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Over 5 inches of rain in 28 hours - worst solar day ever.

Trukinbear

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Aug 28, 2020
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Over 5 inches of rain in 28 hours (nearly 6) below shows 24 hours of it and it rained over an additional inch since midnite.

The neighborhood is a chorus of (cheap) generators - worst solar day ever 0.2KwH

We're at the 42 parallel North - on a line with Cape Cod but as you can see our weather is much milder both in the Summer and the Winter - eternal spring.
 

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Yeah wow, sounds like here now. I'm visiting my mother in the PNW Washington for a couple weeks and they're getting hit bad right now with record rainfalls...


She was asking me about some solar options for adding solar to their house, but I told her she might need lots of batteries to get through multiple dark days hehe...

There are like 6 ponds on the property right now, 2 on the lawns.... And they're up on a hill, lots of lakes in the valley..

Kind of a nice change to see rain again, since I live in Utah... Although the winds yesterday took out the internet for the whole day (power outage at the WiFi tower site), a few trees downed on the property...
 
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... she might need lots of batteries ... There are like 6 ponds on the property right now, ... And they're up on a hill
Could you could go hydro and skip the batteries? You'd need more panels to compensate for the lower efficiency, but a 20% panel increase is probably cheaper than 300% battery coverage.
 
Sometimes a generator just sounds good :)

Yeah they definitely do have a 6.5 kW Honda generator wired into a dedicated critical loads panel and have a manual transfer switch for now (dual breakers in aux panel with joining bar). The good thing is they built the house to start with 20 years ago with a critical loads panel for generator use so it is friendly to add in new technologies easily.
 
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Sometimes a generator just sounds good :)
Yeah, just a little resentment after being forced to replace my generators with more modern units (see signature), and build a building around them for sound attenuation (at the cost of thousands of dollars) so that my generators are nearly whisper quiet - by the same people who forced the issue now have friggin Briggs & Stratton nearly unmuffled 'big box' 'contractor' generators sitting in their yards screaming at 3600 RPM.
 
Just had to be on battery bank/generator for a day here in the PNW, wind/rain storm dropped a huge tree on the power line going into my area.

I've got a contractor-style 6500w diesel Gillette and I dont like to use it because it's so loud it'll crack your teeth when standing next to it and it makes the whole house resonate.

When the power goes out long enough that my old battery bank needs charging I find myself using my nice and quiet gasser Predator 3500 inverter generator - that thing is awesome.
 
Yeah, just a little resentment after being forced to replace my generators with more modern units (see signature), and build a building around them for sound attenuation (at the cost of thousands of dollars) so that my generators are nearly whisper quiet - by the same people who forced the issue now have friggin Briggs & Stratton nearly unmuffled 'big box' 'contractor' generators sitting in their yards screaming at 3600 RPM.

Your Onans are 1800 rpm dual-pole aren't they? I have an Onan 6.5 1800 rpm on my motorhome and it's way quieter than the 3600 rpm ones, not anywhere near as obnoxious as this Honda at my parents place...
 
Your Onans are 1800 rpm dual-pole aren't they? I have an Onan 6.5 1800 rpm on my motorhome and it's way quieter than the 3600 rpm ones, not anywhere near as obnoxious as this Honda at my parents place...
My previous Onan diesels were 1800 RPM 4-pole units - a 10HDKAG, 7.5HDKAL, 7MDJE, and 12.5DJC - but they were also open frame units. My current ones are multi-pole permanent magnet inverter (and cycloconverter) units with RPM that varies with load and are completely enclosed along with the mufflers. My heavily modified 10HDKAG was cheaper to run than my current 8HDKAK (but not by much and the keywords being heavily modified) but was louder than sin with noise coming from lots of places other than the exhaust. The 8HDKAK has a 3-cylinder version of the same Kubota that was 4-cylinders in the 10HDKAG, and is the same Super 5 Kubota 3-cylinder as the 7.5HDKAL... just MUCH louder. The air-cooled Hatz single in the 3.2HDZAA doesn't even sound like a generator... much. As you can probably guess I've been tinkering with these Onans for quite a while having started with LPG-powered units (BGAL, BFAL, JB) before moving on to diesel.
 
My previous Onan diesels were 1800 RPM 4-pole units - a 10HDKAG, 7.5HDKAL, 7MDJE, and 12.5DJC - but they were also open frame units. My current ones are multi-pole permanent magnet inverter (and cycloconverter) units with RPM that varies with load and are completely enclosed along with the mufflers. My heavily modified 10HDKAG was cheaper to run than my current 8HDKAK (but not by much and the keywords being heavily modified) but was louder than sin with noise coming from lots of places other than the exhaust. The 8HDKAK has a 3-cylinder version of the same Kubota that was 4-cylinders in the 10HDKAG, and is the same Super 5 Kubota 3-cylinder as the 7.5HDKAL... just MUCH louder. The air-cooled Hatz single in the 3.2HDZAA doesn't even sound like a generator... much. As you can probably guess I've been tinkering with these Onans for quite a while having started with LPG-powered units (BGAL, BFAL, JB) before moving on to diesel.

Oh yeah I meant 4-pole (not 2-pole), in my mind I was thinking 1 pole vs 2 pole, but the 3600 rpm are the 2 pole, where the 4 pole are the 1800 rpm... Knew it was something like that hehe, thanks.

Yeah, I don't think I'd ever buy a 3600 rpm generator ever again since having my Onan. My latest Generator solution is a 5 kW UPS in my Prius and that just idles quietly like a car usually sounds, maybe about 1200 rpm at full load...
 
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