I Need A Emergency Power Supply For House For 16 KW ,Anyone Have Any Inexpensive Ideas?

Question

We live in a rural area.. we are looking at solar,wind,and battery backup and generators.. We really need enough to supply our house due to the harsh weather conditions here .The power doesnt fail often but I have a gut feeling we need the backup.We looked at generators that run about 3000 just for the generator but would like your ideas as to what would be a good investment or idea for backup.Any links to alternative power ideas that would supply 16 kw would be helpful or if you have ideas please let us know..Thanks for any info,also would like to mention im not physically able to build my own anything but maybe could hire someone locally if there were good enough plans for something.

Answer 1

Man this will take long to explain. Just stock up on fire wood and candles, it is cheap and no hassle at all

Answer 2

16 KW seems to be an awful lot of power for a home emergency generator. In a situation when the power fails you should consider powering critical equipment like the frig the heater controls, some lights etc. You can get away with 10KW or less. That would lower the money you would have to spend on a generator.

Answer 3

The easiest way to save money is to build something yourself. Costs quickly escalate when you have to pay to get something fabricated.

The technique I would personally use would be to use a surplus automobile engine to power a generator head. You'll need to fashion a speed governor to keep the speed at either 1800 or 3600 RPM (depends on generator head and gearing). For fuel I would modify the engine to run on either propane or natural gas (handy if you have natural gas at the house). Now here's the kicker: use the waste heat from the radiator and the exhaust to produce hot water and heat your house (with ammonia absorption you can have ice or air conditioning as well). This is called co-generation. By harnessing the waste heat, you recover up to 80% of energy in your fuel. Co-generation equipment is only commercially available on very expense turbine generators, but there's no reason it can't be scaled down to smaller vehicle engines as well.

I fully endorse the use of green sources of power like wind and solar, unfortunately the cost and space requirements get to be quite large if need multiple kilowatts of power to come from the system. I would use the above mentioned co-generation system to charge a deep-discharge battery bank. If you wish, you can also supplement your power generation with whatever wind and solar sources are feasible for you. You will need a charge controller that can arbitrate from different sources as well as a number of inverters to get usable clean AC power (the power quality straight from the generator head will be quite poor, and really only useful for utility lighting).

The above idea is what I came up with for residential use in an urban area after a number of nasty wind storms that affected the area over the winter. Although I didn't get hit with a black out, numberous areas surrounding me did.

Answer 4

I don't know where you priced generators at but there are places where you can get 3 to 6 kw generators for under 500.00 bucks and if your home requires 16kw for everything a 5 or 6 kw should do nicely for a backup source. i.e. backup means you do not use every thing electrical in your home at once. maybe your refrig. ,heat or aircond., stove, tv,some small aplliances and lights. i have a small converter hooked up in my truck and that only puts out about 500 to 750 watts and that helped me thru some ice storms it ran my tv,some lights,portable stove and heater.

Answer 5

If you have to find nice ideas for woodworking i can suggest you to check here http://woodworking.toptips.org
It's perfect if you are just starting out or if you're a seasoned carpenter. you will like it for sure !
It has almost 20.000 woodworking plans and you have a CAD/DWG software to view and edit the plans. You have step-by-step instructions with photos and high quality blueprints and schematics. If you are a beginner this is the easiest way to start your woodworking projects, and if you already have experience you can anyway find a lot of interesting ideas!

Answer 6

My friend who lives in the country, has an all electric home etc. Purchased an older farm tractor with power take off. a generator that put out 25KW. He has a big switch box to cut off his out side power, and turns on his own. It works like a charm.