Standby generator control timer?

[folivier]

I'd love to see: a control for a standby generator that when electricity fails it starts the genny for a couple hours then shuts off for about 6 hours then on for another 2 hours then repeats.
It seems everybody here in hurricane country now has a natural gas standby generator. Well when you evacuate and the electricity goes out and you can't get back for a few days to a week do you really want your generator running continuously for all that time? I've seen some cheaper air cooled genny's shut down or even burn up due to being run so long. Not to mention the cost of all that natural gas.
I've tried contacting a few of the manufacturers and they aren't interested in doing this.
So any electrical gurus want to design this?

 

[cajun_64]

This shouldnt be very difficult. Could you possibly get me a copy of the generator wiring diagram?

 

[cajun 22]

Most of the whole house stand by gensets have the timers built in that will do what you want. It takes time to go through the menu to get to it. The cheaper gens burn up because they are not rated for continuous duty. All air cooled gen sets need to be shut down and serviced every 24 hours.

 

[dantheman]

If you evacuate , shut the automatic control down . Problem solved .

 

[Barney88PDC]

Then the freezer goes to ****.

 

[cajun_64]

Then the freezer goes to ****.

If the freezer has good gaskets, it should be good for 3 days before needing energy.

3 days after hurricane Lilly mine was just beginning to thaw. YMMV

 

[Isaac-1]

Great idea, but I don't see it happening for a couple of reasons:

1, consumer generators in this country are built as cheap as possible, every extra feature costs money.

2, liability concerns, you would need studies using refrigerators and freezers from numerous brands tested to show that running 1 out of X hours keeps food from getting warm enough to make people sick. Otherwise someone will come back from a week long evacution make a ham and cheese sandwich and sue the generator company when they end up in the hospital.

3, if you really want this feature, some commercial grade automatic transfer switches will switch loads when a generator does its weekly test run to show that they can handle the actual emergency load. All you would have to do is bypass the detection of utility power so the load always transfers on generator test and does not start the generator and run continously when line power fails, then set the self test timer to start and run for something like 1 hour every 6 hours instead of an hour per week. A bit more relay logic could make it so it only does this if the main power is down.