On Sep 7, 4:53*pm, Way Back Jack wrote:
The day that Irene came thru, I didn't lose grid power as such, but did
have a series of outages that lasted 2-3 seconds apiece. *Unfortunately,
these were enough to kick on the generator, only to stop a few seconds
later when the grid returned. And so it was on, off; on, off; on, off ......

So now the generator's broken. *Battery won't even try to crank. *All I get
is a grinding sound. *Battery charger still shows a green light, so I
assume that a connection(s) has come loose or some sort of fuse blew.

Any ideas?

A grinding sound would seem to indicate that most likely either the
starter is bad or that it's not getting full power to be able
to correctly spin out and engage. If that's what it is, it's
fairly easy to diagnose and fix, depending on how accessible
the starter, soenoid, etc are.



Also, can this type of thing be fixed by an electrician? *I do
have a service contract with the co. that installed the Kohler, and they
really know their business, but they are severely swamped with repair
tickets, which is understandable. *Finally, can the automatic transfer
switch be adjusted to keep the generator from kicking on until grid power
has shut down for 10 seconds or so? *

Thanks,Jack

From the problem it sounds like an engine problem, not
a generator problem, so an electrician would not be my choice
unless he's one that does generators. If it's only a backup
generator and
since you have a service contract, I'd just wait if I were
you.

As to transfer switch adjustability, I guess what you may or may
not be able to adjust would seem to depend on exactly which
one you have. The on/off cycling several times should not have
caused the problem you are having. To burn out the starter it
would have to crank the starter for a long time.

If it makes you feel any better, a neighbor had a $7K Generac that
was about 6 years old fail after 5 hours of hurricane duty. His guy
did come out and the generator itself is cooked, beyond repair.
He's got a whole new one on order. I wonder if these things are
really worth it. With the high cost you also get increased complexity
and more things to fail. And if it does fail, it costs a bundle to
fix.
For $500 or so you can get a breaker panel kit
and a receptacle installed and then use one of the manual start
generators that can be had for $400. I'll bet your yearly service
contract costs more than that. There are applications where
you need it to start automatically, eg where there are critical
loads and no one available to get there in time to start it up.
But for the typical homeowner, I think the expense isn't worth
it.