Honda EU2000i Generator Usage & Plans

After spending almost a week without power, and an old generator last winter we decided it was time to upgrade to a more sensitive device friendly unit. The only high power items in our house are our well, and our dryer. Other than tools in the shop these are the only devices that run on 220v, everything else in the house is much smaller. When the power is out we have no plans to do laundry, even a week without power we should be more than fine for not doing laundry.  Water is a different story for us, however we have the older generator that can actually output 220v if we need to refill our lines, and pressure tank. Right now we have about 40 gallons of available water in our pressure tank plus whatever gallons are in the pipes. Last winter during our near week outage we did not run out of water but were careful, and used water from our 5 gallon containers for the toilet.

Utilizing a Kill A Watt meter we were able to determine the draw on everything we would like to run in the house when the power was out, and then added them up and mismatched. Lucky for us the Honda EU2000i was more than enough to run the entire office, plasma TV, and even start up and run our fridge as long as everything wasn’t cranked up all the way.

The Honda EU2000i as the name states is a 2000 watt max 1600 watt continuous generator. At 1/4 of the rated capacity it will run nearly 10 hours on 1 gallon of fuel! Talk about efficient! The office draws under 400 watts so being able to work without power for prolonged periods of time will be efficient, and safe for all electronic devices.

The plan for the Honda EU2000i is to setup a separate breaker-box for the office, and run some new outlets that are surface mount near the other outlets for devices that must always be on. This should keep it rather simple, and cheaper than using a transfer switch.

I will report back after we’ve put the Honda generator through the paces!