Yeah, and I think you only change one regulator to switch the generator
from NG to LP. The Generac came with it, and we kept it. Our feeling
was that we can call and get a propane tank delivered if we ever had
to. If something happened where you couldn't get an LP delivery, odds
are you couldn't get a diesel delivery either.
On your original issue: with enough time and materials you could turn
that into an advantage. I visited a data center once that had two feeds
to the building from different directions like you do, what they did was
bring both services into the data center and color coded the outlets.
They had red and blue duplexes on the wall....not sure where they got
red and blue, maybe they painted them.....but red was one service and
blue was the other. They said they had never had a scenario in their
company history where both services were out.
Yes, standby for utility outages from storms. We have never had gas
shut down. Not even after the tornado last year. Not saying it's
impossible. If it happened, I could run the most absolutely critical
stuff off of a portable generator and propane tank.
On 10/26/2014 6:32 PM, Rex-List Account via Af wrote:
Just to throw another curve into your thinking - what is your
reasoning on the generator? Disaster recovery? Frequent power outages
due to storms and such?
As a thirty plus year vet at a phone company and a twenty five plus
year vet on the fire department let me give you this to ponder. If it
is for frequent power outages
due to electrical storms, ice, and/or poor power lines then NG is
fine. However it has been my experience that in disaster scenarios
like earthquakes (ok I haven't actually
seen this one) severe storms/tornadoes (I have seen way too many of
these) then one of the first things the fire department does is shut
down the natural gas pipelines.
Too many houses destroyed and the possibilities of way too many
leaks. I personally would go with diesel fuel. Almost always
available - can be easily trucked in. LP can be
hard to source and price fluctuates in the winter. There is always a
farmer or construction company around with diesel. NG is defiantly
more convenient, but in a true disaster
situation it may not be available. Just my two cents worth.
Rex
-----Original Message-----
From: Af [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of George Skorup
(Cyber Broadcasting) via Af
Sent: Sunday, October 26, 2014 4:17 PM
To: Animal Farm
Subject: [AFMUG] Generator question
So I have a unique situation at our office. We're looking at a
Generac QuietSource 22 or 30kW running on NG. I'm not dead set on
that, but those are very nice and quiet 1800RPM. And the problem is,
our building is really old and is split in half with two separate 240
services coming in. And I do have an old empty 1-1/4" conduit between
the two utility closets. The two services is actually nice because a
lot of times, one side will have power when the other doesn't. One
comes from the north, the other from the south.
There's no way we can rewire and combine everything into one service
feed. I'm trying to wrap my mind around how to do something like two
auto-transfer switches on one generator. I have critical stuff to run
on both sides. Probably need a qualified electrician or engineer, but
I thought I'd ask here for suggestions before we go down that road
and pay someone to come up with something that I most likely wouldn't
like.
