My wife is wanting me to get a Tri Fuel Generator to connect to our natural gas line as an emergency backup. The generator I'm eyeing has 7600 peak watts and 6800 running watts on NG. I'm currently estimating the consumption at peak load to be 140,000 BTUs (but this is estimated based off of other units as this one doesn't publish the info).
My current meter is an AR-250 which I believe supplies 250,000 BTUs/H
Gas appliances in the house are as follows:
- Hotwater Heater 1 - 38,000 BTUs
- Hotwater Heater 2 - 38,000 BTUs
- Furnace 1 - 79,000 BTUs
- Furnace 2 - 79,000 BTUs
- Gas Range - 44,700 total across 4 burners
Total: 278,000 BTUs
Clearly we can throttle and manipulate what we use, but given another Snowmaggedon, I'm thinking we would be running the generator at half load (3500 watts) with my calculation, that means assuming the use of the furnaces and hotwater heaters with 2 burners running, I might need 330,000 BTUs of gas at peak.
I would plan to tee in a hookup between the meter and the house and probably have a line run of ~10ft from the tee to the generator in the driveway.
My question...I assume I need a meter with more flow for those peak times...will Atmos come install a higher flow meter, how much will it cost, and is there another bottle neck in the system I'm not thinking about...e.g. a high flow cut off switch if my gas spikes during an outage.
Thanks y'all!
My current meter is an AR-250 which I believe supplies 250,000 BTUs/H
Gas appliances in the house are as follows:
- Hotwater Heater 1 - 38,000 BTUs
- Hotwater Heater 2 - 38,000 BTUs
- Furnace 1 - 79,000 BTUs
- Furnace 2 - 79,000 BTUs
- Gas Range - 44,700 total across 4 burners
Total: 278,000 BTUs
Clearly we can throttle and manipulate what we use, but given another Snowmaggedon, I'm thinking we would be running the generator at half load (3500 watts) with my calculation, that means assuming the use of the furnaces and hotwater heaters with 2 burners running, I might need 330,000 BTUs of gas at peak.
I would plan to tee in a hookup between the meter and the house and probably have a line run of ~10ft from the tee to the generator in the driveway.
My question...I assume I need a meter with more flow for those peak times...will Atmos come install a higher flow meter, how much will it cost, and is there another bottle neck in the system I'm not thinking about...e.g. a high flow cut off switch if my gas spikes during an outage.
Thanks y'all!
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