Mine is a Generac generator with a Briggs and Stratton engine. 20 years old and had been used in anger (power cuts) only three or four times. I’ve been running it from 0600 to 2359 daily, topping it up every 5 hours. It’s getting through about 15 l of petrol a day. We’ve been running everything apart from the immersion heater, cooker, oven, heaters, just watching how it’s loaded.
Thankfully we have a log burner in the house and a coal stove in the bothy, otherwise it would not have been pleasant at all.
We bought a lawnmower with a B&S engine from the super-store Lechmere when we lived in New England in the mid 1980s. [I particularly remember benefiting from their policy of giving recent customers a price-difference refund if they dropped their price after you bought the product]. Anyway we [or rather my company] shipped it back to Scotland where it continued to mow the moss, eh, grass great for another two decades until the metalwork rusted and collapsed. But the B&S was still going strong.
Mine has ashamedly only had two oil changes in 20 years. It started first pull Saturday and that was with 1 year old petrol in it. In my defence, I used good oil!
I think I may give it a service after this, as we’re now heading into day 5 with no power. Latest update is 2359 on 2nd Feb.
We have a few generators in the contest group. I think they are all Briggs & Stratton motors but can’t remember who provided the other bits. Most are classic spinning iron jobs with a motor driving an alternator that has 12v or 110/240 windings with a governor to keep the volts steady. They have a slow time constant so if you have a big enough PA and send Morse slow enough you can follow the sending as the motor speed hunts
There’s a new one someone bought which is inverter based. Still has an alternator but that just makes enough DC and the inverter spits out the 240V 50 Hz signal and it’s much more stable. Much harder to send morse on the motor speed with this one. No nasty noises on 50MHz up and all the gear was happy with whatever psuedo-sine wave came out of it. Think it’s a 4.5kW job, needed to power 3 stations on field day and the kettle and toaster.
Mine is pretty old school when compared to the inverter types. It coped with everything we threw at it. Best part was listening to it nearly spitting the dummy every time a heavy load came on or off. The LED light bulbs obviously helped with fuel consumption but they didn’t like what ever kind of AC they were getting, as some were flickering.
It ran between 0600 and 2359 most days and I reckon used 10-12 litres a day, so not too bad.
Things like fridge / freezer compressors can look like a dead short when they start but once running the power wont be that much. We have a low power kettle for contesting 1.2kW I think. You can hear the genny groan a bit and then throttle up when you switch that on. But apart from the fraction of second as it picks up speed, it’s nothing compared to an inductive load like a motor.
