this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
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In addition to the carbon monoxide problem, is there also not the issue that fuel last only for half a year (a bit more with some additives) ?
Btw, anyone know how entities (e.g. hospitals) with fuel-based emergency generators manage their fuel supply?
Diesel will last a while (way longer than 6mo) but it’ll get pretty nasty after a few years. As the other commenter pointed out you technically can still run it but it will ruin your shit and eventually things will just seize up and at best will need to be completely torn down and thoroughly cleaned, at worst scrapped
Not a hospital but I have a generator on my house. Runs on liquid propane. I live in an area with terrible infrastructure. I lost power twice today (only 20 minutes each time, thankfully) because it rained. It typically runs about 3-400 hours a year and we typically have at least 1 >6hr outage every 2 months or so and at least one outage longer than 4 days a year during snow season, two if there’s a nasty hurricane season in the northeast.
We have no services available to our house aside from internet (eg no gas, no sewer, no water, etc) so we just have a large tank for the liquid propane. We originally just had them come twice a year but that was insufficient. We then had them come after serious run times but that was a pain to remember to call. I now have an ultrasonic tank monitor on there, it was like $50 and connects via Ethernet to home assistant, uses some magic ultrasonic nonsense to detect the level of the tank, once the tank drops below 40% I have it ping me and I call them, repeats at 35%, 30, etc just in case I forget then more rapidly like 28, 26 because it’s really bad for the generator to run out of gas (so it’s also a reminder to just shut it off if I truly drag my feet). I wish I could send them an automated request but the companies around here are pretty “phone only” situations for the most part
I imagine the industrial solutions are fairly similar except they’re probably using the $350 generac (or equivalent) tank monitors
Someday I’ll have the money to just convert to solar. The house came with this setup and it works for now
Sounds like you can do the battery conversion now and wait with adding solar panels. Should be cheaper than your generator pretty quickly considering how much you use it.
Seems multiple times more annoying than solar with a big lifepo. Hope you can switch to solar sooner than later!