Ottawa Citizen

A HASSLE-FREE OPTION IF POWER’S OUT

- STEVE MAXWELL Steve Maxwell is a carpenter, builder and home-technology expert helping people across North America. Visit him at SteveMaxwe­ll.ca

If I’m just imagining more and longer power failures, I’m not alone. Canadians are buying portable backup generators like never before, but there’s more to electrical security than just getting your own miniature electrical plant.

Generators use a gasoline or diesel engine to spin machinery that creates electricit­y. But electricit­y alone is useless unless your electrical devices are connected to it. That’s the tricky part. Sure, you could run extension cords to power your fridge, TV or kettle, but that’s a pain. And besides, the really important items are all hard-wired into your home.

Your furnace might run on natural gas, but it still needs electricit­y to function and has no cord. If your house is connected to a well, water won’t flow until you get power to your pump. Lights, security systems and heat almost always depend on a direct connection between a generator and an electrical panel, and this is where something called the GenerLink comes in.

For safety reasons, regulation­s everywhere require that switching gear be installed between the electrical panel in your house and whatever generator you might want to connect to that panel. This switching gear is designed so that either the generator provides power to your house or the electrical grid does, but never both at the same time. Also, your generator must never be allowed to deliver power directly to the grid since this would endanger line workers.

For years, the safe connection of generators to electrical panels was done exclusivel­y through switches spliced into the large cables coming into your home. But adding this feature to an existing house is troublesom­e and expensive enough that it has stopped more than a few people from protecting themselves with a generator.

GenerLink is one of the simplest ways to make a safe and legal generator connection to your house because it doesn’t require wiring.

While GenerLink is not yet approved in all areas of Canada, this is changing. The unit gets installed underneath your electrical meter, offering a port on its bottom edge to accept a special cable. This cable connects the generator to the GenerLink, creating a system that’s more than just safe; it’s also smart.

The GenerLink delivers generator power to your home while the grid is down, but as soon as grid power comes on again, it switches back. If your generator is like many these days, with a system that automatica­lly throttles back the engine to an idle when no power is being demanded, your ears will tell you when you can switch off the generator until the next power failure.

GenerLink is a U.S. product, but it’s available in Canada through an Ontario company called Jesstec Industries ( jesstec.com; 1-800-891-9380). I discovered GenerLink in 2008, and I’ve been monitoring the performanc­e of the technology since then. A few people have had trouble with the units failing to switch back to grid power when it came back on, but failure rates have been less than 0.02 per cent in my research.

On the plus side, using a GenerLink is pretty simple. When a power failure strikes, connect your generator to the device and fire up the engine, but not before you’ve made some decisions:

Since most portable generators aren’t powerful enough to handle large loads such as a water heater, baseboard heaters or clothes dryer, you need to switch off circuits on your electrical panel that you don’t want your generator trying to supply. If you demand too much power and trip the breaker on the generator, it’s no big deal. Just reset the breaker and use less power.

With winter coming, a steady supply of electricit­y is something you might not want to leave to the authoritie­s. A little smallscale, home-based technology might just prove very valuable in the coming year.

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