Most Insteon/Indigo friendly whole house generator

[hamw]

I am in the market for a whole house generator. Probably looking at Kohler or Generac. I have done a search on the forum and read the threads. Most of the information is several years old. Anyone have a current opinion on which brand generator they would recommend that plays nicely with Insteon and Indigo? It would be nice to be able to monitor the unit on a control page if possible.

Thanks!

[FlyingDiver]

I have a Cummins generator with a really horrible web interface. It also can send email notifications of start/stop events. I didn't want to depend on internet connectivity for those email notices, so I wrote a simple SMPTd plugin that will accept the emails from the generator and trigger events when they are received. I send SMS messages (using my Twilio plugin) when the generator comes on due to power loss. I also monitor for the status messages when the generator does it's self-test, and send notifications if that doesn't happen on schedule.

[hamw]

Anyone using a recent model of Kohler or Generac? I have heard the Kohler is a lot friendlier to sensitive electronic stuff like Insteon? Is Generac now up to par too?

[roussell]

I can't speak for the residential Generacs, but I'll never (again) trust a commercial one. I have a 600kW 3-phase at a remote office and had to put about $50,000 in line-filters and constant voltage transformers just to get a clean enough waveform to not freak out the elevator controls and computer room UPS equipment. Their ATS also sucks, it doesn't switch at the zero-crossing of the waveform (at least not reliably) so you get spikes when switching back to Utility-delivered power. I've had no such problems with Kohler, or Caterpillar.

Terry


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[wir3d]

I've been trying to crack this nut for awhile now. I have a Generac 36KW (with Nexus controller) residential unit and want to interface it with Indigo. So far I found a guy that has setup a Raspberry Pi3 connection with WIFI and some Python code. I was able to duplicate his design because he documented so well.

https://github.com/jgyates/genmon/wiki

It works with the two most common generator controllers, Nexus and Evolution which are found in many of the home generators.

I have that installed and working it has both a web interface and a socket interface that we can connect to. The next step is to figure out how to interface that to Indigo. I'm hoping that maybe someone here might also have a home backup generator with an Evolution or Nexus controller and might be interested in setting up the same (genmon) hardware/software setup. If so, we can collaborate on integrating with Iindigo.

At this point I'm not overly confident in my programming skills to do it by myself, but given enough time, I'll have it figured out but not sure it will be "clean" enough for other people to use.

[hamw]

Sounds like a great project and hope you succeed! Glad to hear the recommendation for the type of controller that may be able to be interfaced.

How does your Generac do in terms of your Insteon switches? There have been some concerns regarding voltage stability with those… Have you had any issues?

[wir3d]

I don't have any X10 or Insteon. I'm all Z-wave for switches.

[hamw]

Just had my Kohler 20 kW installation completed yesterday and thanks to the snow storm here in the east the power is already out! Generator is working and no issues so far with Indigo or Insteon control. Yaaaay!!!

Anyone getting the OnCue info into Indigo yet?