Furnace not running on portable genorator

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ShadowRider

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Howdy I'm new to this forum and would like to say Hi!
As an introduction my spelling is alot wors than my looks which is bad :}
so I would like to say sorry ahead of time but I do have a question.
I set up a residential transfer switch on a house the other day with one
problem. The generator was on wheels and I'm sorry but I can remember the
rating but it would run the microwave two refrigerators lights and the well
pump. But the gas furnace would run the burner as it should and just before
the fan would kick on it would go "click" and run through it all over again with the burner going but "clicking" just before you would expect the blower fan to run. the transfer switch has a Watt meter on it and would read 500 watts for the furnace and then drop to 0 when the furnace would "click" and again and again and again. If I switched it to normal power (you can control each circuit individually) the furnace would run with no problem. I checked the voltage at the furnace and it was 120V on the money. Any thoughts?
Thanks again:grin:
 
The new furnaces are very sensitive to the cycles. The voltage may be correct but if the cycles are off the furnace will not work. Did you check the cycles of the generator?
 
That was the one thing that I thought of but didn't have a meter at the time that could check it. How do you tell that to a customer and is there any way to fix such a problem?
 
On my own 5500 watt portable it came from the factory pushing 64 cycles or so.

I put about 2000 watts of load on it and kept moving the governor spring to different settings (holes in the governor arm) until I got it dialed in at 60 cycles.
 
Those new furances are very sensitive to voltage and grounding. I had one that would not run without the ground wire hooked up.
 
be sure you have a good ground, the flame signal is often times read through the ground. Also check polarity.
 
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