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In Part 1, I discussed the research, physical installation, a bit of maintenance, and the overall basic operation of the Generac 22kW Guardian whole home generator. In this post, we’ll go over the monitoring of the generator and quickly outline the vendor’s supplied option as well as the Open Source option I decided on, and even up contributing to! Yes, even though I’m not a developer, I managed to contribute to an Open Source project and helped the developer out!

Being a homeowner isn’t for the faint of heart, there’s always a chance for things to go wrong, especially considering that we’re in Texas and well… *gestures at the Valentine’s day week of February 2021*. So with that being said, as soon as the ink was dry on our house contract and we had closed, I was already in process of soliciting for a standby whole home generator. This three part article will cover everything from the decision making process of the generator and its installation (this article), how I monitor the generator using GenMon, an opensource application suite on Github (Part II), and lastly, how I implemented Grafana, Prometheus, and SNMP Exporter (Part III) to get the level of monitoring I am comfortable with.

So, if you’re a Texan, you already know who ERCOT is and you already know what’s going to happen in the next few days. If you’re not Texan, or you haven’t been eyeing the weather, it’s going to freeze. If you’re not sure what the connection to freezing weather and ERCOT, I’d recommend reading up on it here: Wikipedia This quick hack article isn’t about them per se, but something that might be helpful to keep an eye on the grid in the upcoming winter storm.