R-BallJunkie
Supporting Member
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2006
- Messages
- 1,521
- Reaction score
- 229
yeah, my house is older (1985) and im plum out of room in my panel. i looked at replacing/upgrading but then you have to meet new code verses grandfathered so that would have meant $$. this was the easiest, safest path. Glad to see people moving forward with backups! I'm sleeping better now knowing there's some form of protection in place for the next Ike or winter stormTalked to an electrician about wiring in a transfer switch. He looked at my load panel and said since I'm only using 12 of the 24 spaces on my panel it would be far cheaper and easier to move the top two breakers to the other rail, mount a 50 amp power inlet and wire it to a dedicated 50 amp double pole breaker and install an interlock kit. He said that the main reason for using a transfer switch is if you do not have enough spaces in the load panel, or do not have a large enough generator and don't want to flip a bunch of breakers so you would just wire in the stuff you want on the generator and the rest would remain unpowered.
So I'm looking at about $150 worth of parts to do this myself or 300 for him to do it, and another 300 for the A/C soft start kit and I'm done until I decide to plumb in the connections for the generator to run off of natural gas. He also said that it would be a nice selling point for the house that it's setup to have a backup generator.