# Portable generator



## fanelle (Nov 27, 2011)

We are planning a scheduled shut down at the plant I work at to change some branch circuit breakers in an old Square D I-line pannel. One of the branch circuits in the panel feed a xfmr for the IT server. Now The server has a ups in it thats suposed to power it for about an hour. Upon closer investigation we found that most of the ups battery modules were shot and need to be replaced. It now says it can only power the server for about 10mins. So we opted to tie in a portable generator to the server to power it. The generator has a floating neutral though. Do I need to be conserned about this effecting the server? Thanks for any advice you may have.


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## brian john (Mar 11, 2007)

fanelle said:


> We are planning a scheduled shut down at the plant I work at to change some branch circuit breakers in an old Square D I-line pannel. One of the branch circuits in the panel feed a xfmr for the IT server. Now The server has a ups in it thats suposed to power it for about an hour. Upon closer investigation we found that most of the ups battery modules were shot and need to be replaced. It now says it can only power the server for about 10mins. So we opted to tie in a portable generator to the server to power it. The generator has a floating neutral though. Do I need to be conserned about this effecting the server? Thanks for any advice you may have.


 
The generator DOES NOT have a floating neutral unless you let that happen.

Ground the neutral to your service, then it won't be "floating".

Also be aware that 10 minutes you read could be drastically off. 

Why not replace some of the battery modules?


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## fanelle (Nov 27, 2011)

thats easy enough. Battery modules are on back order till june. Shut down is saturday. IT had a month to order and was not able to make it happen in time.


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## brian john (Mar 11, 2007)

Depending on the battery modules they can be opened up and the individual batteries in the trays replaced.


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## fanelle (Nov 27, 2011)

I was told by the IT guy that his boss wouldn`t approve a purchase of just batteries because the modules also contained a circuit board of somekind and he wanted it replaced as well. As it turns out the circuit board is hard to come across.


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