Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

Karen asked: 

> It seems to me that the focus regarding generators should be more on the
pollution caused IN THE IMMEDIATE VICINITY OF OUR HORSES rather than the
noise caused by the generators.  

A medium-large generator will be around 200cc, or about 1/10 to 1/15th the
displacement of a car (and 1/30th that of a truck), and will emit very small
amounts of CO - they also run at a low RPM - about what an idling car would
do. If all of this added up to anything substantial, all the RV's with CO
detectors would be going nuts. Unless there's something wrong with it and
it's running rich, the generator will produce in the ballpark of 2 grams of
CO per minute. As long as you're not in an enclosed area, this isn't going
to cause a problem. When your neighbor shows up, their truck is emitting
somewhere around 160 grams/minute, so the generator running for about 1.2
hours will emit as much as the truck running while moving for one minute. If
the truck is older and heavily loaded, it could be emitting up around 1.5
kilograms/minute (figuring at 10% CO, which is what a really rich mixture
will do). So by the time the person driving the old clunker gets their truck
parked, they've emitted as much as several generators would all weekend,
assuming a couple of hours run time per day. As you can see, the vehicles
are going to heavily dominate the emission picture for a weekend in
ridecamp. Revving the motor like people do getting on the freeway, or trying
to park a heavy trailer, will emit more than an hour of normal driving.

Even in the early morning, when there would typically be an inversion, a few
dozen generators running in a typical ridecamp isn't going to create
anything close to dangerous levels of CO. The campfire would probably have
substantially more emissions and impact, esp. since it would smolder all
night.

> What is the fix for providing clean air for our horses to breath that is
not heavily ladened with carbon monoxide and other pollutants other than
turning off the generators?  This issue has been mentioned several times,
but no one seems to be focusing on it.  I care a lot more about the health
of the horses than I do about whether or not I have to wear earplugs or I am
warm at night.  

Sure - it's something I care about, too - my dissertation was on pollution
from automobiles. I strongly suspect that air quality issues in ridecamp
aren't substantially affected by generators. If someone knew someone who had
serious air quality instrumentation, this could be tested, but you'd have a
hard time figuring out what came from the RM's truck leaving to take things
to the out check, the 4 wheelers the RM might be using to mark trail, etc,
and people starting their trucks.

So that's CO - what about everything else? Hydrocarbons are much more of a
long-term issue than a short-term issue. NOx could have the effect of
popping the ozone concentration up a little, but if it were to the levels of
really causing a problem, you'd see a reddish-brown haze.

So the generators are really causing much more of a noise pollution problem
than anything else, so the solution is to buy a new, quiet model, use LED
lights, solar, etc. to minimize the need for it, make sure you have enough
batteries with enough capacity, and run them only when you need them, and
obviously, be considerate of your neighbors.

Probably no one's focussed on it because they don't have any way to assess
the relative impact. I happened to study this for around 7 years, so...

In terms of respiratory and cardiac health, the effect of day in and day out
exposure due to living in or near an urban area is going to have much more
impact than a few generators way out in the boonies. Living somewhere near
LA, Houston, Atlanta, or Denver would be a lot worse on your and the horse's
health than an occasional visit to ridecamp with people running generators.
This is one of the reasons I like living in the rainy NW - the air quality
is great, even though I am near Seattle. BTW, when I say near, air pollution
can travel quite a long way, so near is within about 50 miles. When the
winds are right, we've actually seen air pollution from China have a
measurable impact on our air quality here.



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