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I have a 2300 sq ft two level house with electric everything but woodstove (does have blower). I've run my MEP-002A through about 15 days of outages, and have come up with no reason I would want anything bigger. No, it won't run everything at once. That's OK, as I have never wanted to run...

With an MEP-002A, I can do a pretty good job of loading the set down by putting four pots of water on to boil on the cooktop. Big eyes are 1100 watts, small are 700 on mine, so that adds up to 3.6 KW of pure resistive load. Further, ours is the old-school GE cooktop which is series or parallel...

Well, kinda. There's one secret sauce you're missing if you go this route: a permanent-magnet generator head. The hardcore wind turbine people and a few others are using PMGs, but I haven't seen any on any non-hybrid vehicle. The difference in efficiency is enormous - a standard claw-pole...

Have any of the AAS generators ever been released for private sale? That's probably the sticking point - they were likely part of a communications or radar system and are classified as armaments.

That pretty much covers it. I discovered how unreliable power was at this house the hard way - we had a five-day winter outage start the night we moved in. It was a hardcore survival situation there for a few days, and I was eternally grateful to the neighbor down at the bottom of the hill who...

How does it handle with those square-section tires? I mean I know it's not big and fast, but those do seem like they'd make it a bit squirrely in a corner.

I have an exposed MEP-002A. The only time I wish it were quieter is when I'm standing near it. It's about 60 ft from the house, and is behind a parked vehicle and I have added a tractor muffler (mostly to keep the weather and critters out). It's a low rumbly roar from the house and nobody...

Yes, there are capacitors between the power bus and ground in a couple of places. They're known to go bad and cause grief. They exist to damp out electrical noise generated during fuel pump operation and are not critical for gen set operation. Try taking them out of circuit and see if that...

I want one of those almost as much as I want a Ural...and can't afford either.

A Florence! They were always remarkable on SAC bases, being neither silver nor camo, but sleek shiny white. There was usually a shiny white T-37 around for checkflight to maintain flight pay, but the tweet was memorably small and whistly, rather than sleek. There can't be many DC-9-30 variants...

The old muffler design rules still work for this. Damping volumes are odd multiples of the cylinder displacement with a minimum of about 7x for the primary chamber. You put the inlet pipe and the outlet pipe in at different angles/positions in the damping volume to cancel primary resonance...

It's been a while and my memory is fuzzy. If I were writing it up, I'd make note of the periodicity of the exhaust pulses, which is unique to this type of engine, at least, if not to HD. Basically, one cylinder fires, then 45 degrees later the other cylinder fires, then nothing happens for...

45 degree common crankpin twins all sound the same, allowing for little differences caused by stuff like flathead chamber shape and low comperssion ratios. That's why Harley failed when they tried to patent the sound back in the 80s. An Indian, anything with a V-twin JAP (like a Brough or a...

Most of the noise on these sets is from the fins on the heads and cylinders resonating to the 'Diesel knock' of combustion. Second loudest is probably the intake side of the cooling blower. You would likely derive some sound reduction from lining the cooling ducts with acoustamat, but the...

Yes, that math bears out pretty well, although fuel is nowhere near the only cost of running one of these. I never said that the small MEPs are cheap to run, just that they're efficient, which they are in comparison to all the other options in that size range. My 450 Watt Sawafuji-Onan is even...

I hadn't carefully read the suffix to the BUF picture when I first saw it back in December. Now that I look more carefully, I see that it's a veteran of 42 BMW during Linebacker II and Arc Light. Chances are excellent that my dad flew combat missions in this acft...

Something you non-motorcycle-experienced people probably don't know: Jump starting something from a shunt-regulated source (like an MEP-002/003/016/701 is a great way to fry the shunt regulator when the 'something' starts and its alternator starts making power that the shunt regulator tries to...

Yes, I also estimate assuming 3/4 GPH consumption and generally enjoy 1/2 GPH in reality. They are as efficient as they are noisy...

If there is any temperature change and any humidity in the air there will be condensation in the tank. Thats just how physics works.

I would be all over that panel with the gauges (or just the gauges and associated gizmos like shunts) for a load management panel for my standby generator for the right price. There is a 400 Hz freq meter there, but also volt, amp and 50-60 Hz meter. That stuff adds up in cost quickly.