Yeah, if I remember correctly, those were Mitsubishi motors on the 20 kw’s. The majority of the ones we installed were air cooled 10 and 12 kw units. A store down the road from me put in a 40 kw last year. We recently had a substation power outage that affected a large area. All of the ones I installed were humming right along, they were out there trying to get that one to run. I think the power came back on before they got it to running again, IF they got it running! LOL!
Yeah I think they were. I remember buying filters from Generac and they were whatever filter the engine manufacturer used, and Generac repainted them black and put their part # on and put them in a Generac box.
Those are not the same models put in homes, but still not great. We put in a Generac commercial model in a new Von Maur, because we couldn’t get a Kohler in time. We had to take it out because Generac’s controller took too long to start and transfer power for life safety. Generac claimed it was legal, but the fire marshal said it wasn’t. (15 seconds to start, 5 to transfer, should be no more than 10 seconds total to meet fire code) Generac wanted a couple of thousand to change the controller to one that actually would meet life safety code. There are cell tower companies putting them in, so maybe their quality is a lot better now, or they are that much cheaper than Onan or Kohler, they figure it’s worth the risk.
All the communication tower sites I did had a large battery UPS in addition to the genset. I was doing a PM on one for the 911 system one time and they somehow blew a primary to the facility, Nobody told us for 10 or 15 minutes, and It probably took another 10 or 15 for me to get it back together and running. So I would imagine cell tower sites are similar
I think all the tower sites in Philly used Spectrum with either 460 ford on NG and a few were John Deere diesel. Poliece districts and fire stations had a mix of everything, I even remember one with a V-4 Wisconsin on it. There were quite a few old Onan 6JB units, Something with a big Hino 6 cylinder diesel on it at the 1st district, and all the big stuff was Spectrum 71 or 92 series Detroit Diesel. We even had one that had to have a Scott-T transformer to supply a two phase building.
We were signed up as a dealer, and still couldn’t get a good answer out of their tech support. That was many years ago, but sounds like it hasn’t got any better.
It hasn’t. One guy actually said to me when I was asking about what to do next to reset mobile link “well you’re the one standing there not me, what do you think?” And when I explained what was happening with the customer’s WiFi he says “whoa, can you repeat that in English?” They just seem generally unprofessional and after lots of lousy experiences I’m wondering if Kohler or Briggs&Stratton are any better.
Out of the many we installed, I only had two with transferswitch issues, one was like yours, the switching coil jammed, burning out, made Generac replace entire mechanism, as it was only a week old. The latest one, is the new load shed model, that doesn’t transfer I’m using it as a slave to a second house, from a non-Generac generator. It is only used for transfer, not sense, as both houses are off the same transformer, just different meters. Haven’t had time to troubleshoot yet.
