How Does
How Home Emergency Generators Work
Contributor
By eHow Contributing Writer
Monitoring Electricity
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To understand how home emergency generators work, one must begin with the electrical panel. Every house has an electrical panel--a console for regulating the electricity coming from the utility company and being used by the house itself. Attached to the house's electrical panel is a transfer switch. The transfer switch monitors the electricity that the house pulls from the local utility company. The transfer switch can be considered to be your home emergency generator's alarm bell, ready to go off when there's a problem. Some home emergency generator users opt not to install a transfer switch to monitor electric usage. In these cases, they themselves--the people--act as monitors.
Sensing the Outage
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When the transfer switch (the aforementioned "alarm bell") senses that a power outage has occurred, it sends a message to the home emergency generator. The message is: turn on. In the case of those without a transfer switch, their message to turn on the generator comes in the form of the blackout itself! For them, once the power goes out, it's time to go outside and crank the generator--often via a hand crank.
Turning On
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The home emergency generator then turns on. In any generator, an electric conductor (like, for example, a copper wire) is moved through a magnetic field. This is the essence of how a generator works. As this conductor is moved through the magnetic field, electric current is induced in the conductor. Thus, the mechanical energy of the moving wire is converted into electric energy. This provides backup power to the house until the regular electricity source from the utility company is restored. Once that regular source has been restored, the transfer switch senses it and sends a message to the generator: turn off. The generator then shuts down and the house is back to being powered by the utility company. In the case of hand-cranked generators, the user must manually turn the generator off.
eHow Article: How Home Emergency Generators Work
