwalls. That's about $60K installed (could be way off there, but very expensive). A full house propane generator 25kW would run about $12-15K.
Yes, in theory the Powerwalls could power the house at night, and charge in daytime producing significantly more surplus. But Duke Energy only pays $0.0669 per Kwh surplus and charges $0.15 per Kwh for electricity, so the bottom line is that battery backup here is crazy expensive, and will never pay for itself.
Now you don't really need to power the whole house with batteries. I could power half of it. But that's still about $30K, which would be twice what a whole house generator would cost. So twice the price, for half the capacity using batteries.
I've asked this question to multiple solar/battery installers here. All said it makes no financial sense. Fortunately, power outages are rare here. But if a hurricane hits... Of course, if I lived in California, and had frequent blackouts due to forest fires, I'd give you a different answer.
We also really, really, really wanted to add batteries to our house. We actually installed hardware/software to measure energy consumption and switched loads on our breaker panels to prepare for it. And never bought them.
- After I ask a stranger if I can pet their dog and they say yes, I like to respond, "I'll keep that in mind" and walk off
- It's above my pay grade. Mongo only pawn in game of life.
Member
As a person who worked in retail selling power equipment for over twenty years, Very high chance they did not put the switch to "run" or just used it for a weekend project never intending to keep it. Generally HF generators rate very high.
"Remember back in the day, when things were made by hand, and people took pride in their work?"
- Rick Dale
Moderator
I agree with you Dave. I've noted a lot of things that seemingly get bought and returned "after a short use". HFT is already combatting that with compressors with an actual return fee unless it can be proven that it's not running. I had a bad one and did an exchange. That transaction required the manager to manually remove the return fee. I have bought a number of items from them that were intended for limited time use, but I plan to turn around and sell them on the FB Marketplace to recoup most of my cost. I'm about to do that with a few things I bought for my shop build, as a matter of fact. Some folks would just return them. Other box stores fight the same battle and it's disappointing that more than too many people take advantage.
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The most expensive tool is the one you buy "cheaply" and often...
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