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Can I revisit wet stacking?

loosegravel

Just a retired mechanic who's having fun!
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Enumclaw, Washington
I have never seen any fires due to wet stacking. But have seen 45-60 KW gen sets not be about to pull 15-20% load, without dying in their tracks. We ran a lot more then 3000 hours a year on many sets. And the mess that runs out of the engines is most foul. We several times STARTED a fire, cleaning up the sets. Progressively stepping up the loads till we hit 100% rated load, and then let er rip for 6 hours. The sludge turns to carbon and it spews out the exhaust. After the first time, we had someone near by with several fire extinguishers. My shop was in the middle of the woods, and dry pine needles burn well.
I’m thinking glowing red embers are pretty common when bringing these machines back online. I’ve seen it many times, and thought at first that I had pieces of piston rings blowing out the stack. The members here calmed my nerves and said that it’s pretty normal!
 

Summerpaws

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Hampton, NH
I’m thinking glowing red embers are pretty common when bringing these machines back online. I’ve seen it many times, and thought at first that I had pieces of piston rings blowing out the stack. The members here calmed my nerves and said that it’s pretty normal!
Our big Cats had their exhaust run through a low pressure fire tube boiler. Because they were always at 50% load, we never got and gooky deposits but we did get soot. We did an annual boiler inspection that included punching the tubes. Probably the closest I have ever got to hell while living.
 

Summerpaws

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Hampton, NH
That's a messy, messy job.
And hot. We wore Tyvek suits with respirators for the soot but the boilers were still hot. We had two vertical boilers and we had to stand inside them to punch the tubes. I wore Timberland steel toed works boots and the heat from the tube sheet would seep through the soles until we had to get out and cool off. We would do one boiler a week. Punch the tubes, check the controls, fix any bad refractory and replace the gasket materials. 7 boilers, 7 weeks. Not my favorite time of year!
 

87cr250r

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For further clarification we replaced JD 6081 8.1L generator sets with these 4.5L units. The lube consumption was very high on the 8.1 units but we ran them to 35,000 hours this way. The 8.1 liter engines were burning about a gallon every 100 hours. The 4.5 engines don't require additional lube within the 500 hour service.
 

Digger556

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Summerpaws -

You mentioned typical outage is 1700-2000 watts for ~4hrs at a time, 4-5 times per year.

If I were in your situation, I would purchase a 4500-6000 watt inverter/charger and appropriate amount of battery capacity. My choice would be a pair of Outback VFX 2800 watt inverters wired in a split-phase configuration for a total of 5600 watts cont / 9000 watt surge capacity. These units have auto transfer switches and ability to command a 2-wire autostart generator.

During an outage, the inverters would instantly kick on without a disruption to power via their transfer switches. They would run until the batteries were depleated to a preset level, at which point the generator (802a) would be commanded ON and be loaded to 80-100% after a warmup period. The generator runs at a happy load, recharging the batteries while simultanously powering the house loads. Once batteries are recharged, the gen disconnects, cools down, and shuts off, while the house continues to be powered by the inverters until the end of the outage.

The 802a would need to be fitted with Kurt's autostart controller.
 

Summerpaws

Member
33
95
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Location
Hampton, NH
Summerpaws -

You mentioned typical outage is 1700-2000 watts for ~4hrs at a time, 4-5 times per year.

If I were in your situation, I would purchase a 4500-6000 watt inverter/charger and appropriate amount of battery capacity. My choice would be a pair of Outback VFX 2800 watt inverters wired in a split-phase configuration for a total of 5600 watts cont / 9000 watt surge capacity. These units have auto transfer switches and ability to command a 2-wire autostart generator.

During an outage, the inverters would instantly kick on without a disruption to power via their transfer switches. They would run until the batteries were depleated to a preset level, at which point the generator (802a) would be commanded ON and be loaded to 80-100% after a warmup period. The generator runs at a happy load, recharging the batteries while simultanously powering the house loads. Once batteries are recharged, the gen disconnects, cools down, and shuts off, while the house continues to be powered by the inverters until the end of the outage.

The 802a would need to be fitted with Kurt's autostart controller.
That sounds like a great system. Sadly, being retired on a pretty much fixed income, it is way out of my reach. Looking at the components, it's almost twice what I paid for my 802. While I am electrically educated, having worked in a power plant for so many years and worked with 120 volts to 4160 volts, I'm not licensed so I'm sure I would have to get a licensed electrician to wire it up. Definitely if I had to pull a permit. Thanks for the suggestion though. On paper it makes total sense. The generator would be happy and my wife would be happy not knowing there even was a power failure!
 

Mullaney

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That sounds like a great system. Sadly, being retired on a pretty much fixed income, it is way out of my reach. Looking at the components, it's almost twice what I paid for my 802. While I am electrically educated, having worked in a power plant for so many years and worked with 120 volts to 4160 volts, I'm not licensed so I'm sure I would have to get a licensed electrician to wire it up. Definitely if I had to pull a permit. Thanks for the suggestion though. On paper it makes total sense. The generator would be happy and my wife would be happy not knowing there even was a power failure!
.
Before you "turn in the towel" on you wiring up the connection to your house, check with Building Standards in your area. I am in the city of charlotte and I wired my house from scratch. I also wired our industrial building about 15 years ago. Yes, I had to pull permits in both instances and I had to pass their electrical inspection. If I remember it right, I also had to file a paper to be bonded maybe? Our city is a stickler for permits too by the way...
 

Summerpaws

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Hampton, NH
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Before you "turn in the towel" on you wiring up the connection to your house, check with Building Standards in your area. I am in the city of charlotte and I wired my house from scratch. I also wired our industrial building about 15 years ago. Yes, I had to pull permits in both instances and I had to pass their electrical inspection. If I remember it right, I also had to file a paper to be bonded maybe? Our city is a stickler for permits too by the way...
I'm not sure about my town. When I built my addition, a friend of mine and co-worker, pulled the permit. He and I went over what I wanted and what the codes dictated. I did most of the wiring and he stopped by to check my work. Because of that, inspection was a breeze. It never entered my mind to inquire if I could have done it by myself.
 

87cr250r

Well-known member
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Rodeo, Ca
I don't think you'll have any trouble but ask yourself, what is the worst that could happen? What if it does wet stack? Are you going to have to shake the carbon out of the exhaust? Worst case throw some new piston rings on a 2 cylinder engine? Will you get to this point within your lifetime?
 
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Jbulach

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Sunman Indiana
I retired from the local transit company here 2 years ago. The first time that I saw "wet stacking" was at work. We have a crew of people whose glorious job is to clean the inside of these buses. I'm here to say that their job is the toughest in all. Most of them work the graveyard shift when the buses are in the yards. In the summertime, the inside of these buses can be very warm. Conversely, in the wintertime they can be very cold. They will run the buses on fast idles while they're working on them to maintain a decent climate control inside of the buses. Their job takes about 4 - 5 hours per bus when done correctly. At mileage intervals, the buses are brought in for their preventative maintenance inspections. If a bus is brought in for a PM right after an inside wash, the inspector will usually always write them up for a bad turbo charger, because the exhaust will be dripping with oil. I wish that I had 1/2 of the money that has been spent on replacing good turbo chargers over the years. I would be rich! The truth is, the buses just needed to be put back into service under a good load, and the oil would simply burn off. Try to explain that to a parts changer though!

It seems that the naturally aspirated gensets tend to wet stack more so than the turbo charged ones do. At least that's been my experience with them so far. But none the less as has been suggested above, the best thing to do is simply run your genset as you need and don't worry about a light load. When your mainline power comes back on, simply run the genset for a while with an artificial load of some sort to burn out the excess oil if there is any. I've become a fan of using a brine tank to load test my generators. It's simple, it's cheap and it's effective. Google it and check it out. I can bring my generators to their knees without a bunch of expensive equipment, and it's also very accurate and precise. The only thing is, as the brine mixture temperature goes up, so does the resistance and thus the amperage. So, I have to stay with it for a few minutes to make sure that I don't go over-current.
Add some grape cool aid, and I’ll bet you can eradicate every raccoon, skunk and possum within a three mile radius with that!
 

Summerpaws

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Hampton, NH
By the looks of it, I assume a CO tasked it solely with charging a battery powered toothbrush its entire 500 run hours.
You're probably right. Wow. The only engine I've seen close to that was a no start chainsaw. Fuel spark, compression. Pulled the muffler and it was clogged solid. The spark arrestor screen just caught all the oily mix. Never seen a diesel with anything but soot in the exhaust.
 

MatthewWBailey

Father, Husband and Barn Hermit
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Mesa, Colorado
I'm not sure about my town. When I built my addition, a friend of mine and co-worker, pulled the permit. He and I went over what I wanted and what the codes dictated. I did most of the wiring and he stopped by to check my work. Because of that, inspection was a breeze. It never entered my mind to inquire if I could have done it by myself.
I'm licensed in NH as a PE. So if you need something reviewed & stamped to get the inspectors off your back just holler. (No charge to service members ever). They love to make homeowners jump thru hoops. I've taken the "homeowners electrical exam" for the rewiring of my house service when I was in New Mexico. The electrical inspector-director was pissed I aced the 50 question test He made me take in his conference room. (He didn't know I was a PE). Idiot.
 

Summerpaws

Member
33
95
18
Location
Hampton, NH
I'm licensed in NH as a PE. So if you need something reviewed & stamped to get the inspectors off your back just holler. (No charge to service members ever). They love to make homeowners jump thru hoops. I've taken the "homeowners electrical exam" for the rewiring of my house service when I was in New Mexico. The electrical inspector-director was pissed I aced the 50 question test He made me take in his conference room. (He didn't know I was a PE). Idiot.
That's awesome Matthew. Thank you!
 
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