I have a 3 bedroom / 1 bath home. It is just 2 of us in the house. Also, I've heard that there is way to plug your generator into any wall outlet and it will charge your whole house. Any truth to this?
A 13 K will handle most homes, and NO you can,t plug it into a outlet, it has to be connected to the breaker box with a automatic disconnect, [BY Law] so when the gen kicks in the power line is disconnected, A Diesel powered gen will run for 3 months on 1,000 gal of fuel,
Backfeeding your house in the manner suggested is dangerous and should never be done. I use a 7kW generator for backup power.
It depends what you want to power. If you only want it for your fridge, gas stove, portable lamps, and to charge batteries, a 3 to 5 KW one will do. If you wanto power a few key circuits, likely a 5K to 7K generator with a manual transfer panel will do, with your essential circuits moved to it. For a whole home, you want a 10 to 15KW fixed generator with an automatic transfer panel. Plugging any power source into existing outlets is dangerous and illegal. If you want to tie a generator into your house wiring, you need an approved transfer switch or panel, and it installed by a qualified electrician.
A 10 Kw unit should be enough. Remember you're only going to use it during a commercial power outageyou'll only run essential appliances during that time. Yes, you can plug the generator into any of your house's outletsbut the power company asks that you don't, because the electricity will also run back up the utility lines and could endanger people working to restore commercial power. A qualified electrician can install a proper receptacle into which you feed power from your generator and does not risk harming the linesmen.
Plugging a generator into an ordinary wall outlet limits you 15-20 amps of single phase power, or less than 2000-2500w. And it would only energize one leg, or about half the circuits in your house. You'd also want to throw your main breakers to prevent you from backfeeding the neighborhood and/or electrocuting a lineman. Overall, it's not a safe or efficient way to connect a generator. You want a generator plugin that will safely allow more power to fed into your house along with a transfer switch that will properly isolate your house from the grid whenever you want to connect a generator. As for sizing, you need to figure out what you really need vs. what you have, and for how long. For most storm-related outages, you can probably get by with a relatively small amount of power (refrigerator, a few lights, etc) for the few hours or at most 1-2 days that power will likely be out. If you want to cover longer outages or you have higher level of necessities, then you'll need a larger generator. Also, you need to worry about a fuel supply especially if you're planning for a long outage. Fuel transportation and storage can both be problematic, although the problems vary by fuel type (gasoline, diesel, natural gas or propane).
