Meat Plow wrote:

On Sat, 09 Jun 2007 00:23:06 +0000, trader4 wrote:

On Jun 8, 7:04 pm, Meat Plow wrote:
On Fri, 08 Jun 2007 17:47:48 -0500, zxcvbob wrote:
I was tempted to buy a Honda 2000W electronic generator at the state
fair last year because they were on special for $899. (that's a great
price) I decided not to get one because (1) I hate spending $900+ and
(2) the electric power here is very reliable.

But I'm still interested in emergency generators even if I may never get
one.

Does anyone have experience with 2kw to 5kw diesel generators? Yanmar
makes them -- very expensive and hard to find -- and there are Chinese
knockoffs for less than $1000. (If you search on "Yanmar diesel
generator" you will probably find more links for the Chinese generators
that just have the word "Yanmar" in the page somewhere.)

They run at 3600 RPM rather than the 1800 I expected. So is there any
real advantage over gasoline? How long do 3600 RPM diesel engines last?
Gasoline engines are sometimes only rated for a few hundred hours. The
online specs never give this rating. I guess it's safer to store 100
gallons of diesel fuel during the blizzard (or hurricane, or whatever)
season than it is 150 gallons of gasoline.

And what are you going to do with 100 gals of diesel when you don't
use it? That's one of the problems with either gas or diesel, ie
having a sufficient supply of fuel when you need it and rotating it so
doesn't turn bad from sitting around. With a diesel, if you have a
heating system that used fuel oil, I guess you could tap into that to
run the generator. However, if you have natural gas available, IMO,
that is the best fuel.

Yeh that is a very important consideration. Even stabilized, gas lasts
tops 8 months or so before it starts to break down. Natural or LP gas is
the best.

My supplies of stabilized gas regularly last well over a year with no
issues. Back when I had supplies of diesel with stabilizer it would be
just fine after several years.