Well I have two questions this time.
The first one is that my inverter isn't working. With nothing plugged into it, it's reading an overload. Now it's in an unheated garage and at my other house it was in the basement. Could the cold be causing this? I just brought it in to warm up and I'll try it later to see if it works again. Has anyone heard of this before? I was planning to leave it in the garage.
The second question is about the small generator that I got for Christmas.With no inverter in the garage I started thinking( never a good a thing ). I started the generator and got some lights going. Then realized that this is only a small gennie (950 watts) and only has one plug. So I made sure the inverter was disconnected, spliced two old extention cords together so that it has two male ends and plugged the gennie directly to a recepticle. This energized the whole system. The lights work with the switch, the radio came on and all the plugs on the work bench work. One heavy gage cord and the whole thing works.
Now the question part. If I were to do this to the house in a power outage just to run the lights ( all CFL's ) would it work or is that dangerous? I realize that I'd have to shut off the main breaker so I wouldn't back feed into the power lines and possibly hurt someone. With this small gennie I also have to turn off all large appliances ( fridge, frezzer, furnace, water punp etc) With all the large stuff off this should be able to run lights and maybe the tv or at least the radio. So would this work or did I just find a new way to burn down a house?
Of coure if the inverter still works I'll have all that power too and it could be hooked up the same way. Then I could just use the gennie to help charge the batteries if they started to run low. So, good idea or am I losing it like my wife says?