Installing A 15 kw Honda Generator In My School Bus Tiny House

How much were those totes? $11 a piece. You're going to have this distribution panel inside. Inside. Like that. This is the whip that goes between the generator and the distribution box. And what we're going to do is this billory dingus right here it'll have a little help courtesy light on it so you'll be able to let the generators running, it's dark out where's the plugs at in the bay? Plug them in. So you have a 15,000 watt generator and what that is is two legs of 50 amps and first of all your vehicle is only set up as a 30 amp single 120 volt system so you only could use half of that anyway if we wanted to. Next is that even if you used half of it, one leg of 120, you're still at 50 amps and you're going to maximum ever draw 30 amps so we're going to make this kind of more of a power distribution so you can have your friends over and use the generator too because we often share. And a 30 amp outlet is pretty common for the smaller stuff. We don't want to do 120 because it's kind of tricky that way. The 30 amp is a good size and everybody can adapt down to 20 amp if they want. By having four of these plugs here we're going to be splitting the power between the two hot legs on that generator. We want to try to keep the generator balanced a little bit. You don't want to draw everything off of one leg and nothing on the other. You'd like to ideally plug in two. So you're going to steal one of these plugs if you're plugged into stuff. For now until you get your transfer switch you can just run your cord and plug it right into this and have the generator running. Later probably we'll just always have something plugged into here which goes to a transfer switch and does its thing. But then if you have somebody plug into number if this is number one you'll have your friend plug into number two and when the generator is running it'll sort of equally load these two because you'll be pulling off the two legs. So what has to happen is this whole box is going to get stuffed with a bunch of breakers so we have a master 50 we have some 30 amp breakers and then I went and opted for a combined multi breaker for 30 and 20 amp so we have a little breaker for the light switch. So between these we're going to have four 30 amp circuits. Now 30 times 4 is of course more than the amps that are available for the main one so if everybody is pulling 30 amps simultaneously this 50 amp breaker is going to protect the circuits because the generator can't carry that much. But ideally if every device is pulling between 5 and 10 kilowatts of power it's going to be great. Or I'm sorry, between 2 and 5 kilowatts of power. So I'm just going to start taking this all apart and assemble all the little fittings and stuff and I know that some people like to just watch that all go together kind of slow motion or fast motion style there. Time lapse. So what we've got is a power distribution box for a 15 kilowatt generator. So we have power coming in. This is 50 amps on two legs. We've got earth and neutral coming from it. The generator itself is going to have, I'm not sure how the earth neutral bond is going to work on that. We need to do a little research but at any rate I can put a bonding screw in this panel if I have to. We'll see. I've got to remember how to do that. We also have a little indicator light so this is going to be connected to the output of one of these breakers, one of these 20 amp circuits here. This is just simply to a light bulb and the idea is that this pilot light is on whenever the system is energized. Whenever any of these breakers are energized. This light switch is just a courtesy light so if someone is reaching in here to plug stuff in in the dark and the generator is loud and it's sort of chaotic, you can at least see the pilot light and flip the light switch on and your entire bay is going to be lit up with a light so you'll be able to see that. We're back feeding this panel in so the two legs are coming into this master 50 amp disconnect and then we're going to be having isolated earth and neutrals here. The idea is that your inverter is going to plug into one of these guys. I was just thinking actually we do probably need to put a bonding screw in this but I'll do the research to make sure that we're all good. I don't know if I have to have an automatic connect and disconnect or whatever it is or whatever that generator is doing but wired in this way we have four 30 amp circuits that's about it. Now we're going to go out and see what the physical placement of this and also which side to put the knockout on to connect this main power into this box. I am disconnecting this old damaged wiring from the generator head and we're going to inspect everything inside before we hook it up and hope for the best because the last thing we need is a fire that burns your bus to the ground. so a little dirty not bad but not good so we'll clean this up make it look nice that's better booting tight put a little shim behind there and a little shim behind here because this thing is going to just be vibrating and just **** and here it's going to be just a horrible place to live if you're a mouse you don't want to live here store in the propane canisters that way when it explodes it'll all go quick alright Aaron what are we about to do? we're about to burn your bus down don't put that karma out there oh yeah anyway we're just going to make sure make sure this is off put some grease on the starter ring I'm going to cycle it around a little bit here so let's see if this goes I'm sure the grease will found its home by now now we're going to turn the propane on all those breakers are off that should be de-energized this is hooked up to that our exhaust is over here so it's not touching anything and we're going to just see if it runs and then we're going to flip a breaker on and see if things are ok actually before we turn on the breakers we'll make sure we can turn the generator back off again if it's running it does have a choke on the other side where's that? right up there is this it? yep we'll see if it energizes so one thing before you turn it on it does have to be at a certain RPM before that generator energizes do we know how to get to that point? a little bit higher throttle probably the safer way to turn it off so it doesn't backfire otherwise it's pretty exciting I can't get the meter to get into the tines good enough I have a 30 amp outlet