LOL the coffee thing is the worst! Would love to get a generator. We fill up all the water troughs (4 x 100 gallons each) for 2-3 horses. Right now I have about 10 gallons bottled water in the basement.
[QUOTE=Ruth0552;8341042]
That’s a generator on the back of the tractor. I can’t remember EXACTLY how it works, but all the old generators by family has go on the back of tractors and we share. So if the power goes out, we can run the generator for a while to heat up the house or to fill the animal’s water.
I’ve two stints of 7-10 days no power since I’ve been living in this house (9 years). They were in the same year- the October snowstorm, and I think it was hurricane Irene? Or Sandy? I think it was 2011.[/QUOTE]
I suspect you’re looking at these:
http://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/category_generators+pto-generators
They are great when you need significant temporary power away from the grid. The downside is that you now have immobilized your tractor. If you have two then that might be OK; unless you actually need two and then you’re back in the same boat.
Your best bet is still a contractor-grade generator big enough to do what you NEED to do. If you’re “Up Nawth” you need heat as well as water,but maybe not so much refrigeration; if you are in The South you just need water, and maybe power for refrigeration. If you are in the middle you have the most difficult of the “balancing” problems.
The quiet Hondas are truly outstanding units but pricy; I’ve got a pair of EU-2000 that I can hook up in parallel that I use when we travel and can be “emergency” power at home. If I were going to get a true “standby/utility” unit I’d get something like this:*
http://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/product_200434685_200434685
A portable generator has a lot of uses around the farm. Get a good quality wagon for it and you can move it with a tractor to where you need it and then put it away.
A downside is you have to store a supply of gasoline. In a perfect world I’d own a diesel genset like this http://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/product_200654933_200654933 where I could just use the diesel we regularly have on hand for the tractors. Price precludes it, however. Maybe if win the lottery someday…
There are also propane powered gensets. That might work for folks with a ready source of propane regularly on hand.
There are lots of sources for gensets. Google is your friend if you decide to do some shopping!
G.
*Disclaimer: I don’t own stock in either Northern or Generac. I don’t own this unit; it’s just one that would do the job for me in our East TN climate and our house.
We do have a generator if worse comes to worse (needed for my husband’s construction business, and was not purchased for this purpose). We were without water for 4 days a couple of summers ago. It wasn’t a power issue, but ultimately turned out to be gophers who had chewed through the lines to the well. It was 4th of July weekend, and we paid for emergency well service. They told us the well pump was bad, and replaced it. When that didn’t work, they told us that was all they could do for us and we were on our own. :mad:
My DH finally figured out what the issue was, and he and my brother had to do the repairs.
We were lucky. I didn’t have the horses at home during this time, but we did have the dogs here. I filled several containers of water at my mother’s house and stored for the dogs, and for flushing the toilets. We always use purchased water to cook and drink (our well water tastes terrible!), so I already had that. We showered at my mother’s house.
Being without water for any length of time is a nightmare.
This is similar to the inverter thing we used to use. It’s upside is that it’s cheaper; the downside is that you can’t let your battery go dead so be careful with that. You also want to be careful to test it ahead of time to make sure it will bear what you have hooked up to it, and remember you can only run one thing at a time.
http://www.homedepot.com/p/Sunforce-1000-Watt-Pure-Sine-Wave-Inverter-11240/100660092?MERCH=REC--PIPHorizontal1_rr--202543465--100660092--N
Get a generator! If you have natural gas you can get a generator hooked up to your gas line so you don’t have to worry about having fuel when you need it. I have a generator at my home in Western NY – it automatically goes on when the power goes out and then switches off when the power comes back on. Yes it is expensive – but like OP I’m on a well and can’t stand not having water. Also – when I"m away in the winter I know that the house will have heat even if there is a bad ice storm when power can be out for days if not weeks.
PTO generator is great, but then you cannot use your tractor. Plus your tractor will be running at full throttle for however long the power is out.
I think the Rigid (Depot) generator was just highly rated and not too expensive. This one would run most of a home at about 1/4 the cost of a Honda unit.
Spend the $ for a large enough generator to work the well and your automatic waterers. Also considering you’re in a state that the temps get pretty cold, it would be to your advantage to have your furnace hooked up as well and a few lights.
Yes portable generators aren’t cheap but if you have a power outage of several days you will be glad to have it. :yes: :yes:
Also, run your generator at least once a month for about 30 minutes. Presuming you get a gas powered generator, make sure you use Sta-bil or a similar additive when you add the gas or you’ll screw up the carburetor.
I bought my farm 25 yrs ago (1990). It’s total electric, no gas or propane. In March 1991 we had an ice storm that took out electrical power. I was going next door to get water from a neighbor’s pond for the horses, dogs and cats as well as for flushing the toilet. I was lucky in that my power came back on in 2.5 days. Some people weren’t that lucky and had to wait 2 weeks. I bought a portable generator right after that.
Back in 2013 I had a whole house generator installed and I purchased and buried a 500 gallon propane tank. The generator runs once/wk for 15 minutes and when the power went out for 10 hrs, I still had heat, light, water etc.
The reason I went with the whole house generator was watching the people on the Jersey shore after Sandy hit. The gas stations weren’t open so they couldn’t run generators even if they had them. That convinced me to get the propane-powered generator and a large enough propane tank that would give me a wks worth of power. I figured in a week the propane tanks could get through.
Agree, generator; however, it would make it difficult to continue running for the sake of automatic waters, so I’m going to suggest you get some 33 gallon heavy duty trash cans (plastic kind) and use them for water when the power is out. One of those per horse will hold enough water for a 24 hours. That’s what we use. Keep extra ones filled just incase your generator goes out or you run out of fuel.
I was without power for 28 days after Hurricane Katrina. DEFINITELY get a generator! (Didn’t have one capable of running the well for the first week, and had to drive several miles to a friend with a generator to fill up a trough in my pickup.) Hooked up the new, bigger portable generator to the power meter (not ideal, but with all the power lines in the parish down, as in physically disconnected, no chance of backfeeding!) and ran the well, the fridge, and all the lights and ceiling fans in the house for all that time.
Now, I have a transfer box, and still have the same generator from 10 years ago! Have used it a couple of times since Katrina. Just used it again this summer in the barn when the power went out during a farrier visit (MUST have fans to keep the farrier happy!) Was actually the first time I ever used the transfer box in the barn, but worth it to keep the farrier happy (And of course, the horses, too, they needed the stall fans!)
Agree with generator, if you’re going to have animals with auto waterers, you need it.
What kind of basement do you have, nicely finished or regular concrete? If it’s not super nice you could get a big Rubbermaid stock tank that you can fill up when you know a bad storm is coming, and then hang buckets. Inconvenient, but would get you through a couple days, depending on how many animals you have.
P.S.- The better prepped you are, the more likely the storm will head out to sea…
Generators are wise choice but can be hard to come by or be inflated in cost if you’re buying right before a storm.
Getting one of the portable tanks is helpful otherwise.
you’ve gotten so much good info already so I won’t bore you with the ins and outs of the generator, but I will share a story.
I grew up with well water and all electric appliances (an no generator). So if the power was off, you couldn’t do much of anything. No showering, no flushing toilets, no cooking, no heat, no A/C…
About ten years ago, I bought my first house. We had a bad spring storm and lost power. I had filled up some jugs and the tub for water for my dog and such and hoped it would be back on before I had to go to work in the morning. It didn’t. So I drove in to the office where we had a generator and a shower. Showered up and got ready there then went to my office upstairs. To a lot of laughter.
Why? Because I was on city water. (had I turned on the faucets, I’d have had water.) I had gas appliances (would’ve had hot water even.)
I was pretty red faced. But man, it was just so ingrained in me that no power meant=everything stops working. LOL
Buy the biggest generator that you can afford.
We recently sold the pull generator which was awful for my back and went to a 8000 watt automatic which i can plug into a generator approved outlet in my detached garage carport because remember they MUST BE OUTSIDE or you’ll die.Nice not to have all that noise next to the house.
Anyway this generator will run the heat because we’re on propane and the generator only has to power the fan. This makes me happy after having a outage that lasted 7 days with daytime temps of 18. Yes in the south…
So it run the pump, frig , wi-fi and heat but not all the the same time.
Also make sure you have fresh gas, don’t fill up your all the gas cans months before you need them or the gas will go bad … lesson learned.
The farm where I board was without power for 8 days in the ice storm two years ago. Mucking stalls by head lamp was an inconvenience. Relying on boarders to run back and forth between our own homes and the barn with water jugs to provide drinking water for the horses was bad.
I know nothing about generators, but I can`t imagine not owning one if I owned a barn that relied on electricity for water.
Simikie…thank you for posting this. Relates to my post in other forum. Garcias!
I don’t have a generator, but both my parents and my sister live within 1/2 hour of us, and the crazy way the electricity is routed on my street means my next door neighbor is on a different electric line than I am. Just today, my power was out for 5 hours because a tree fell across the road. I saw the tree on my way home from the grocery store (with plenty of perishables, of course). I took a bag of groceries to my neighbor’s to put in their fridge until mine came back online.
That said, if I was in MN, I would probably make getting a generator a priority.
O
[QUOTE=walkers;8341840]
We recently sold the pull generator which was awful for my back and went to a 8000 watt automatic which i can plug into a generator approved outlet in my detached garage carport because remember they MUST BE OUTSIDE or you’ll die.Nice not to have all that noise next to the house.
Anyway this generator will run the heat because we’re on propane and the generator only has to power the fan. This makes me happy after having a outage that lasted 7 days with daytime temps of 18. Yes in the south…
So it run the pump, frig , wi-fi and heat but not all the the same time.
Also make sure you have fresh gas, don’t fill up your all the gas cans months before you need them or the gas will go bad … lesson learned.[/QUOTE]
Dang! Okay,propane and generator just went a lot hire on my must-have list!
Or you could do the homesteader system which I saw growing up: a claw footed cast-iron bathtub with a wood fire underneath. Works in all disasters and you could even have a warm bath!
I’ve had the same generator since before Hurricane Fran. I keep a spare carburetor on the shelf above it even though I run all the gas out of it, fog the cylinder when we put it away. I think the last time it was used was Hurricane Isabel. If it doesn’t start with fresh gas, I’ll put the new carb on it.
