Hello,

Has anyone had any experience with purchasing a natural gas generator for thier servers?

We were looking at a 16,000 watt generator but someone informed me that they can easily blow up your equipment. Well we can't have that.

Anyone an expert here?

Tony

The type of fuel the generator uses is not important, what is important is the quality of power that is output. Generally speaking air-cooled generators put out relatively "sloppy" power. I had a client a while back that had a backup generator (air-cooled) installed for his building. When on generator the office lights and regular PC's would run but the servers stayed on battery, the power wasn't clean enough and the voltage too low for the smartups to switch back to mains power. After speaking to the Generac rep I learned that only the larger liquid cooled models are recommended for computer grade power.

A company I work for considered it, but the permits were nuts out here in the Peoples Republic of Kalifornia. I've seen some pretty awesome units, but you really have to research the cleanliness of the power. I would reccomend buying a power conditioner, if not a really beefy UPS.

Our experience is with diesel. The engine generators are recommended due to their longevity and lower operating costs. Most modern diesel engines are quiet and generally require much less maintenance than comparably sized gas (natural gas or propane) units. Is diesel out of the question?

Look into a Guardian.

http://www.homedepot.com/prel80/HDUS/EN_US/diy_main/pg_diy.jsp?CNTTYPE=PROD_META&CNTKEY=misc%2fsearchResults.jsp&BV_SessionID=@@@@0782350487.1165463007@@@@&BV_EngineID=ccgladdjigmldmgcgelceffdfgidglo.0&MID=9876

In my hurricane infested part of the country many people are now using these. They power an entire house with no downtime of power. The energy is stable as it is coming from a stable source and the craftsmanship is high quality.

Typically in a data center environment, your genset will sit behind your UPS and your UPS will feed your PDUs and then you will have whips out to your cabs, making the quality of the power produced by the genset less of a concern because the UPS is doing its thing. As for having it blow up your equipment, that shouldn't happen if it is properly installed and maintained.

Ultimately, any competent electrical engineer should be able to recommend a functional and appropriate solution for your needs. I suggest getting on the phone and getting some people out to look at your stuff and discuss your goals.

Looked into it and know what we'll get. Everything is behind UPS's to begin with. APC makes just about any size UPS/line conditioner you could want.

You need to be very careful with natural gas generators they are not as powerful as diesel generators, we found out first hand. When you drop a load onto natural gas generators they will slow down quite a bit and slowly build back up to usable RPM's, a diesel generator has more torque and will not slow down when an electrical load is dropped on it.

We had the situation when we tested a natural gas generator that when our UPS's detected good power from the generator it switched to the generator, the generator the slowed down from the load and caused the UPS's to sense bad power and it switched back to batteries, the generator then speeded up and the UPS's tried it agian, and this process repeated endlessly untill the UPS died. We switched to a diesel generator and had no problems, needless to say we were glad we did not put the natural gas generator in a production environment.

Ahh the age old small business generator problem....well we have onsite power backups running with a gas powered 12k generator.....electric start.....with some handy hacking and such i designed a system to start it when the power goes out and turn off when the power shuts off. We also experienced the issues with the APC's not liking the power comming off the generator....to solve this we have some flood lamps...i believe 20% of total output.....they are incandesent so it's a constant load.....unlike motors or flourecents with ballasts......when the genset turns on it powers the lights and that puts a 20% load on it.....so it has time to stabalize......the servers switch over from AC to genset 10 seconds after the genset starts up and is producing power....which gives everything time to stabalize.....since the generator is already operating above idle when the server load hits the RPM won't drop as sharply......this custom home-made solution is working for us....lemme know if u have any other questions.....