Portable Diesel Generator Recommendations?

[groundcover]

My 60 KW LP has a block heater, finally added a thermostat but when I asked Cat service about turning it off for the summer he said let it alone, this machine will use more power than it ever makes !

 

[Industrial Toys]

Two customers of mine with BIG expensive 100K+ sets had failures on account of loss of heating. Of all the parameters, that is not monitored. If it's critical to these machines, why not?

 

[groundcover]

Exactly!

 

[ultrarunner]

Coolant Alarm sounds if either over or under temp as well as fuel leak into containment tank, over cranking, battery, etc.

I've had good service with inline coolant heaters but short service life with Freeze Plug Block Heaters....

 

[4570Man]

How many watts does a coolant heater pull? I would think it would be fairly expensive running them full time. And if I was taking the effort to put them on thermostat control I wouldn’t go to 180. 60 degrees is leaps and bounds better than 0.

 

[Industrial Toys]

My JD6200 block heater draws 8 amps. A little Kubota draws 3.2 amps.

I recently got a transformer for my 7.5 Diesel Inverter block heater to run it at 60 volts thinking half the wattage, but it's really a quarter. Surprisingly, given enough time, it does keep the block warm.

 

[TractorGuy]

Shop Craigslist for a MEP-802A that has been sorted and load tested.

 

[Larry Caldwell]

Well for one, a Diesel will wet stack if run under too light a load.

I was running my 7.5 last summer during an outage and my draw for fridge and freezer and a bunch of electronics was something like 500 watts. To me, that's even a waste to have a Diesel running. I do run my water heater at half power, mostly to kep calcium buildup down and never ever noticed a loss of hot water (only me here and another on the weekends). The 7.5 handles the water heater and water pump without issue, but really, if push came to shov, I could shut them off. I have a pressure tank and the hot water stays hot a long time.

With the exception of effort required to manage loads, life goes on as usual and I'm not in the dark. Not in any room or buidling. Place is usually lit up outside at night, during an outage like a ball park, just because I can. All for 7.5KW.

Exactly. I have a 2-cycle camp generator that will run 4.5 hours on a gallon of mixed gas and is whisper quiet. It cost me $149 at Coastal Farm. We just had an outage a couple days ago, and if we had battery backup for the router, I could go back to waiting 24 hours to even get the generator out. I have an 8000w propane generator if we need to run the water heater and pump for showers, but a cistern provides gravity feed water for cooking and flushing. The big drawback of a generator is the noise, which is really irritating.

Life can be pretty plush with 19th century technology. We have a hand crank coffee mill to grind the fresh beans. We have a wood stove to heat water for the drip coffee maker. The wood stove doubles as primary heat in cold weather. The heat pump does fine above freezing, but wood heat is far more efficient below freezing. If the power goes out, the internal temperature of the house doesn't change.

I have heard of wet stacking, but have never seen it. I used to build forest service bridges, and in cold weather we let diesels idle all night. In the morning we opened the throttle, put a load on them, they would blow a little soot, and would work fine. I can see it might be a problem if the genset was so oversized it never went to full load, but any diesel should be able to idle for a few hours with no problem, as long as it got a good workout before shutting it down.

 

[Industrial Toys]

Made me wonder what harm wet stacking actually does? Fowl up the Turbo which none of my gennies have, or the muffler?

Really, I wish I had a house with a totally seperate Emergency lighting system. Probably run on an inverter. Because, a the end of the day, no matter how many generators I may have, when I decide to shut them off, I am in the dark.

 

[4570Man]

Made me wonder what harm wet stacking actually does? Fowl up the Turbo which none of my gennies have, or the muffler?

Really, I wish I had a house with a totally seperate Emergency lighting system. Probably run on an inverter. Because, a the end of the day, no matter how many generators I may have, when I decide to shut them off, I am in the dark.

Wouldn’t it be easier to just feed the panel with a battery reserve. Or just get some battery lights.