balancing generator load

[m16ty]

After having my 003 for a year now, I'm finally getting around to hooking it up to the house.

How is everybody monitoring and balancing the load between each leg? Is it really that critical?

What I've been thinking about is mounting a box beside the house panel and putting two ammeters on each leg with a display on outside of box. I may also add one of those cheap frequency meters to also be able to monitor that from inside the house. I'll just skip this and run the wire straight into the house panel though if I don't need to monitor amp draw on each leg.

 

[Isaac-1]

Some degree of balancing is needed to avoid burning out the windings on part of the generator, although it does not need to be perfect. The biggest concern is not to overload either half, so make sure that neither leg ever exceeds 50 amps or so on a MEP-003a and you should be good

 

[Triple Jim]

About 1/3 of the way down this page, I have a couple photos of how I do it.http://www.steelsoldiers.com/showthread.php?91430-How-have-you-civilized-your-MEP-Generators/page3

The meters are next to the entrance panel, and I can see the load on each side from inside the house.

 

[gimpyrobb]

Just put it on a scale and see how heavy the load is.

 

[steelypip]

I discovered by accident as I was turning on breakers during an outage that most of the largish plug-in loads in my house are on one leg, so part of the master plan is now to either split some circuits or move some over to the other side of the box. Luckily most of the wires come in from above on my load center and it's not going to be an especially big deal to swing them over.

It's definitely worth the trouble to figure this out. You probably don't have to fix it right away, but you do need to be aware of the single-leg current limitation and stay below that. Splitting out your feed cable near the box and checking both legs with a clamp-on ammeter would probably be the easiest way to do this.

 

[m16ty]

Just put it on a scale and see how heavy the load is.

There's one in every crowd.

 

[m16ty]

About 1/3 of the way down this page, I have a couple photos of how I do it.http://www.steelsoldiers.com/showthread.php?91430-How-have-you-civilized-your-MEP-Generators/page3

The meters are next to the entrance panel, and I can see the load on each side from inside the house.

Jim, That's exactly what I'm talking about. I think I'm going to add a frequency meter also because I've got a extra.