I second that opinion. I live in an area of the U.S. which had an extended
power outage affecting several hundred thousand homes earlier this year, and
our climate is, like many cities in the Northeast, very cold in the winter.
Many homes with high efficiency newer furnaces had generator
incompatibilities, but inadequate generator grounding was an extremely
common problem which caused many furnaces not to work properly.

It is not surprising that permanently installed generators like my Generac
Guardian require an 8 foot long solid copper 5/8th inch diameter rod to be
driven into the ground and bonded electrically immediately next to the
generator.

Smarty


"Bubba" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 04 Dec 2006 22:43:05 GMT, "Rick Brandt"
wrote:

I live in St Louis and just got power back after losing it for four days
for the
second time in one year.

The first time was in the summer and was merely inconvenient. This time I
had
to have a way to keep the furnace running. I first borrowed a generator
(3550w), but I started feeling bad about putting so many hours on someone
else's
unit and figured it was time I had my own so I went out and bought a
Coleman
5000w with the Suzuki 10hp engine.

Problem (with both but more so with the new one) is that generator power
is not
clean enough for my new-fangled electronically controlled furnace (Trane
hv-80).
With the borrowed unit the board kept flashing an error code that
basically
indicated to replace the controller board. Fiddling around with it for a
while
and I was able to get it running. With the new one the glow igniter comes
on
and apparently causes enough of a voltage fluctuation to disrupt the
controller
board and I get a "check igniter" error code.

Do other people have these problems? Between the midwest and the gulf
coast we
certainly have plenty of people who occasionally have to run on generators
and
electronically controlled furnaces are pretty much the norm now. Is my
Trane
just being particularly fussy? Everything else we powered off the
generators
ran great.

Of course the "cover our ass" page of the generator manual suggests
getting a
line conditioner for just about anything that's not a light bulb. Do I
really
have to drop a few hundred more dollars on one of those just to get my
furnace
to run?

By the way, what convinced me that this was the problem was that the
furnace
fired right up when I temporarily ran it thought my computer UPS. The UPS
alarm
squalled like hell because it wasn't big enough, but the voltage as
measured
with my voltmeter held much better and the furnace lit up. It would be
nice if
I could isolate the power to run the controller board from those that pull
major
amps so I could just get a conditioner for that, but it looks like
everything
hooks straight to the board so I don't know if that can be done.

Naturally, four hours after I got the new generator running the utility
company
got our power back up. I would still like to get a handle on this before
the
next time.







It could have been something as simple as the generator/s weren't
grounded properly. The new stuff with circuit boards are very finicky
when it comes to a good ground.
Bubba