Gunner Quinn
(Continued from Part 1.)
Back to the Friday morning of the storm: The rain stopped here around 10 A.M.. According to our rain gauge, we received 5.6” overnight. As I walked our property, I found a tangle of trees had fallen with a very large white oak knocking over a decent-sized pine, and that in turn landed on one of our chicken coops. A sycamore had fallen from our side of the property line and damaged a section of our neighbor’s pasture fence, the top of a white oak had broken out and blocked one of our internal roads, a poplar was laying across our spring cistern, the road our driveway connects to was blocked by multiple trees in both directions, several hundred feet of utility lines were on the ground near our home and the creek that forms our property line was backed up by a nearby river such that the lowest elevations of our property were under five or so feet of water. We were fortunate.
As of this writing, the only loss we incurred was a two-inch irrigation pump that spent the night underwater. I may be able to repair it. Our neighbor had a young bull (around 500 pounds) escape and no one has seen it in three weeks. Remarkably, none of the homes in our community suffered damage beyond a few torn-off shingles. There were/are so many downed trees here and in the surrounding counties. Obviously, some homes took damage; but the number of occurrences where a tree fell away from a house, vehicle or property even falling opposite to surrounding trees gave a strong testimony that the Lord was watching over His people during the storm. At my in-law’s place, twenty-six oak and hickory trees were uprooted on their two acres. The way trees fell between my father-in-law’s parked trucks, tractors, and trailers without scratching the paint cannot be described as anything other than divine intervention.
When we experience a power outage, I have a four-hour rule for bringing out the generator in hot weather but will wait for up to six hours in cooler weather. In the case of Helene, I hauled our gasoline-powered 5.6kW up to the house and connected it to the generator transfer panel around ten Friday morning. We have had this old workhorse since the summer of 2003, it has around 350 hours on it and I do my best to crank it every six months. I began running the carburetor dry to shut the engine off on the day I purchased it and since ethanol-free gasoline became available around here four years ago, Sta-Bil treated alcohol-free gas is all that I have used. The last of my 2022-dated stored fuel was burned during our time without electricity.
I installed the 60A/220VAC generator panel as the second improvement we made to our home after purchase. It is a twelve-space model produced by Siemens, but seems to no longer be in production. The panel is extremely simple with a pair of double pole 60 amp breakers mounted back to back with a lockout device that will allow both the generator and utility supplies to be shut off, but will only allow one or the other to be in the supply or on position (photo of generator panel). The remainder of the setup consists of a 6/3 copper conductor running between the generator supply breaker and a 50-amp 220-volt receptacle mounted in a weatherproof box on the exterior wall of our home. To tie in the generator, we use a 30-amp rated 10/3 copper cord between the 50A receptacle and the 220-volt output on the generator. If or when we up-size our generator, the 50-amp plug and 60-amp breaker will mean that I won’t have to resize any of the wiring to accommodate the larger gen set.
I become angry every time someone tells me they plan to connect a generator to their home by backfeeding a 220 circuit such as the dryer or range. For years I heard this method referred to as using a “suicide cord”, but during a generator safety course the instructor named it the man slaughter cord. I must agree this is a far more fitting name. The lineman son of a friend was severely injured a few years ago because someone back-fed a generator. Please don’t do this. A basic generator lockout panel is not an expensive investment and doing electrical work correctly in this situation above many others is a civic responsibility.
I had to get into the panel twice during the power outage. The first time was because I had inadvertently placed our home office on a breaker instead of the living room. Having included spare jumper conductors in the conduit during initial installation and purchasing extra breakers made adding the living room a three-minute fix. The second time I had to get into the panel was around day four and I will address the reason in a few.
Back in 2020, a friend hired me to install a generator panel similar to my own. In choosing his generator, he had found a company that took dual fuel Champion generators and added a regulator and fuel line modification that enables the unit to also run on natural gas. I was impressed enough with his generator that I purchased one. Since the Champion literature was not written for natural gas operation, I can only estimate that given the running outputs of 7,000 watts for gasoline and 6,300 W for propane that I am getting approximately 5,500 running watts due to the lower BTU density of natural gas. Although we have owned this unit for four years, I had not quite gotten through the initial five-hour break in period before needing the unit for Helene.
After gathering enough information throughout the day on Friday to determine we were not likely to get power back soon, I hauled the tri-fuel unit up to our home and using a flexible supply line tied into the natural gas quick connect fitting one would normally use for a gas grill. I switched out the gas-powered Briggs and Stratton for the Champion. By the time our power was restored, I had put 97 hours over 9 days on the Champion burning natural gas. We powered two freezers, our kitchen fridge/freezer, an on-demand water heater, and two general use circuits as our base load.
To help my wife keep track of the load we were placing on the generator, I wrote out the demand of each appliance we kept on. At least twice each day, we turned off the breakers for the fridge and freezers and turned on the well pump. By the numbers, the generator should have been able to manage the surge load if a freezer coincidentally powered up at the same time our pump was starting, but the margin was too close for my comfort. I estimate that our base power need at any given moment was between 2,000 and 2,500 watts excluding the well pump.
Being a bit nerdy, I was looking forward to (and slightly dreading) logging our daily cost for fuel. After the bill arrived and I ran the numbers, we spent roughly 53 cents per hour or just at $5 per day to keep our freezers powered, supply five box/oscillating fans, recharge our electronics, a 12V deep cycle marine battery, and flashlights, burn three lamps equipped with 8-watt LED bulbs for a few hours after dark and draw water from the well for cooking, cleaning, showers, livestock and to supply our neighbors. I’m quite pleased and feel deeply blessed that our power preparations worked out so well.
Now to explain the second time I had to get into the generator panel. After using the Champion for a few days, I noticed it would occasionally sound “off”. I knew we were not pulling large enough loads to tax the generator, but there were occasions when it seemed to struggle. Not in the same way a generator will rev up to deal with a startup load such as a freezer compressor or pump motor, but similar in a weaker way. Yes, my description stinks and my wife told me as much when I tried getting her to listen to the engine with me.
After giving the situation a day’s worth of consideration, I began to suspect that both freezers and the refrigerator were on the same leg of the supply, essentially leaving the second leg without a load. When I opened the panel, I saw that I was correct. I switched the position of our kitchen refrigerator with one of the general use circuits and the problem was resolved. The unit ran smoothly from that point until we turned it off for good. When I put the breakers in ten years ago the idea of balancing each leg never entered my mind. Any of you currently using or planning to use a small portable generator as we have, may want to check the distribution and balance of loads in your panels too.
It is our practice to fill the bathtubs with water if we suspect a moderate thunderstorm is going to roll through. But as I mentioned at the start of this article, we didn’t prepare this time. In fact, my bride’s first words to me on Friday morning may have been “the power is out and we didn’t fill the tubs”. Our standard is to keep two cases of bottled water and a pair of filled water jugs on hand at all times. We had them and they easily carried us for the few hours until we tied in the generator. The neighbors were a different matter. I checked on those who could reach in the early afternoon. I let each know that they could come over at 3 P.M. and get all of the water they wanted. The motley collection of bottles and totes they showed up with was heart-wrenching. None of them had a basic water jug or even a food-safe five-gallon bucket. For the remainder of the outage, we set the water supply time at 5 P.M. and the quality of drinking water vessels never improved.
We loaned our eldest neighbors a water jug then later in the week filled an IBC tote half full of water and hauled it over to their home so they would have plenty nearby to wash or flush with. I offered to fill another IBC tote we keep on a trailer for irrigation and drive to the individual homes to fill up whatever containers they had available with water for non-potable use but each said they didn’t have any way of accepting or storing it. Wow… That was my first encounter with trying to be charitable and finding out one could easily run through their own supplies trying to help people who couldn’t/wouldn’t/hadn’t done anything to meet their most basic needs. By the time utilities were restored, I had given away or loaned out propane, butane, extension cords, a small 3,500-watt generator, a propane stove, a spare generator plug, four sets of scaffolding and a few other small items that I don’t currently recall.
(To be continued tomorrow, in Part 3.)
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