For those of you who live here in the DR and are considering purchasing a small generator to get you those extra hours of power to charge your inverter batteries, this may be of interest to you.
As I hate noisy stinky high maintenance gas guzzling generators, I have managed to get around the power failures with an inverter, a multitude and batteries and economy bulbs throughout Rocky's.
We also turn off all unnecessary electrical devices when not in use and we don't even attempt to run hotwater tanks, refrigerators (we use ice during long power outages) AC units or water pumps.
That being said, the latest power failures forced me to buy a mechanical generator.
As there was hardly anything left on the market, I had little choice of what to buy and I landed up with a Honda powered Elemax semi quiet 2.9 K unit.
To my surprise, when I run it during the daytime, I have been managing to run the bare essentials here, a few lights, fans, TV's and the 3 PC's, and still squeeze out 50 amps of charge power from our Trace 3.6 inverter.
Although the charger is capable of puting out 100 amps, in reality, it's rare that we get enough voltage from Edenorte to ever get that much.
Typically, it puts out 50 or 60 amps when the batteries are low, as we rarely get more than 100 volts from the street lines.
All this to say that if you are in a similar position and have to buy a small generator to supplement you until we get through these long power outages, this Honda, as small as it is, might be what you need to resolve the problem.
It costs a bit less that $1,000 US, should be more reliable than a "no name" brand, consumes approx. 1 US gallon of gas per 3 hours of operation and is substantially quieter that most.
We put ours into a small shed with an extended 15 foot exhaust pipe and can't even hear it in the bar while the neighbouring generators drone out their low rumble.
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.
As I hate noisy stinky high maintenance gas guzzling generators, I have managed to get around the power failures with an inverter, a multitude and batteries and economy bulbs throughout Rocky's.
We also turn off all unnecessary electrical devices when not in use and we don't even attempt to run hotwater tanks, refrigerators (we use ice during long power outages) AC units or water pumps.
That being said, the latest power failures forced me to buy a mechanical generator.
As there was hardly anything left on the market, I had little choice of what to buy and I landed up with a Honda powered Elemax semi quiet 2.9 K unit.
To my surprise, when I run it during the daytime, I have been managing to run the bare essentials here, a few lights, fans, TV's and the 3 PC's, and still squeeze out 50 amps of charge power from our Trace 3.6 inverter.
Although the charger is capable of puting out 100 amps, in reality, it's rare that we get enough voltage from Edenorte to ever get that much.
Typically, it puts out 50 or 60 amps when the batteries are low, as we rarely get more than 100 volts from the street lines.
All this to say that if you are in a similar position and have to buy a small generator to supplement you until we get through these long power outages, this Honda, as small as it is, might be what you need to resolve the problem.
It costs a bit less that $1,000 US, should be more reliable than a "no name" brand, consumes approx. 1 US gallon of gas per 3 hours of operation and is substantially quieter that most.
We put ours into a small shed with an extended 15 foot exhaust pipe and can't even hear it in the bar while the neighbouring generators drone out their low rumble.
If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.