Edmonton Backup Generators | Can a Generac Generator Power Your Whole House? Testing Generac

Well, hey everyone. It’s Kevin with Halo Power Solutions. Hope you’re having a great day. So, as most of you know, we install Edmonton backup generators with Generac Generators. And I’ve done videos about how we install them, why we install them, but I think what’s really important is for customers that have Generac Generators—or maybe you’re not a customer yet—you need to know how to test your generator.

You know, it’s great when you’ve got a generator installed and you’ve done the initial test on it and it works, but running a bi-yearly test on your generator can really give you that peace of mind that that machine’s ready to go should you have a power outage.

So, what does that mean? Well, you’re not just running the generator and actually letting it idle away. You want to put that generator under some load. So, I’m going to show you today how you, as the homeowner, can do a simple load test on your generator by simulating a power outage so that basically you’ll run your home off your generator, put some load on it, and give you that peace of mind that that generator is ready to go should an actual outage occur.

So, let’s dive into this.

Now, before we get going on this generator load test, I want to remind you to hit that YouTube subscribe button. If you’re not yet a subscriber, you’re missing out on a lot of great content. So, hit that subscribe button and be sure to comment, share your thoughts on these videos and other ones that we’ve done.

Okay, so the test that we’re going to be running today is on this 7209 24 kW Generac Generator you can see behind me. Now, remember, it’s 24 kW when it’s running on propane. When we run them on natural gas, which is most of the installs that we do in the Alberta area, this generator puts out 22 kilowatts. So, you can expect about 88–89 amps of capacity and 240 for this generator.

What Is The Right Generator Size For Your Home?

So, it’s a perfect size if you’ve got a home like the one behind me here—about 1,800 square ft and 100 amp service. We’ve got a stove, we’ve got a dryer, we’ve got air conditioning—that’s the big 240-volt loads on it. So, what we’re going to do today is simulate a power outage by shutting down utility power at the transfer switch. You’ll see how this generator fires right up.

And while we’re running the generator, we’re going to turn items on in the house. We’re going to turn on the appliances that draw a lot of power—the stove, the dryer—and we’ll even turn the air conditioning on and create a real-world situation where this generator is powering the home under normal day-to-day summer circumstances.

Okay.

Okay, so here’s just another shot of our Generac Generator. And when we look at the control panel here, we can see that it is ready to run. You’ll see that it cycles back and forth between “ready to run” and “hours.” Now, what that 1655 hours means is that’s how long the generator’s been activated. It doesn’t mean it’s got that many run hours on it—it just describes how long the generator’s actually been in service.

Now, before we get too carried away here, always a good idea to pop out that dipstick and make sure the oil’s right up. And I can see here that, yep, oil is right up—nice and clean.

All right, let’s run a test on this girl.

Okay, so I’m down in the utility room and you can see behind me we’ve got a Generac Generator 100 amp automatic transfer switch. Now, this particular install, we did install the transfer switch inside. Quite frankly, there just wasn’t enough room to install it outside, but it works well because in the cabinet behind me is a 100 amp Siemens electrical panel. And this transfer switch is set up beautifully to run this home should the power go out.

Okay. So, whether your transfer switch is inside or outside, it’s going to look just like this. In order to simulate this outage, what we’ve got to do is open up the transfer switch. So, you unscrew this thumb-turning set screw at the front, open up the cover, and here you see your 100 amp auto transfer switch.

Edmonton Backup Generators | Don’t Be Caught in a Power Outage

This is the main breaker—this is the main disconnect for your electrical service. Now, I want to be really clear about this: if you are simulating a power outage on your Generac Generator system, you need to shut power off here at the transfer switch. If you go into your electrical panel and you shut off the 100 amp main breaker at the top of your panel, you’re not going to actually create an outage. That would be a utility outage because there is still utility power at the Generac Generator’s transfer switch.

Okay. So, with that being said, you’re going to reach up here on this 100 amp breaker and you’re going to shut her down. Boom.

Okay, so we’re sitting in the dark right now. Power is out and we have this system set for about a 30-second delay before that generator fires up. So, as we’re standing in the dark, we should hear our generator fire up here shortly.

Sometimes that 30 seconds seems like an eternity when you’re sitting in the darkness. But the reason we set it for 30 seconds is we don’t want that generator starting up immediately—we want to make sure that it’s a true power outage.

Okay. I don’t know if you can hear it, but I heard the generator start up outside. So, it’s going to do a quick warm-up and we should hear our turn. There we go. There you go. So, in under a minute from the time of the power outage, the generator started and the transfer switch transferred back.

Okay, so the lights are back on in the house and we’re running on generator power. But right now, with really not much going on in the house, we’re not drawing very much amperage at all. So, let’s start turning some things on here, and we want to make sure that that generator is still going to hum away nicely while we’re running the dryer, the stove, and the air conditioning.

Okay, we’ll start with this clothes dryer here. Turn the power on—played a nice little tune—and let’s start it up. And we’re going to stop because Kevin just turned on the washing machine. You can see I don’t do a lot of laundry.

Okay, let’s go over to the clothes dryer. Try this again. Okay, so we got their setting here. Let’s turn it on.

Okay, awesome. So, by turning on the clothes dryer, we’ve already added about at least 20 amps’ worth of load onto the system. Now, we are at the oven, so let’s turn the oven on. We’re going to bake and set her at about 350°. So, when this oven’s heating up, we can expect that we’re pulling at least 20 amps.

All right, last but not least, let’s turn things down so that air conditioner starts up.

All right, so we’re out at our Generac Generator, which is purring along nicely. And let’s go over and make sure our AC is started up. Yep, the AC is running. So, right now we’ve got the clothes dryer running—roughly 20 amps. We got the oven heating up—at least 20 amps. My AC draws about 18 to 19 amps. So, I know that I am pulling at least 60 amps on my generator and that’s a very real-world load.

And the generator’s running beautifully—no problems at all.

One thing I want to mention is if your generator is running under load and you see the green light flashing, that’s what it’s supposed to do. That tells you that you’re running your home off generator power. So, that green flashing light is totally normal.

All right, so everything is working just fine in the house. We got lights turning off and on. Dryer’s still running. The stove’s still heating. AC is still on.

Okay, so I’ve been running my generator for a good 15–20 minutes now. So, I know that this generator is working just fine under load. What I’m going to do now is turn utility power back on and show you how it restores back to utility. It’s almost instant—you’ll just notice a little flicker of the light and then the generator will run a cool down cycle and just go back into automatic standby mode.

And that’s it. This shows you how easy it is to perform a load test on your own home when you have a Generac Generator.

All right, so we’re going to go back over to that main utility breaker on the transfer switch and we turn it back on. So, what we’re going to hear after a minute or so is the switch click back over to utility because it has seen that utility power has been restored.

Switch to Backup Power Without Any Hassle

Boom. There it is. Now, really nothing happened in the house—the lights didn’t flicker, the dryer’s still running, nothing changed. So, um, yeah, this is what happens when the power goes out for real at your home.

There you—oh, I’m back up to the oven here, and it’s still heating even though it switched from generator back to utility. That’s how quick it happens.

Okay, so we switched our system back into utility mode. And I can tell utility power is back on because I have a solid green light instead of a flashing light. And you can see here the Generac Generator is running a cool down cycle.

And there you go—it shuts down all on its own after running that cool down cycle and it goes right back into automatic mode, ready to run.

So, another reason that I want to mention why we want to run these load tests on your generator—maintenance is really important with these Generac Generators, and especially that first oil change. But here’s the thing: the first oil change on your Generac Generator isn’t really supposed to happen till it hits about 25 hours of run time.

Now, if you live in the city—I live in Sherwood Park—where we might not get a lot of power outages, it may take a very long time for you to accumulate 25 hours of runtime on your Generac Generator. We set them to run a weekly exercise cycle, but it only runs for five minutes. So, if your generator is only running five minutes at a time for, say, a year, you know, you’re lucky if you’re going to accumulate five or six hours of runtime on it.

So, by running this load test on it and simulating power motion and actually letting that generator run even for a couple hours throughout the course of the year, at that one-year point you should easily have 25 hours accumulated on it, and it’ll be time to do an oil change back to synthetic oil and you’ve broken the engine in on this generator.

So, that’s what’s really important and that’s why we don’t do an oil change on the generator if it’s only got 5, 6, 10 hours on it—because that engine is not fully broken in yet with the oil that is shipped with the generator from Generac.

So, as you can see, doing that load test on your generator—it’s not a big deal. It’s not a—oh, hello, cat, my co-host—it’s not a big deal to run that test on your generator. You just turn off that main breaker on the transfer switch and let the generator do its thing. That’s what it’s designed to do.

So, if you like what you’ve seen today, please hit that subscribe button so you can catch all our future videos. You can also check out all the ones we’ve done in the past.

And if you’re interested in putting in a Edmonton backup generators Generac Generator home backup generator in your place, visit us at halopower.ca, give us a call at 780-995-0359, and I’d be happy to come out, give you a complimentary quote for your generator install, and I’ll even come and pet your cats.

And yeah, that’s all we got for today. So, I’m Kevin Staigh, Halo Power Solutions, where every day we’re bringing power for life.