Hi, Voltage regulation is something that some people on the net have mentioned. The Cummmins / Onan engineer who came to turn my genset hooked up to it via a interface and linked it up to his PC. From there he could monitor Volts, Current, Frequency along with about 148 other parameters, oil pressure, temp of engine etc. And also control various parameters for stability control. For the Onan's there is an interface acessory that allows remote monitoring via the internet, this I think is sort of more designed for remote un-maned relay transmitter applications. He mentioned that one client had an elevator in his house, and when that started it was giving the generator a hard time. Fortunately he said he could tweek the Onan generator control parameters to take this surge into account. The most usual symptom of bad regulation is when a large demand kicks in, your lights sort of wobble a bit. If this persists you may have a control issue. Electronics are sensitve to surges. However most modern TV's etc. power supplies have some protection built in, you can also buy surge supressors cheaply at home depot. I go for the $US 14-ish ones. I also had an electician installed whole house surge suppressor at the main panel as well. Some people say you need XXX type surge supressors, others say the cheapies are O.K. I sort of am not sure, so sort of go for a medium-ish sort of price product and only put them on the more expensive electronic items. I think there is a price trade off on this stuff. You can have a super dooper protected system, but if you are in a somewhat low risk area, it may not be worth it. So I guess each person has his / her sort of level of backup requirment. Incidently if yo are looking for a cheap gasoline powered generator for electronics, many people on the net recommend the Honda inverter generators. The largest is the Honda IS7000 AB. This guy actually spins at various speeds and generates a DC voltage / current. It then has built in power electronics which converts this to 60Hz AC, and produces very clean and stable power. Note cheap in this case still means about $US 3400. All the best, Mike.

Sara, Ion beat me to it and gave you some good advice. I'll offer a bit more clarification on some questions you may have. It is a little difficult, as it's hard to discern how much knowledge you have in this area. I don't want to offer information which would be redundant to you. "1) Grounding of the furnace My generator's ground is connect to the ground prone of three prone plug(other two prone are not connected) through a 12 gauge wire and plug into an outside wall outlet. Is this good enough grounding for the generator? if I plug the furnace wire into generator, is this good enough grounding for the furnance?" Assuming you are simply using a pigtail on your furnace, as Ion mentions, do not connect your generator to any of your house wiring system. I would treat the system as simply a portable generator system for NEC purposes. Namely, simply plug your three prong pigtail into a three prong extension cord and plug your three prong extension cord into your three prong recep on your generator. No ground rod is required. Lastly, make sure the neutral in your generator is bonded to the equipment ground and the generator frame. Most generators are set up this way, but some aren't. It should say in your generator manual, but also do a check to make sure. You should see a wire bonding the generator to its frame. You should also see a jumper bonding the neutral to the equipment ground, but you may have to take off a cover to observe this. Your generator should have GFCI for the 120V receptacles. You don't need any other ground protection than this. Remember it's really the neutral that protects one against most faults which could cause electrocution. What most people call the "ground" is really a case ground (or equipment ground) which is ultimately "bonded" or connected to the neutral at some point. It's the "bond" of the neutral and case ground which really provides the fault protection when voltage leaks to the case. A ground rod doesn't really provide any protection in this sense. Let me give a real world example (I hope I'm not offering info. redundant to you here.) Decades ago, before case grounds (or equipment grounds) were installed on refrigerators, people were sometimes electrocuted from them. What happened was this. The refrigerator had a two prong plug - one for the lead, and one for the neutral (i.e. return current). The refrigerator would get old, wires would fray, or the motor would start leaking voltage. A lead wire would touch the case, or the motor would leak enough voltage the case/housing of the refrigerator would become energized. Maybe from time to time one of the family members might notice the refrigerator would "shock" them. It wasn't a bad shock, because the impedance was too high for the return path from the case through the persons body to the neutral. In other words, the path of electricity wasn't a good connection. They had shoes insulating them, etc. One day one of the family members, while getting some milk out of the refrigerator, spills some on the floor. It's early in the morning, so they're in their bare feet. They mop the milk up, but the floor is still wet. They grab the handle to put the milk back, but now the impedance is much lower (the combination of a wet floor and bare feet make a much better path for electricity). The current flowing through the person causes a constriction of the hand muscles. They can't let go of the handle. They can feel they are being electrocuted, but there is nothing they can do about it (by themselves). After a few moments, the same current causing constriction of the hand muscles makes the heart labor to keep it's rhythmic beat. After a short period, it stops beating altogether. By installing a case/housing ground (i.e. the third prong on the plug) a low impedance grounding conductor provides a direct short in the circuit if there is a lead fault in the refrigerator housing. The path would be from the lead, shorted to the case, through the case ground wire, back the the main panel, where in the main panel, the neutral and the case ground buses are bonded (connected). This direct short will "pop" the breaker, or blow the fuse. So long as the third prong on your pigtail is grounded to the case of the furnace, and the neutral and case ground are bonded on your generator, you won't be electrocuted from your furnace. You could still be electrocuted from your extension cord lying in a water puddle, or wet from rain if the outlet on your generator isn't gfci, but all newer generators are supposed to have gfci receps. "Why all this precaution when it comes to wiring the furnace, like separate circuit?" NEC requires all stationary appliances to be on their own circuit. So the main answer to your question is that it's code. The reason for the code requirement is to avoid people putting a lot of appliances on one circuit, causing the breaker to trip. Let's say you have your refrigerator, deep freeze and furnace on one circuit. One day the breaker trips rendering all three appliances dead. It normally happens when you are on vacation, so you come back to your house with all your food spoiled and your pipes frozen/broken. As a bonus, the water thawed enough to run for three days, flooding your house. NEC code allows an exception for any associated furnace equipment (humidifier, condensation pump) to be included on the same dedicated circuit as the furnace. "Olpea mentioned electricity generated by generator is of poor quality and can damage furnace. a 20 amp surge protector can prevent the damage to furnace from happening, right?" Unfortunately surge protectors really do very little in this regard (I'm referring to the surge power strips). A good one will prevent a major surges until the material inside is "consumed". This can happen with one surge. They won't prevent voltage drops. They also do nothing to correct sine wave distortion and frequency stability, which are also hard on electronics. My main point was not to try to talk you into a new generator but to keep your generator lightly loaded if you need to run electronics like your furnace. That will at least provide more stable voltage. Re: Inverter generators When I mentioned inverter generators, I was thinking of high quality Yamaha or Honda inverters, which are pure sine wave inverters and known for producing the cleanest power. Ion is correct, cheap inverters produce a poor waveform (as do cheap non-inverter generators). I disagree with Ion that electronics are not sensitive to power quality. I believe the opposite to be true. This post is a lot longer than I intended. Didn't mean to write a book.

Hi Chisue, Glad you found the info useful. The $US 10,000 bid las time round I think puts you into the class two gen set area. These are good systems and popular where I live. Auto start and essentially auto everything. Good in that when the power goes out you do nothing and everything comes back on line in about 20 seconds. These units are lawn mower engine based. Typically air cooled and have two cylinders. They run fast at 3,600 rpm and are noisy. But this is not that big a deal in that this is for only a few days of running untill the power comes back on. The amount of power they can handle is about 10-12kw range. Some companies rate them higher like 15 kw, but I would say this is pushing it. Another something worth remembering is starting current. The other poster was correct in that the calculation is amount of power + some buffer. The some buffer is important. The reason why is that at start up, electric motors draw a lot more current. Can be up to 8 times as much. So to handle this surge you need a big generator head, more copper, and a heavier momentum in the engine. You can begin to see why heavier is better in generators. You have two sumps, I do not know how big these are, also the fridge. Immediately upon power restart this is when the power requirement is the largest. All your motors will be trying to start at the same time. You need to ensure that you have sufficient power to start these motors. At a guess, I think 10kw should be sufficient quite comfortably. A portable 6kw gen set may require some messing about with breakers. IE. you only start one motor at a time. Hence the power surge demand is spread out over time. The other useful thing to remember, or your electrician should know is that your generator set actually generates power as two phases. Huh? What is a phase? Imagine a smooth wave like line, in math it is a sine wave. Now imagine two of them. Just like waves on the ocean sometimes one wave is at a peak, and another wave is at a low point. Your generator will produce these two waves, two phases, and they will be perfectly out of phase with each other. One will be at the peak, while the other will be at the low point. OK now you are confused :) OK the simple thing to remember is that most things you want to power up will be a 120v one phase item. You need to try and evenly divide these items on each of the phases. Sometimes one thing is a power hungry one. This will use up a lot of power on one phase. You cannot borrow power from the other phase. Because you cannot borrow power, you have to size your generator accordingly. For example, a 12 kw generator can be thought of as two 6kw generators (one for each phase). Make sue that if you have a big power item, e.g. your cook top, that you have sufficient to power that one one of the phases. This phase thing can be confusing, and there are some items which actually do use both phases, hence what I have just said in the paragraph above may not be applicable. e.g. Some well pumps are two phased powered. Hence in general it is a good idea to have spare capacity in your generator set. This is expensive. How much spare capacity is difficult to guesstimate. My recommendation is to go for the more expensive class two gensets and stick with that. The reason why is that once you jump to class three the cost tends to almost double because of the genset weight on installation, and the genset cost itself. If you have some key big power items, e.g. you cook top that you must have running, then maybe consider a class three genset setup. From can see from your post, I do not see any big items that would reuire a class three. If you have central A/C and want to run that, then I would recommend a class three genset. May people go for a class two set up, and buy a window air conditioner which they can install and run for a few days while their central A/C is out. You also asked in your post how log you can run a genset for. Well so long as you top up the oil etc. at a shot you can run continuously untill your fuel runs out. Fuel is usually the limitation. If you are on mains gas, then almost indefinately. My genset burns at max rate such that a 500 gallon propane tank will be depleted in 5 days. Note propane tanks can only be filled to 80% capacity, so a 500 gallon tank by volume, but only 400 gallons actual LPG propane. Then your tank may not be full, say half full. So right now I have a two day burn reserve. The flip side is you do not have to run your genset 24 hours. In power outages, I only run for say a few hours for showers, heating no burst pipes etc. The rest of the time if I am out keep it shut off if I am out etc. You may want to run 24/7 however due to your sump pump and basement flooding risk. Hope this is useful, and you are not falling asleep .... All the best, Mike.

Lisa A, I'll repeat, an earthquake safe building is one from which the people get out. Your friends in their Tokyo high rise got the good out of that. Highrises on cushions or rollers, which are built to sway rather than tilt, and have dampeners to prevent Galloping Gertie harmonics from building, are, when built correctly, like your friends' building, earthquake safe. There's no way to build a building that won't have some kind of damage if the quake is strong enough where it is. Low, stud and stucco houses survive quakes pretty well. I'm not sure about metal studs though. They can twist, but then they might stand longer than wood. And considering the prevalence of termites here, at least they haven't been eaten. My friend always jokes about how the three little pigs may have been right for storms, but had it all wrong for earthquakes. The house made out of bricks would fall down (though in '94, the city had skip loaders out in the streets before noon, picking up the fallen bricks from the streets, which I thought was very efficient. :) The one made out of sticks (stud and stucco) is the best of the three, but straw (daub and wattle) isn't bad. Kevin, I'm happy to be corrected or enlarged upon!! I, being too used to it, left out the most important part, which is to stay where you are if it's safe, drop and cover your head. That's what you're supposed to do next to the supporting piece of low furniture for the "safe triangle" rather than going running for doorways. I'm not familiar with that e-mail cited, but that's a very good link you appended. The mis-information e-mail claimed that getting under objects like tables is dangerous and so was bed. The sum of it is: The American Red Cross has not recommended use of a doorway for earthquake protection for more than a decade. The problem is that many doorways are not built into the structural integrity of a building, and may not offer protection. Also, simply put, doorways are not suitable for more than one person at a time. The Red Cross, remaining consistent with the information published in "Talking About Disaster: Guide for Standard Messages," (visit http://www.disastereducation.org/guide.html ) states that if you are in bed when an earthquake happens, remain there. Rolling out of bed may lead to being injured by debris on the floor next to the bed. If you have done a good job of earthquake mitigation (that is, removing pictures or mirrors that could fall on a bed; anchoring tall bedroom furniture to wall studs, and the like), then you are safer to stay in bed rather than roll out of it during the shaking of an earthquake. Also, the Red Cross strongly advises not try to move (that is, escape) during the shaking of an earthquake. The more and the longer distance that someone tries to move, the more likely they are to become injured by falling or flying debris, or by tripping, falling, or getting cut by damaged floors, walls, and items in the path of escape. Identifying potential "void areas" and planning on using them for earthquake protection is more difficult to teach, and hard to remember for people who are not educated in earthquake engineering principles. The Red Cross is not saying that identifying potential voids is wrong or inappropriate. What we are saying is that "Drop, Cover, and Hold On!" is NOT wrong -- in the United States. The American Red Cross, being a U.S.-based organization, does not extend its recommendations to apply in other countries. What works here may not work elsewhere, so there is no dispute that the "void identification method" or the "Triangle of Life" may indeed be the best thing to teach in other countries where the risk of building collapse, even in moderate earthquakes, is great. By all means, get under a large, sturdy table unless under it is the place right in the path of flying dishes or light fixtures. If you're in a dining room, under the table is probably the best place to be. What the Red Cross leaves out in the above quote, since it's directed at the problem e-mail in question, is that people who learned to get under their desks at school don't fit in the knee holes of their current desks. The "drop, cover and hold on" works. If you do that and you want to stick your head under the desk, and expose your bum, your head will be better protected, but when people just go for the "get under the table" they often stick their bums under and have the more delicate extremities--their faces and tops of their heads--sticking out! Also, people try to get under their beds and end up with injuries they wouldn't have if they'd just stayed in bed or dropped beside it. Bed is safe IF there isn't a chandelier or ceiling fan above it, a tester, artwork, or other heavy thing on the wall beside it, a tall dresser, armoire, or mirror that's not strappped to the studs close beside it. If you're in bed, pull the covers over your head. Literally!! Teach your kids to do that too. Make sure when you set up your nursery that there's nothing that can fall on Baby's crib--good advice even if you never have earthquakes--and, for Goodness's sake! don't run to Baby when the shaking starts! Baby is safer in the crib than in your arms, and you're safer staying put. Most earthquakes that are big enough to do damage last less than a minute. You can put on your shoes and go get Baby after the shaking stops, and before the first aftershock. If things are falling on you and you don't feel safe where you are, find a structural doorway, or a strong support for the "void area" (the safe triangle). Staying put is good if crap isn't falling on you, but if you can see a place within a few strides that has less falling crap, go for it. It's only going to get worse. The big difference between the safe triangle notion that's current in the U.S. and the triangle of life idea from that e-mail is that the former is supposed to shelter you from falling bookcases, partitions and other tall crap that's coming down and trying to bonk you on the head, and the latter is trying to find you an open pocket when a whole building comes down. I'm not sure that will work in a falling building situation since you don't know which directions the walls and beams are coming from. It's more shear luck if the way the building falls gives you an open space. To Buehl--a belated happy birthday wish. I got distracted yesterday by comings and goings and forgot to write it down. :)