So to answer the most recent few posts,
I just want to ask for clarification. When you say you "have the neutral taped off" do you mean the neutral wire going from generator to breaker panel, or do you mean the wire/bar between the neutral lug and the ground lug? If the one between neutral and ground, then you're good. You shouldn't need/have a ground rod on the generator because there can be a voltage differential on the ground path between the two ground rods that can mess things up. The older NEC code said to ground generators, but the newer ones say not to if it's tied into the house's ground system.
No, neutrals are not switched by the transfer switch, because they should be permanently wired into the system. If it isn't connected to the neutral buss bar, then you have no 120V circuits, or they will be completing their path using a 120V circuit from the other leg, which means you're going to be putting 240V through it. If all the loads are balanced perfectly this won't be an issue, but that's extremely unlikely. Either this or they will be completing it on the ground path instead, which isn't a good thing, as the purpose of ground is more like an emergency exit path for electricity, it should NEVER have live current.
By any chance did the installer also run any smaller wires in with the #6 cable? (on a Generac standby there should be 3 more wires if newer than 2008 ) If so you could probably rig up a switch (like a light switch) to tell the transfer panel to operate and transfer to generator power (or you could do it with a 12V battery with trickle charge or some other method of a constant 12V power source)
This is a dumb transfer switch, like all of Generac's switches. Dumb in this case meaning that the transfer switch does not control/initiate the transfer process. What happens is there is a 12V circuit coming from the generator that is always live. When the generator is up to speed and wants the switch to transfer, it grounds out the other end of that wire to complete the circuit, which allows the transfer switch to do it's thing (in this case rotate a knob that disables one breaker and then enables the other, it's ALWAYS break before make on these residential type switches)
So that "sensing breaker" is for power to the generator controller to see what utility power is doing (should be a dual pole breaker, so 240 volt, connected to N1 and N2). There should also be a 15 amp 120v breaker that is on the transferred portion of the panel that goes to the generator to keep the battery charged up if this were a normal Generac standby from within the last 8-10 years. if it's from before about 2008 they used a lot of individual components (auto voltage regulator, transformer, control board, battery charge board), and from 2008-2012 or so they did a few different things (none of this is actually relevant to the current topic, but thought I'd share anyway)
(I might not know as much about the MEP series generators as a lot of the guys here, but I AM a Guardian level Generac Certified Repair Tech (just means commercial level, 150KW and below) so I can at least help out on things like this
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