Generac Portable Generator Troubleshooting Tips

A Generac portable generator, with super quiet parts and performance, needs little maintenance and troubleshooting. Each Generac portable generator comes with a minimum two-year warranty and some with a five-year warranty. If you need to do some troubleshooting for your Generac portable generator, however, there are several sites that offer this help including the manufacturer's own Web site.

Generac generators offer as little as 3 1/2 kilowatts of power or as much as 150 kilowatts, so you can choose both the size and the power you need for your home or commercial enterprise. With one of the best warranties in the generator industry, your troubleshooting of your Generac portable generator should be at a minimum and with the ongoing support of the Generac professionals. To assist with this troubleshooting is the Generac's automatic exercise system, that keeps your portable generator and its part in super quiet and top-notch performance mode.

Every seven days this exerciser tests the power generation of your generator. You can determine the day and the time of day when this should happen, and let the generator do its own troubleshooting.

The super quiet Generac portable generator uses LP or natural gas, and runs as long as you need it to during any power failure by your utility company. It has a number of system problem indicators, such as shutdown for high temperature in its engine, oil pressure that is too low and high speed or over cranking.

These systems will help any technician that might have to come to your home for troubleshooting your Generac portable generator, thus reducing your cost for service.

7+ Tips For Hooking Up Your Portable Generator

Hooking up a portable generator in your home requires you to have a transfer switch that is suitable for disconnecting your electric loads from the utility grid of your electric power supplier for your house. For hook up of home single phase 120 or 240 volts of power you'll need a double throw and double pole type.

Double throw means that you can move the switch into two positions. One of these positions feeds the power to the load from your house utility system. The other feeds the power to the load from the portable generator.

Hooking up a three phase portable generator would require you to have a double throw switch that is three poled. This means that you'll have added a lever for manual switching that is extended, so that you can turn the switch on or off from the ground.

If you're hooking up a portable generator at your home that is small and only used to run a few things such as a well pump, or a single large appliance that will be plugged directly into your house's generator, you won't need a transfer switch. It's just when your portable generator has to have a hook into your wiring at your home that you'll need the transfer switch. Put your home transfer switch between the loads you need to serve and your utility meter no farther than 25 feet from the generator.

If you're hooking up a portable generator that is driven by an engine and has an automatic start up you'll generally find the transfer switch already built into the generator's automatic controls. Make sure you ground the portable generator as you hook it up in your home. Use solid wire made of copper and a ground rod that is 8 foot.

New diesel driven welder/generator from Lincoln - Lincoln Electric Co.'s Commander 500

The Lincoln Electric Co., Cleveland, Ohio, has unveiled its latest multipurpose, engine driven welder/generator, the Commander 500. The welder features Lincoln's newly developed Chopper Technology, which is designed to control the d.c. welding output to create an arc with increased welding performance. In addition, the Commander 500 welder/generator is engineered to deliver exceptional stick, TIG, cored wire, MIG, and arc gouging performance, the company said.

"What our engineers did was basically take a typical chopper circuit and adapt it to specific welding applications," said Eric Snyder, product manager for engine driven welders at Lincoln Electric. "The Chopper Technology works like a simplified inverter, which are starting to become very popular within the welding industry.

"We're taking three-phase power and putting it through our specially designed chopper module. At the heart of this module lies an integrated gate bipolar transistor or IGBT, which takes this three-phase a.c. and rectifies it to d.c."

At this point, Snyder explained, the chopper module operates like a high-speed switch by turning on and off 20,000 times per second. "So it's basically turning your output on and off, let's say between zero and 100 amps. That is so fast, that as far as the welding arc is concerned, it just looks like a solid d.c. line - just a straight line right at the 100 amp level."

"The high-speed switch circuit provides a great deal of flexibility to address all the welding processes. The result is easy starts, smooth arc, good bead appearance and lower splatter levels on the welded piece."

The Commander 500 welder/generator provides 500 amps of welding power at 100 percent duty cycle, and is suited to the construction, maintenance, repair, rental and pipe industries. Besides being a d.c. multi-purpose welding machine, it is also designed to generate 12 kW of a.c. power from the 120 V/240 V full-kVA receptacle or 4.8 kW of a.c. power from two 120 V duplex receptacles.

A single, full-range control dial for stick and CV-wire applications is equipped to control general welding output. The unit features five ranges with full overlap for stick pipe welding and other processes where slope control is required.

The unit is powered by a 2.8 L Deutz F3L912 industrial diesel engine rated 44 hp at 1800 rpm. This three-cylinder, four-cycle, air-cooled diesel features 12 V electric start, a Donaldson two-stage dry-type air cleaner, Stanadyne fuel filter with water separator and a custom-designed Lincoln muffler.

Indicator lights displaying low oil pressure, high oil temperature, broken cooling blower belt and low engine alternator voltage are supplied by Faria and Prime. An engine protection system is designed to automatically shut down in the event of a broken blower belt, low oil pressure or high engine temperature. A 25 gal. fuel tank minimizes the need for frequent refueling, Lincoln said.

The Commander 500 welder/generator series includes the standard Lincoln K1639-1 and deluxe K1639-2 model alternators, both driven directly off the engine. The deluxe model includes dual digital output meters for presetting weld amps or voltage and the display of actual outputs during the welding process.

The deluxe model also has Prime and Faria engine gauges for fuel, temperature, oil pressure, broken coolant blower belt, and low engine alternator voltage. Both units have a six-pin connector for remote output and a 14-pin connector for use with other Lincoln wire feeders. The deluxe model also incorporates a 30-minute delay low-fuel shutdown.

Generator system backs up 1500-mile submarine fiber optics cable network - Pacific Detroit Diesel Allison

Communications technology such as telephone cable and microwave channels has brought Alaska seconds away from the lower 48. More recently, that's been pared to milliseconds thanks to fiber optic cables that now snake along the North Pacific seafloor from Whittier, Alaska, to the Pacific Northwest.

With service over several cables begun in the spring of 1999, Pacific Detroit-Allison's branch in Anchorage, Alaska, was called on to install a modem and highly automated standby generator plant in the fiber optic transmission station being completed in Whittier by Alaska Northstar Communications, a subsidiary of WCI Cable, Inc.

The facility draws 208 V, three-phase power from the Chugach Electrical Association powerplant in Whittier. But any interruption to the supply will automatically trigger two Kohler model 80ROZJ 100 kVA generator sets that also can be monitored and controlled over telephone lines from Anchorage.

Rated at 120/208 V, three-phase, and 60 Hz, the Kohler equipment incorporates John Deere 6059T four-cycle turbocharged diesel engines with six in-line cylinders. The 5.9 L engines displacement engines deliver 150 hp maximum power at the rated speed of 1800 rpm. The engines utilize a manually operated priming pump and incorporate both primary and secondary fuel filters. The engines were built at Deere's Saran, France, facility and combined with the Kohler generators in the U.S. PDDA represents Kohler in Alaska and the Russian Far East.

The gateway to the village of Whittier is vintage Alaska - an ancient string of railroad flat cars haul autos, trucks and busses through two, long, lightless tunnels and by the massive Portage Glacier from Alaska's Seward Highway to the village that straggles along a bay off Prince William Sound.

Whittier was founded during World War II to receive and dispense fuel. The rusting hulks in an extensive tank farm still stand near the foot of the mountains in Chugach National Park. The most prominent structure in town, however, is an anachronistic and towering apartment building - reported to hold the entire population of the village when winter descends.

However, among first sights when one emerges from the final tunnel are two buildings that represent modern technology - fiber optics cable terminals being completed to service cables that run to Juneau, Valdez, and 2000 miles to Oregon and Washington.

Fiber optics involves the transmission of laser signals along glass fibers at the speed of light. In the case of the ANC/WCIC cables from Whittier, communications equipment connected to the fibers enables signals to be transmitted at 10 billion bits per second. These 10 billion bits per second will encompass voice, data, and Internet traffic, at a rate equivalent to 128,000 simultaneous telephone calls.

In some respects, the companies putting up the facilities are competitors. On one side of the railroad tracks on the upper side of town, a facility is being installed by General Communications, Inc. (GCI). GCI will service submarine cables laid to Valdez, Juneau and Seattle. WCI Cable, Inc. (WCICI), will operate submarine cables laid to Valdez, Juneau and 2000 miles on the North Pacific sea bottom to Portland and Seattle via a "landing site" at Tillamook, Oregon.

Worldnet Communications, Inc. Alaska Fiber Star (AFS), WCI Cable, Inc., and Alaska Northstar Communications (ANC) are companion units in a family of communications companies that are owned by an Australian insurance and investment company, AMP Ltd.

An existing AFS "backbone" - terminology for the routing of a fiber optics system - emanates from Anchorage and runs to Fairbanks with ADMs (add/drop multiplexers) at Wasilla, Talkeetna, Cantwell, Healey, Clear, Nenana and Fairbanks. At these sites, traffic can be added to or dropped from the backbone system to provide communications access to local carriers. The fiber optic signals are also regenerated and passed on to the next site. Presently these stations are sited about every 60 miles.

From the Anchorage NOCC, the backbone runs south along the Alaska Railroad route to Whittier. A 100-mile submarine cable runs to Valdez.

Primary user terminals for the systems are termed "point of presences" (POP), such as units at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks where fiber optics carry supercomputer data. Jim Cole, a project engineer for WCICI in Anchorage, pointed out that only fiber optics systems are fast enough to service such superfast computing systems as Cray Computers like the one at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.

Construction of the concrete block building which houses the WCICI Whittier station was virtually complete fall. It was designed with environmental realities of Alaska in mind. The building was designed for Seismic Zone 4. Cole said that Whittier experiences "8 to 10 perceptible earthquakes a year." Keeping the often frozen soil stabilized beneath the structure, even this far south, requires exhaust vents to be mounted high on the structure.