On Thursday, October 15, 2015 at 1:58:10 PM UTC-4, (PeteCresswell) wrote:
Per Ed Pawlowski:
Maybe, but an alternate fuel can still be a good backup. Kerosene and
propane heaters can be handy too. Sometimes generators don't start.

Guy I know has one of those fancy-schamcy pad-mounted gennies with
automatic start/cutover - fed by a huge propane tank.

Every so often it starts itself up for a systems check.

When we had last year's 9-day electric outage, it turned out that all
those systems checks had burned out the alternator and he was without
the gennie until the outage was over and a repair guy came out.

After hearing that, I got a second 2KW gennie.... now I have two... and,
besides it being nice to be able to make coffee or run the big
microwave, the real purpose of it is redundancy.

I keep them in the garden shed and start them up for a few minutes every
month or so .... or whenever I think of it.
--
Pete Cresswell

A guy who lives near me had a similar experience. He had a 12KW Generac
nat gas powered, maybe 5 years old. Started up every week for the routine
check run. Very lightly used, power is generally reliable here. During
a hurricane outage, a few hours into running, it died. He wound up buying
a gas generator from one of the out-of-state guys with a rental truck.
I'm sure that wasn't cheap. He had the service guys come out and they
told him it wasn't worth fixing. So, he bought a new one. I got the old
one, which, since it was only a few years old, I figured I could probably
fix and keep. We knew the engine part was good, it started, ran for a
minute, etc. Upon diagnosing, the rotor for sure was shot and possibly
the armature. It would have been several hundred just for a new rotor.
The I happened to look at the reviews on Amazon for Generac standby
generators. They were horrific. All kinds of people in similar or
worse situations, including new ones out of the box that were defective.
A lot of people said they ran fine for the weekly test, then failed
when needed. I came to the conclusion that for the money I'd have to
put into it, versus what I'd wind up with, it wasn't worth it.