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RE: Looking for advice on datacenter electrical/generator

  • From:Removed per subscriber's request 06/23/09
  • Date: Fri Apr 04 20:44:23 2003 
At 04:04 PM 04/04/2003 -0800, Bill Woodcock wrote:


      On Fri, 4 Apr 2003, Matthew Kaufman wrote:
    > natural gas has been off for multiple days in a row twice.
    > So for the last datacenter I built, I went with diesel.

I'm not following your logic...  How does the fact that natural gas is
_usually_ available on-tap, and diesel _never_ is make diesel preferable?

                                -Bill
Natural gas as generator fuel is generally not a good idea for a few reasons:

- Natural gas is volatile, hence not a good option in earthquake prone areas - earthquake + natural gas line = big smelly leak - big smelly leak + spark = big fire
- Diesel is fairly stable, and won't go up with quite so large a bang in a fire, not to mention it can only be ignited under extreme temperature and pressure
- The gas gets cut off immediately in any fire situation, usually affecting a few city blocks at a time
- Diesel is readily available, and can be delivered by any Joe Citizen during a disaster to the generator site, since it doesn't require much in the way of special containers

Diesel generators come in both turbocharged and naturally aspirated models, which can easily be serviced by any competent diesel mechanic. Genset diesels are not any different than diesels in a passenger vehicle, tractor, or transport truck. In fact, diesels in gensets are engineered to work under much higher load conditions than vehicles, since they run constantly at a higher RPM under load

Last, but not least: if you can't get diesel fuel from anywhere to run it, buy a few gallons of vegetable oil from the local supermarket and pour it in the tank. It'll work just as well.

emoved per subscriber's request 06/23/09