Quote:
Originally Posted by zx10guy
Where's your main service panel? Garage? How big of a house do you have? One of the big renovations I did on my home, I had the electrician install a 100A sub panel in the basement. It's come in extremely handy. I have dedicated circuits for my A/V room. I also have a two dedicated circuits for my "server" room. One was wired by the electrician which is a 20A 120V outlet. That's powering my network wall rack. The other I wired in myself which is a 30A 240V outlet. That's feeding a 6kVA UPS that's powering my 44U server rack.
Another major renno, I had the electrician put in additional outlets along the wall of my garage; in addition to a 30A 240V outlet for a garage heater. I have a 3000W forced air heater mounted to the ceiling using that outlet with an electrical baseboard thermostat wired in to allow me to turn on and set the temperature at floor level.
If you're handy, you can just wire in your own whole house surge protector. I did mine myself. Depending on the system, you either have to drop in a dual bus breaker or there are ones that just snap into a breaker slot. The last piece of wiring is to wire in the ground wire. Mine is from SquareD where it's modular. I can see the status of the surge protector via a green LED status indicator. No green means it's shot. It also has surge modules for cable and phone. I put mine in after getting hit by a major surge from a work truck crashing into a utility pole that sent a power surge into some of the homes in my cul de sac. Fortunately, I had surge protectors in place to protect my electronics. I only suffered one tripped breaker and one cooked surge protector. My two other neighbors didn't fair so well. Both sustained over a thousand in damages.
For the transfer switch, are you putting in a manual or automatic transfer switch? Do you already have a backup generator? Asking because I have a 20kW Generac backup generator on my home with two load centers.
|
I was planning to do a manual switch. Reasons being I am in a residential area with my neighbors super close in physical proximity, plus with the concrete already laid around my house I don't know how financially feasible it would be to wire in a permanent generator. i have natural gas plumbed to my house, but I hear even that you have to make sure it is rated for your generator and may have to upgrade that as well.
My circuit breaker board is in the garage for those that have asked. This is a ~3k sq ft house, I'm most concerned with fridge/freezers, tankless water heater, electric/gas fireplace and hvac. I would like to add some additional wall outlets in the garage, if nothing else convert 2 plug outlets to 4 plug.
The plan so far was to maybe buy a Honda gas powered portable generator to leave in my garage, select the few appliances I want to power on the breaker panel, and during a power outage plumb the exhaust gasses out the bottom of a cracked garage door.