I’m looking for home backup power. The 10kw units MEP 1040, or 803A
Help me understand why I want one.
I have a consumer grade 13kw, dual fuel generator. It weighs 120 lbs or so, electric start etc. it’s brand new, it works.
I understand the military units and Diesel engines hold the longevity game over a consumer grade unit.
Consumer grade - 13 Kw 120 lbs
Military - 10Kw 1100 lbs
There is a huge size/weight/price difference between the two, and I know it’s an orange to apples comparison and I’m sure they probably aren’t measuring Kw capacity the same here either.
Why do I want/need the 1040 or 803A?
Some of this has been gone over in other posts, but I'll go ahead and go over everything as I see it anyway.
When you say "home backup power" what is it that you really mean by that?
to clarify: do you have outages that last for many hours or days on end, or do you have a couple hours without power every year or three?
If power does go out for more than a couple hours every few months or years, is there anything critical in the house that really requires that you have power, like freezers full of game meat, medical equipment, or other stuff like that?
honestly, if "home backup" is your only requirement, and you don't lose power for more than a handful of hours a year, then a military generator is massive overkill.
I'll explain a little.
The consumer generators are "occasional use" type products. They are designed to run for a few hours before needing some type of attention (typically an oil level check every 8 hours). They have an expected life span of a few hundred hours to maybe 1k hours. Most of them have an emissions rating of 2-500 hours depending on quality of the engine. They get oil changes every 100 hours or so (some at 200 hours with full synthetic oil, but typically only if they have an oil filter built onto them, which few do).
Advantages are they are lightweight, commonly available, and easy to repair or cheap to replace, and low maintenance costs. They also don't care how much load is placed on them (unless you have a cheap diesel unit).
disadvantages are poor quality parts that can fail unexpectedly, high RPMs, short life expectancy, and high noise level. If gasoline powered they also must be either drained, or run on a monthly basis with treated fuel in the tank, or the carburetor will gum up and unit will not work until cleaned/replaced. They also have much less rotating mass, which means whenever the amount of load is changed, the engine speed (and therefore frequency) will change a lot more, and can even spike/dip far enough to cause damage to some electronic items. Gasoline/propane doesn't have as much energy as diesel, so fuel usage will be higher.
Military generators are "prime power" type products. This means they are designed to operate for days or weeks at a time with little or no maintenance checks. You can even check the oil on many of them without shutting them off. 500 hours between oil changes isn't uncommon (about 3 weeks) and going over that usually isn't harmful to it. They are happy to just keep running nonstop.
Advantages are high quality parts and construction compared to civilian units, long expected lifespan, low RPMS, diesel fuel typically has a longer usable storage life than gasoline. All the shop and parts manuals are readily available for most models. They are also much quieter, and have a much more pleasant tone to them that is easier to sleep through. They also have a whole lot more rotating mass, so sudden changes in load won't have that great of an effect on it's operation/output. The power output will also likely be much "cleaner" (the waveform of the power will be much smoother). Being diesel and low speed it will burn less fuel over time.
Disadvantages include large size, heavy weight, harder to acquire parts, much higher initial cost, higher parts cost, fewer shops willing to work on them, higher repair costs. You also have to make sure to run them under a heavy load for a few hours if the load on it has been light for any extended period of time.
I repair standby generators for a living. For the past 12 years Generac has been putting electronic controllers in their generators with hour meters (earlier ones just had blinky lights for everything)
Even my highest use customers (that aren't off grid) are only at a few hundred hours of runtime. Take 10 hours a year off of that just for their maintenance runs, and my higher use customers that tend to lose power more often or for longer periods of time, are averaging 10-20 hours a year of power loss.
From a financial standpoint, the above information suggests that the military type generator isn't really a cost effective solution for the majority of households. The $3-4k difference in initial cost would take decades to make up.
My advice would be go talk to your neighbor about whether the noise is going to be an issue, and work out some type of deal where you do drop them an extension cord (that they hopefully understand will only power a few basic items and not their whole house) as well as agreeing to what hours the generator will or will not be running (unless you have critical loads then you probably don't need it running overnight)
Don't get me wrong, I love my MEP-802 generator, and I haven't put a huge number of hours on it since I bought it (about 60 in the past year) but I got it before the price madness started on these things, and I probably paid not much more than you did for the dual fuel unit you have.
