MEP 803A after action report

[combustor]

Have a 2007 unit I bought with 90 hours on it a few years ago. Only needed a few minor repairs/parts to become fully functional (besides changing all the filters and fluids). Have done the quad winding mod thanks to this forum. Living in the country, outages are not uncommon. Here in NW GA we just had the longest outage to date of almost 5 days due to Zeta, and ran the 803 for over 100 continuous hours. Normally when the power goes out it's thunderstorms (summer, so the A/C runs most of the time), or ice storms (winter, so heat pump runs most of the time.) Due to the mild temperatures however, I had to run the electric dryer much of the time to keep an acceptable load on it. I could have shutdown the set at night, but didn't want the fridge to be unpowered for 8+ hours at a time (now I'm thinking a few frozen jugs of ice could work?). After a night with very little load there was the tell-tale signs of wetstacking (black goo dripping down exhaust manifold joints, raw fuel and carbon flecks around the exhaust). Cleared up fine with a high load the next day. For subsequent nights I was able to program the thermostat to turn on the heat for a few hours then the a/c for the next few hours and back to heat (the dryer maxes out at 99 minutes run time unfortunately). I believe the wetstacking episodes caused high oil consumption as well, because at the end of the 5 days the oil level was at the very bottom of the dipstick. Once power was back on, I changed in fresh oil, and reattached the fuel solenoid pushrod that had vibrated loose (I think it's missing a nut on the back). Glad diesel is under $2/gal as we probably went thru 50 gallons. Wife is even more pleased with the purchase after this episode. She was able to get everything going and manage loads/fueling (I left her detailed instructions) until I got home a couple days after the power initially went out.

 

[justacitizen]

congrats.

 

[Guyfang]

Glad to hear a good story, instead of "Its broke!"