[PLUG-TALK] Emergency backup generator - suggestions?

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Fri, Jan 02, 2026 at 07:44:34PM +0000, Eldo Varghese wrote:
> My recommendation:
> a) what Ted said re: 5kw range not being able to handle your furnace / 
> heater. The 5kw range is at best to keep your lights+fridge+internet up 
> and running. Larger gensets will need regular maintenance+testing like 
> Ted said
> b) If the goal is to maintain whole home backup, I recommend solar+battery.
> -Eldo

My goal is survival capacity during a week+ winter power
failure.  Been there, shivered through that.  Way too many
irrelevant details omitted for now.  Still too many follow:

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I have a digital power monitor on the furnace.  I just spent
half an hour watching it through two startup cycles.  It
reads out current, voltage, power factor, frequency, 1 second
cadence.  It does NOT record data, but I will soon deploy
an Emporia Vue system to monitor the branch currents.

-----

Furnace startup sequence, eyeballing the furnace monitor:

Idle, less than 7 watts, power factor about 80%, trivial.  
First phase of startup:  about 180 watts to the glow plug,
then gas turned on; power factor close to one.

Then the furnace motor revved up over SECONDS, more gently
than I imagined.

The furnace (induction motor) surprised me; I was expecting
(perhaps like you) the usual "dead short low voltage high
current" that induction motors usually draw.  The "circuit"
is just a relay between motor and the 116 to 120 volt feed.

Surprisingly, startup current peaked at only 830 watts (power
factor never below 0.8 ), then dropped to 300 watts running. 
I'm skeptical - the current was enough to pop the circuit
breaker on my small 1KW Honda generator.  Perhaps I should
be skeptical about the Honda generator.
 
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I will verify this when I get the Emporia Vue 3 power monitor
working the way I want.   Which is actually a PLUG-centric
software issue.  Deserving of a different LINUX thread, but
I'm lazy, here goes:

-----

The Vue sends 384 byte packets to Emporia company in
Colorado, which provides free (FOR NOW) graphs on
THEIR server, which I can look at with a web browser.

Fork that, I say.

Precisely useless in an major emergency situation, when I
will need power management data the most.   Semi-useless
now, as I prepare for such emergencies.   Also useless 
after Emporia is acquired by a predator that will charge a
steadily increasing monthly fee for access to a formerly
free service.

Those 384 byte packets pass though my firewall (currently
ancient CentOS, but Debian Real Soon Now), but I presume
I can divert them to an SSD, and build a cheesy program
to interpret the binary packets into spreadsheet data,
or more sophisticated analysis.  

An engineer can do for a dollar what any damned fool can
do for two.  If we can "do for a dollar" for our entire
community, our community will be wiser and wealthier.

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Other PLUG members have Vues.

I propose we collaborate, form a "Vue SIG", write some
code, give a PLUG talk, and gather more collaborators. 
Perhaps expanding to other power monitoring systems,
including home-brew kludges.  That's the Linux Way.

The BIG problem is that electricity can be LETHAL, and
(as noted before) some of us have way more confidence
than data.  My friend (frenemy?) Jerry Pournelle called
the consequences of overconfidence "evolution in action".
I'm not quite so blasé; I prefer knowledge and community
self-help to overconfidence, failure, and death.
Paraphrasing Carl Reiner, dead men don't write code.

-----

The BIGGEST problem, which I hope we can help address, is
that our survival depends on utilities owned by investors
whose personal survival does NOT depend on US.  We can
hope for the best, but when the Fit hits the Shan, we
should have alternatives deployed and tested in advance.  

Cough cough Cascadia Subduction Zone cough.

-----

Too much talk, even for Plug Talk.  Back to writing notes
about the book "The End of Plagues" by John Rhodes.  My
M.D. wife (an Intel tech writer when we met) handles the
pandemics, but I can't obey her wise commands if I don't
understand what she's talking about.  K-strategy; I'll
avoid the lazy and clueless practitioners of r-strategy.

Keith L.

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com