I need a hand moving a 500lb generator

[MaineShark]

Glad to help.

Joe

[Nat F]

It certainly was easy work, I showed up 10 minutes late to discover the generator right beside the platform.  All I had to do was help pick it up and move it a few feet to the final location.  Many hand made light work everything was done within a few minutes.  It was nice meeting everyone that showed up.

-Nat

[Quantrill]

If you haven't grabbed a new whip yet, I could probably get a discount on one through the supply house I use...

[mvpel]

I'm planning to get the wiring done this weekend, the gas hookup on Tuesday, and everything inspected and active next week, so that we can have everything up and running by the time we leave for PorcFest, so I think I'm stuck with Home Depot.

At the moment, I'm deciding whether I should run an underground conduit to the unit with a short whip at the end instead of a longer whip all the way to the house.  The maximum whip length is 6 feet for LFMC, I'm going to have to see if that'll be long enough to reach the band joist.

Update: 6 feet will be just enough to reach, with a nice gentle radius and vertical ends.

Then I need to decide whether I'm going to use the 30 feet of line they provided with the transfer switch and a junction box to get the rest of the way to the generator, or build a new conduit system with new wires.  It's about 50 feet at right angles.

[mvpel]

After some exciting times, everything is up and running!  I had to tweak the voltage regulator a bit to bring the no-load voltage up to the proper level, and ran a test of the automatic transfer earlier this evening, and everything worked just as advertised.

One of the circuits is our bedroom and bathroom upstairs, and I had installed an arc-fault circuit interrupter, which promptly detected an arc fault.  I've a few things to check on, particularly in the bathroom since I'd redone all the outlets in the bedroom when we repainted it and installed a ceiling fan, but in the meantime I stuck a standard breaker in there and we'll hope for the best.

The current ITE main panel in the house (original from 30 years ago) has some design flaws that can be mapped to specific requirements in the national electric code - when a breaker is removed a big swath of the main bus bar is exposed, it's like they didn't want to use the extra the plastic to cover it up.  A neutral wire twisted the wrong way after I stripped it and tapped that exposed bus bar - that made for some exciting times.  More effective than coffee, though not preferable.  Left a little smoking crater in the metal, and it took about a minute for the neutral wire to cool down to room temperature.

That damn thing has gotta go.  I replaced a main panel in my first house, looks like I'll be doing it again.

I now need to go around and change the sensitivity on all my UPS units - when they're set to the default of "high," they go nuts shifting their transformer tap around trying to adjust the output voltage when the generator is feeding them.  They almost stroked out when the A/C kicked in.