My MEP-803a and it's first true test

[nextalcupfan]

Bought an 803a surplus Nov 2019, called in an electrician to wire it up to my house, which became very expensive since it was discovered my house had NO ground whatsoever. Also due to the amount of work that needed to be done and the weather not cooperating it took 3 months to actually get wired to the house.

Had an Ice storm roll through my area yesterday (12/29/2020) (with more on the way Thursday night into Friday(12/31-1/1)) we lost power at 6:57PM, my power monitor fired up the set and kicked the ATS over about 40 seconds later.

She gave exactly 0 cares about being covered in 0.25in of ice.

This is at 9:55PM.

I took the opportunity to put in about 3 gallons of fuel from one of my cans.
Ran all night and here is a shot of the panel the next morning.

I slowed the frequency down a tad last night (the gauge is off by 1Hz so its not running as fast as it looks)

And here is my power monitoring and auto-start/shutdown status. (Yes I'm running my 803a off a Raspberry Pi 4)

So far the only thing I've been worried about is how much I'm wet stacking the set. Going for a fuel run, and when I get back I may just hook up 10kW worth of heaters for 30-45 min just to get her good and hot.

 

[nextalcupfan]

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLo_9DiW2SAF8SxwVaRULOg3B6CNoARhGS

Playlist of my Progress since I got my generator.

Video is worth a million words.

 

[nextalcupfan]

Generac 200 Amp ATS

Mounting it off the floor is on the To-Do list.....

Wires going left are to the house, right goes to an outdoor rated sub panel I mainly use for plugging in my heaters for load banking. (Videos in the previous post)

 

[nextalcupfan]

Just a few pics of my Monitor setup.
Raspberry Pi 4 on an 8 Relay board.
3 Power Supplies, 1 to convert 24V to 5V for the Pi, 1 to convert 24V to 12V for the ATS, and 1 to rectify 120V AC to 5V DC so the Pi can monitor power from the street.

Left is a 5 Wire cable going to the ATS, 2 for 120V going inside and 2 for the 12V for the ATS to switch.

 

[Light in the Dark]

Its good to be prepared, having a thorough knowledge of not only your equipment, but whats needed to keep it functional under all conventional circumstances. Looking good.

 

[nextalcupfan]

Front 2 Cylinders are bubbling pretty good.
Honestly it's wet stacking quicker than I thought.
I put 2 5kW heaters on my sub-panel to bring it up to 95% load (While still running the house), I'll run that for an hour or so, bring some more fuel down and take the heaters back up.
Should be good until morning after that.

Also played with the Hz a tad, was at 58.8 at 95% load so I brought that up to 59.4. (61.2 at around 10% load)

 

[WWRD99]

View attachment 822165
Front 2 Cylinders are bubbling pretty good.
Honestly it's wet stacking quicker than I thought.
I put 2 5kW heaters on my sub-panel to bring it up to 95% load (While still running the house), I'll run that for an hour or so, bring some more fuel down and take the heaters back up.
Should be good until morning after that.

Also played with the Hz a tad, was at 58.8 at 95% load so I brought that up to 59.4. (61.2 at around 10% load)

I wonder if the muffler might be a little clogged up to or right at the manifold to muffler connection? I got the goo right at the gasket at the muffler where this looks like right at the head exhaust output? You have a infrared heat gun? I used it to get the exhaust up to temp...it also tells you if it's burning the fuel evenly in each cylinder... I'll be interested to see what it looks like after a good load for a couple hours...glad you got it hooked up though...I had one heck of a time too!!

 

[nextalcupfan]

One of the videos in my playlist shows me temping each cylinder, pretty sure they were all within 10F.


Looks much better after 1h15m at 95%.
Not perfect but should work fine, after this event I'll definitely do a long run at 100%.

 

[Light in the Dark]

This is precisely why I run an 802. Except for my wall ovens, I can literally turn everything on and still not peg the thing in an outage.

 

[WWRD99]

One of the videos in my playlist shows me temping each cylinder, pretty sure they were all within 10F.View attachment 822166
View attachment 822167

Looks much better after 1h15m at 95%.
Not perfect but should work fine, after this event I'll definitely do a long run at 100%.

Ok I did try yo look for other posts on your hookup as mine was a long ordeal as well!! I don't know how to do that but I'll search up your name on posts...I just saw the soot on the muffler blanket and goo at the manifold....most people have no idea what egt does and where it should be...glad you got that part covered!

 

[WWRD99]

This is precisely why I run an 802. Except for my wall ovens, I can literally turn everything on and still not peg the thing in an outage.

Every one of these posts make me think about getting a 5k,,,,unfortunately the prices they hit today was insane plus I noticed the ones for next year have a start price of 3200!!

 

[nextalcupfan]

Ok I did try yo look for other posts on your hookup as mine was a long ordeal as well!! I don't know how to do that but I'll search up your name on posts...I just saw the soot on the muffler blanket and goo at the manifold....most people have no idea what egt does and where it should be...glad you got that part covered!

Playlist is in post #2 on this thread

 

[WWRD99]

Playlist is in post #2 on this thread

Geez!! I was looking on here for it...not sure how I missed the youtube ref!! You got a few more views on it now,,,nice seeing how you tested and did things. I did see in the wiring pic that it looks like the ground wire and the white neutral wire is hooked together with a jump wire...hard to tell since I can't see all of it...are they wired together?

 

[nextalcupfan]

Geez!! I was looking on here for it...not sure how I missed the youtube ref!! You got a few more views on it now,,,nice seeing how you tested and did things. I did see in the wiring pic that it looks like the ground wire and the white neutral wire is hooked together with a jump wire...hard to tell since I can't see all of it...are they wired together?

No the Neutral is bonded to ground in the ATS, the grounds and neutrals are just crossing each other because the house hookup is on one side and my sub-panel is on the other.

 

[nextalcupfan]

This is precisely why I run an 802. Except for my wall ovens, I can literally turn everything on and still not peg the thing in an outage.

I could definitely use an 802 in the Winter and I could almost get away with one in the Summer. But there are 2 problems.
One I would have to do some form of load management, and I'm not the only person in this house. Plus I wanted this to be fully automatic, which means the generator can/will kick on and start supplying power without me even being at the house. (Yes I did look into load shedding)
Second is in the Summer my A/C has a Massive surge load of 100A, it actually makes the 803 jump a little bit every time it kicks on. (Currently looking into a soft-start to help out the 803)

I should also mention I have actually overloaded my 803 2 separate times, though it does take quite the series of events to do so.
I got the 803 just for the piece of mind that I can use my home like normal and not have to worry about it. (now I just worry about it wet stacking haha)

 

[WWRD99]

No the Neutral is bonded to ground in the ATS, the grounds and neutrals are just crossing each other because the house hookup is on one side and my sub-panel is on the other.

Ok..was just confused since the ground bar on the genset is not hooked up then the wires are hooked together in the switch box...I'm in pa...the code people made me have my sub box done where everything was on a separate bar and in the switch box...I don't understand why but that's what they did.

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[nextalcupfan]

Would just like to report that power has returned after 25h15m out.
Other than wet stacking due to low load the generator performed flawlessly, quite happy about that.
If we lose power again during the next ice storm (supposedly in 2 days) I'll post more here.

Thank you everyone for your comments.

 

[Jeepadict]

@nextalcupfan what's your background that gives you the knowledge base for this stuff? I just watched all of your videos and am curious if you've already made some sort of build thread for everything you've done? I like the sub-panel you've mounted to the unit.

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