i thought i’d tell a quick story. This early/mid summer in the late afternoon, we lost power and internet when a storm rolled thru and a pine tree fell on power, which then pushed power into cable on the pole, a 1/5th of a mile down the road from my house.
It was into the warm season and i can't sleep unless it’s chilly, so we had the ductless minisplits on in the house. When we lost power i fired up the 802 and eventually we went to bed. I woke up at 530 in the am and turned the genset off when i noticed street lights were just turning off. The 802 ran all night under light load. The minisplits are VERY efficient and didn’t draw much of any current.
That morning i noticed the tell tail signs of wet stacking. The slick sooty residue of unburnt diesel was creeping out at the muffler to manifold flange. I knew i’d wet stacked it and would need to run it hot to clean it out.
(As a side note, i bought this genset non-reset with 22 hrs on it from Fort Drum a couple years ago. At that point i changed the oil to rotella full synthetic, a mistake on my part so early in the engines life. Yesterday before it’s excersise, at 44 hours, i changed the oil to John Deere Break-In oil per Daybreaks suggestion.)
So i waited until yesteray, a cool and chilly early fall day to excersise the genset. I have a 5,000 watt, 240v electric heater i wired up in the garage which serves as my excersiser. I ran the genset for almost 4 hrs with the heater on, and occasionally turning on 800 watts of flourecent lights in the garage, and allowing things in the house to cycle on and off like the fridge, and a box fan moving warm air into the house from the garage, taking advantage of the heat to warm the house.
After warming up for 5 minutes, i placed an increasing load on the genset from the heater over a span of 10 minutes. The switch on the heater allows for 3, 4, then 5k watt settings. At start up, and under load, the genset smoked a white/blue smoke for almost 30min. It got progressively better until it was clear.
Another thing i noticed was after some time is that i had to adjust the governor down a tad, as once the genset was hot and cleaned out, it took less effort to stay at approx. 59.3-59.5 hz under a 5k watt load. It also ran much smoother as well.
The garage lights are on two switches. Each switch turns on 2 light fixtures in the garage. Four 50 watt T5HO bulbs per fixture, for a total of 400 watts per switch, or 800 watts of flourecent lights in total. They are driven by electronic ballasts so the power factor is close to 1, which can be compared to resistive loads. Basically the genset ran for periods of time at 5,800 watts, while a box fan ran and a fridge cycled on and off, and it did so comfortably.
I had free time so i figured i’d share. It really goes to show that it is critical for the 80x gensets health to give it a good occassional workout. Now i just have to clean off the soot at the manifold/muffler and the genset is ready for the winter.
Thanks all for such an awesome forum, and everyones input which helps me leep my genset running like a top.
