generator questions

livingbios

hey all :)

i'm completely new to the electrical game, but i'm very interested in this, however only as a hobby. i'm doing my best to learn as much about this as possible so please excuse my stupid questions.

ok so i'm interested in building a generator to power my home in case of outages. i could buy one, but it'd be much more fun to build one, right? ok i already have everything designed, but i will be using a dc alternator so i'm going to need to convert this to ac obviously. so i'm going to use a power inverter to accomplish this (unless there is another way?). since it's going to be hand built i would like to try to build one of these as well. i've already found a schematic for this, but the max output from this particular design is 1kw. i'm looking for an output of ~5kw, the more the merrier though. my question is, could i run these inverters in parallel to achieve this? maybe somebody can provide me with a schematic to build a larger inverter if not. like i said, i have no idea about any of this really, but i would like to do this. another question i have is that if i was to just buy a large inverter, i would obviously have to run a larger wire for the input, but how much larger?

any insight, advice and direction is much appreciated.

waht

Running inverters in parallel is possible if you synchronise them. If you are off by a few degrees in phase, then you can blow them up.

Building a 5kw inverter is a different ball game. You have blow the schematic of a 1 kw inverter out of proportions. If are you new to electronics I wouldn't attempt building such an inverter as a first project.


Here is a list of different wire gauges, and how many amps they handle

http://www.powerstream.com/Wire_Size.htm