I am also leery of an in house installation.  The main concern being the potential for an exhaust leak. I read on another forum that asked the question “how is that different from the exhaust of an oil furnace?” A leak is a leak but then dead is dead.  Quit a few of the deaths after Katrina were attributed to gas generator exhaust...yes a different animal but close enough…

   I’m planning a gen shed that will be near our swimming pool and double as a pool house.  Although the primary intent of the 6/1 is backup generator, having all that waste veggie oil capability/longevity has me working out the details so that the 6/1 can also run the pool pump and waste heat go into the water. This set up will be down the road after all the backup power hookups are complete.

   I mentioned Lake Effect snow in an earlier post…. Wednesday I was raking/burning leaves… typical fall cleanup…yesterday I had 16 inches of snow in the yard and a few miles away had 23… and its still snowing….

Joe

My primary purpose will to use 6/1 as backup power source. After I did a whole lot of research on the longevity I started looking at other ways to make use of it. It didn’t seem to be an adequate use of a resource to have a machine dedicated purely for back up purposes that could easily run tens of thousands of hours before a major tear down. Although we have outages on a semi-frequent basis…ranging from a few minutes to a day, we have had outages during snowstorms that lasted 2-3 days.  Living at the tip of Lake Erie we do tend to get a few lake effect snowstorms. Snow is one thing… but one of these days a whopper of an ice storm will get us. I plan the 6/1 for that purpose at a minimum.
   I looked at a military surplus units (air cooled diesel) and refurbished refrigerator units (huge) that were in about the same dollar range, although some had low hours and were in decent shape I was a bit concerned about replacement parts down the road.  I was interested in something simple/durable that I could tear apart and deal with myself. I felt that if I built it then I would know it well enough to fix anything on it.  The 6/1 seems to fit the bill perfectly.
   I’d like to (at some point) run it on waste motor oil and/or waste vegetable oil and using as much of the heat it generates for heating hot water. 
   One other area that I will focus on as I build is that my wife will be able to start the generator (when I am not around) and that it will run with minimum effort on her part. Although I jokingly tell people that she is a 6-foot Redhead that just retired from professional wrestling …crank starting a 6/1 when it is well below freezing would be a challenge we rather not deal with. 
   All in all, I think the Listeroids will do very well as a backup power source…I’ll be betting the farm on it…

Joe
   

I’ve researched quit a bit before committing to buy a 6/1 and a ST5 generator head from George. With the array of engines available and ideas on how to set them up his thought process seems most in tune with what I am looking for.  I’m counting on his extensive expertise to far out weigh the added cost of shipping the engine all the way across the country. I recently received an email that he won’t be back from R&R until 7 Nov and that the latest batch of engines is in. One of those in that batch has my name on it.
   
   My intent is to build/rebuild the engine/generator this winter and in the spring build a shed to put it in...another project...

   I definitely like the idea of using a tank for cooling water… however the thought of buying 20 to 25 gallons of antifreeze (to mix 50/50) has me leaning more towards a radiator.  I already have the radiator from a Chevy pickup sitting in the attic. Does anyone have any experience with this type of set up?  If I rotate the radiator (90 degrees) will it provide adequate cooling and thermosiphon using a slow moving box fan to drawn air across it and at the same time provide fresh air intake? 

I also hope this forum flourishes….I've been watching it for activity for a while.
Thanks,
Joe