Generator 1 / Power cut 0

Oo, nice. Let me know if you find another one. ;-)

Tim

In article , Bill scribeth thus

OK...

Ah!, That should be dependable when you need it;)....

I've just finished wiring up the house with an alternative power supply from the garage. Two power points upstairs and two downstairs. A 1500 watt inverter from the car battery or a 2500 watt 4 stroke petrol generator. Next is a 12 volt system running LED lights and emergency spotlights.

When the underground 11kV supply to the substation in my back garden failed at 8pm YEDL turned up with what looked like a mobile burger van at 11pm, parked it outside my bedroom window and started the 3 phase 11kV generator up with "extension leads down to the substation" to supply the village.

I have no idea if it was noisy as they also spend all night digging the pavement up:-(

Hmmmm, now you've posted that, will it be there tomorrow?

Don't blame you. I would've too. ;-)

At what point does it become more economical to run your own genny than to continue getting f***ed over by the power companies? Say if you get a diesel genny and run it on red (which I imagine is legal) Have we reached that point yet?

cd

Some people know the price of everything and the value of sweet eff a.

I have an all terrain masted forklift and plenty of pallets to stand on...:-)

On Thursday 21 November 2013 19:34 Cursitor Doom wrote in uk.d-i-y:

I would have hung up the external flashing fairly lights and put something brass-band like on the HiFi at full volume!

Yep, only public highway using vehicles need to use road fuel (with a few exceptions). If you have a vehicle that never uses the public highway you can run it on red or claim back the duty paid on petrol (but I think the hoops are many an various).

Haven't looked at the price of red recently but I should imagine it's about 75p/l. That roughly equates to 7.5p/kWHr but a small genset is not going to be very effcient, 30% maybe(*). so make that over

(*) If you can keep a decent load on it. Our 2kVA drinks about a litre an hour running the CH, fridge/freezer (dual compressor type) and freezer. I'd imagine the average load is only a couple of hundred watts, that's about 2% ...

A bit like this chap?

or this?

This one didn't even need the forklift

OTOH, with a telehandler

Chris

The pallet was intended to be jocular:-)

Hugely tempting to use a grain bucket for unplanned, temporary access though.

H&S have prosecuted managers for allowing employees to use unapproved equipment but I have not yet found cases involving the self employed.

How is it that it does not surprise me that you have your own private substation?

:o)

My farmer next-door-neighbour collects farming & other heavy machinery. He has a small collection of WW2 bulldozers. I came home one day and he had lifted the end of the one of them with his JCB telehandler and was underneath it.

I subsequently asked him how much the bulldozer weighs (20 tonnes) and what the SWL of the telehandler is (2 tonnes).

No wonder farms are the most dangerous places there are to work.

(The farmer the other side was recently killed by his own Land Rover. It rolled away down a slope in his yard and crushed him against a wall.)

'Fraid not. There is no process by which the duty on petrol can be reclaimed.

Are you sure that includes the likes of engine testing?

Avgas doesn't attract as much duty as road petrol.

But is significantly more expensive than "road" petrol.

Maybe, but that is for economies of scale and distribution costs.

Nevertheless it does prove that petrol can be purchased with less duty "content" than road petrol.

It does, yes. But that wasn't the question. The question related to reclaiming the duty on "road" petrol.