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New PTO Generators
I agree with you about the grounding and swinging potential of the neutral wire. Balancing and grounding are very important.
Years ago, I had a house where the lights would get brighter when the cloths washer would start up. The heavy load of the washer starting would "pull" the neutral toward that phase and the same increase would be seen in the other phase that happened to power the lighting. Except during heavy load excursions, things seemed normal. I traced the problem down to the line actually coming into the house from the power company transformer. It turns out that the neutral connection was corroded at the transformer and a voltage would develop over the corroded connection under heavy load.
When we apply backup generators to our properties, it is even more important to balance loads, because we seldom provide 100A service from a generator. 100A service on a 220V line would be a nominal generator capacity of 22KW and the surge would be even higher.
Most backup generators are in the 10KW range or less, so you have less than 40 amperes to share over all of your needs. Balance helps by distributing those loads on both phases of the power more or less equally, and it means that you probably need to turn off the heavy loads when on emergency power.
Power factor is another thing to consider. While heaters and lighting loads are resistive, most motor and welder loads are inductive. The current and voltage on inductive loads are out of phase. Power companies address this by hanging capacitors on the powerlines as necessary when they find that their power factor is not proper. It is beyond the scope of this email to go into that further, but I even place capacitors on some loads to make them work better and use less wattage. Manufacturers don't put these capacitors in most welders and motors simply because of the cost.
Beyond my career as an engineer, I am also an amateur radio operator. I have seen the problems with 400Hz transformers before. Many hams like to reactivate military surplus radios and some of them need 400Hz. Most we convert to 60Hz using surplus transformers. But, many times the specs of the surplus transformers are not known. Many of us
encounter odd transformers occasionally that are not marked and will burn up when tested. I am sure that you also remember audio transformers used in some USAF equipment. They can also get hot when 60Hz is applied. If you ever have to test something like that again, use a 100W lightbulb in series with the power lead. That will limit the current through the transformer or device to 1A or less. If you want to know more about this, please email me separately.
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Gentlemen: Im a new poster to this forum. Go have a look at Tiger PTO generators from Dynagen.com. We were in the power failure in August here in southern MI and it saved us. I have a L3130 that ran my 12KW gen just fine. Hope this helps!
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Welcome to the Board. We were spared the outage here except for a few drops that wiped out about an hour of computer work so I didn't need my generator. I have a stand-alone myself and I'm a great believer in back-up generators--stand-alone or pto. Our oil dealer has a generator for his fuel pumps so if we had the failure here we still could have gotten gas or diesel, which is a problem some people had. The thing about a stand-alone in my case is that my wife might start it and switch over the power herself but she'd rather freeze in the dark than learn to hook up the tractor.
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04-10-2003, 10:23 
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