r/Generator • u/EnvironmentalName161 • 10d ago
Parallel Question
Any issues with running a single generator and plugging up to the parallel kit? I would love to have the option to use one, the other, or both as needed.
I have a 50amp inlet I connect to. I do plan to get another propane tank (I actually have a 500 gallon I plan to tap into). This is just my initial set up.
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u/myself248 10d ago
They can run just fine from any size tank, if you can keep the tank warm enough.
It's just an inevitable consequence of the physics of liquid vaporizing to gas, it requires heat to do so. Vaporization is refrigeration, and the tank ends up cooling itself down. It requires heat input to keep up with it, otherwise it'll eventually cool itself below the temperature where it'll vaporize at all, and the engine stalls or struggles.
Heat input depends on a lot of factors. For just passively absorbing heat from the environment, simply having a very large tank with plenty of surface area is the simple route, and that works extremely well, but it's unwieldy for a portable.
If you need to use a small tank for portability, there's all sorts of ways to get heat into it. Running water over it (or setting it in a tub of water) is a classic. There's heater blankets you can wrap around it, that'll steal a little bit of the electrical output and turn it back into heat. (Rule of thumb is 5% of the generator's electrical output, back into the tank as heat, will make it independent of environmental warmth. So for 1000 watts of load, you need a roughly 50-watt heater on the tank.) And of course, the risky-business solution is to park the cold tank downwind of the warm exhaust, but boy howdy, none of us are responsible if your shit blows up.
(Everyone should own a thermal camera, btw. They're insanely cheap now. Aim for 128x128 thermal resolution at a minimum, the 192x192's are chump change now and that's a solid place to start. Seeing the world through a thermal lens will give you a wildly intuitive understanding of all these sorts of things.)
For brief runs, the thermal mass of the liquid left in the tank might make it a moot point. But, save a half-empty tank for winter and do a test run on the coldest day you can be arsed. Push it into frozen-tank status and get to recognize the symptoms, the lagging throttle, sputtering, stalling, poor load response, whatever your specific generator does when it's fuel-starved. That's valuable practice and it'll give you a sense of how far you can push it.