Building a Generator to Power Home: Questions and Answers

[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