Episode: 3494
Title: HPR3494: Recent Generator Repairs and Maintenance
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3494/hpr3494.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 00:24:41

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This is Haka Public Radio episode 3494 for first day the 23rd of December 2021.
Today's show is entitled, Recent Generator Repairs and Maintenance.
It is hosted by John Colbe, and is about 18 minutes long, and carries a clean flag.
The summary is, I talk about my Generac 4000 XL gasoline powered generator, and what
I've done to get it running right.
Hey everybody, this is John Colbe in Lafayette, Louisiana, and today I'm outside in my garage
out to get out my Generator to do its weekly testing.
I've been working on this thing a lot, and I thought all along I should do an HPR about
it at some point, but I hadn't gotten around to it yet.
I'll first try to get it out of here.
I keep it at the back of my garage tucked up underneath this little stair thing, the thing
is heavy.
It's got wheels, thankfully, and I'm just going to pull it out.
Around to the side of my house, where I can start it up without getting fumes in the garage.
What I have here is a Generac 4000 XL, does 4000 watts, not great with the electrical
stuff.
It could probably help make it this right.
4000 watts, there's a 30 amp AC socket, and then there's a 20 amp AC, like a 4 pronged
socket.
That's the one, like when the power goes out, that's the one I'll be using.
I also got some electrical work done on my house to accommodate this Generator.
I had a Generator interlock installed in my panel, which is a thing that allows you
to plug from a 4 prong input, like what output on the Generator into a box on the outside
of your house, and it goes directly into your electrical panel.
You can essentially run anything in your house as long as it doesn't exceed the electrical
capacity of the Generator.
You don't want to melt your Generator down by trying to force it to do too much.
Essentially, if we have a hurricane sometime in the summer, and the power goes out, what
I would have to do is cut off the breakers to my climate control units.
That might be it, maybe the water heater also, to make sure that those really high, those
high draw items don't start running, but it would allow me to still keep the refrigerators
running, to keep the food from spoiling, to keep the lights on, and that kind of thing.
It's not a big Generator, it's not a great one, but it's a fairly reliable old one.
It's a hand me down.
I want to say this Generator is probably 22, 23 years old, and my dad gave it to me.
I can remember the first time that he used this one.
It was when I was visiting him up in Tennessee, and it was like January, or December, I don't
know, it was in the winter, and it was an ice storm in Tennessee, and they lost power
for five days, and my dad hooked up to his own house.
He hooked up a transfer switch, which is a different kind of thing than a Generator interlock.
A transfer switch, you have to choose like four, or six circuits, or something like that,
that you want to power with the Generator, and so you choose strategically the one that
will have your fridge and some lights, and whatever else you want to be able to run,
but that's all you can run, whereas the Generator interlock allows you to use any of the
circuits on your board as long as they don't exceed the amperage, so there's a little
bit more flexibility with the interlock.
Anyway, what I can remember him running, I mean, the house got really, really cold.
I remember being in the forties inside the house, but he was able to keep the refrigerator
going, some lights, and my mom used a little electric skillet to heat things up, and that
was about it, but it was pretty miserable, and so you might not be surprised that shortly
after that, my dad got a much better Generator that's just like this built in a much bigger
Generac brand Generator that just lives in a box outside the house that's weatherproofed,
and that it's fed continuously by his very large propane tank, and that will automatically
kick on when the power goes out, and it's a much more expensive deal, it was like $5,000
or something.
This Generator was probably $400 or $500 when he bought it, and so he gave this one to
me when he got his new big home Generator, and ironically enough, now that I've got
this one working again, it looks like he's going to be upgrading his big Generator and
giving me the old one, so whatever, anyway, it's something, if you live in South Louisiana
in Hurricane Country, it's a good idea to have a Generator.
The last time the power went out here, I ended up not using it because I think at that
moment it wasn't even really working, but my friend Corey, his house was without power
for two or three days, and I told him, look man, I've got a Generator, but I don't know
if it'll start, so I brought it over there, we fiddled around with it, we finally got
it started, and he ran his lights and fridge and stuff for a couple of days until his power
came back on, but after that whole experience I decided, you know what, I better keep this
thing in good working order so that it will be ready, and so after that I started, you know,
I changed the air filter, I changed the spark plug, I changed the oil, the oil filter, what
else did I do to it? Not much after that, and I just would take it out once a week, every
two weeks, and started up to make sure it still ran, so because you don't want to be trying
to fix it at the moment when you need it, right? And I've been doing that for the last
year and a half or so, and then about six weeks ago, I went out to do that very same thing
and found it wouldn't run. The engine seized up, I wouldn't start, I tried to pull on the
recoil and it just locked, like it wouldn't move at all, and I thought, well, that's great,
so am I going to have to buy a new generator now? But then I thought, well, you know what,
maybe I can just fix it, so I googled the problem and found that there are a few things that
can cause the engine not to move like that, for you know, not to be able to pull the thing,
and one of them seemed like a likely candidate, it's called Hydrolock. The Hydrolock is
when something happens and some moisture gets into the piston chamber, and because it's
a very airtight thing in there, if there's extra stuff, then the piston can't move, because
it's locked up, and what they say to do is take the spark plug out and then pull on the
recoil, and if you find that with the spark plug removed, you can pull the recoil again,
then that's probably your problem. So I pulled the spark plug out and tried pulling on the
cord, and what do you know, it moved, and so it said once if they, if you find that
that's the problem, then just give that about 10 good yanks to let it blow all the moisture
out of there, put the spark plug back in, hook it back up, and see if it'll start. And I
did that, and I think it started back up, but then not too long after that, it did it again,
and so then I started to think there's probably something further wrong with it. So I started
watching videos on YouTube about repairing generators, and I found this amazing channel
by a guy named James Condon, who he's a small engine repair guy somewhere, somewhere cold,
like an, I don't know, up north or in the Midwest, or something like that. But he has like
a ton of videos about repairing old generators that look like they could not possibly be
salvaged, but he almost always manages to fix them and get them running, and then he'll resell
them. So anyway, that's like my new favorite thing to watch is these generator repair videos.
So I've watched a bunch of those, and one of the things you learn if you start looking into
this is that the carburetor is a major culprit in a lot of these problems. And so I took off my
carburetor and cleaned it out, according to what I saw on the videos, and it was able to start
up again, it started right up, but it still would not idle. There's an idle button on here, where
you turn it on, and if there's no power being drawn from it, it'll spin at a much lower RPM,
and that bite, it'll save fuel that way. So I wanted to get that working. One of the other
things was that before I did any of these repairs when it used to still run, it would never run
if the choke were turned off, and that's kind of a problem. Normally you only need the choke
when you're starting it, but it would need the choke not only to start up, but then I would have
to run it at half choke, or else it would just stall out and die. And so that's also an indicator
of some kind of fuel problem. And the clean carburetor, once I cleaned the carburetor off and put it back
on, it was able to run without choke. So that was improvement, right? So anyway, it still wasn't doing
what I really wanted it to. I wanted it to be able to idle and all the things. So I decided
to just buy a brand new carburetor, because they're only like $20, and the new carburetor came not
only with the carburetor, but the gaskets for it. It came with a new fuel line. What else did it have?
A couple of fuel filters, and mine did not have a fuel filter on it before. So what I did was I put
in the new fuel line, and then also installed the filter. And now it runs much better. It runs
much better. And so I had to, I think when I cleaned the carburetor, I did not find all of the little
jets and holes that you're supposed to clean out. There are bunches of them, and they're hidden in
funny places. And so you have to take the whole thing apart, clean it real good, and run little
wires through all the holes at a little brushes, and then carb cleaner, and James Condon, he'll
take every one of these things and put it through what's called, what is it called? It's ultrasonic.
It's an ultrasonic cleaner where he mixes water with like a parts decrease or kind of solution,
and everything comes out spotless, and then he'll put it all back together, and it should,
normally works great after that. Anyway, so I got the new carburetor, got the new fuel line.
What else did I do here? I had to set the engine speed because it was running too fast,
and the way you figure out whether it's running too fast, there's a couple of ways. One is to use a
little like electricity usage monitor, like a kilowatt, and I have a knockoff version of one of
those, but you plug it in, you run the engine, and then you press the function button until it gets
to the hertz, and that'll tell you how fast you want the engine with no load on it to be running
around 62 hertz, according to all the videos I've been watching. And then when you put a load on it,
like a heater or something like that, it'll go down a little bit, but you don't want it to go down
lower than like 58, 59 hertz. And then you check the voltage output by hitting the little
function button until it gets to the volts, and mine was really not putting out enough volts.
It was under no load, it was about 117 volts, and then as soon as I turned on the heater, it dropped
down to like 104 volts, which is not enough. It needs to be close to 120, but there's a little
adjustment, there's a little adjustment potentiometer inside the, there's a little access hole
on the side of the generator where you put a tiny screwdriver in there, and then you just turn it
just a hair, and it will adjust that. And so I did that adjustment, I adjusted the engine speed by
using the engine speed adjustment screw, and it's pretty much doing what I want now. And so
oh, the other thing is I drained the fuel tank completely to make sure the fuel tank
wouldn't have like debris and stuff in it, and it was okay, and then I also had to go on the search
for non-ethanol gasoline, because everyone says on these kinds of engines, they get gummed up really
easy if your gas has ethanol in it. So finding non-ethanol gas is not the easiest thing,
but I got a buddy at work who knew where to go get it, and so I went to this gas station that I
would never otherwise go to, because it's not in a convenient location, but it has a giant sign
out front that says no ethanol, so I got that, and hopefully that'll help me keep the works from
getting gummed up. Feeling that though, you can put some stuff in the tank called Stable,
I've got a little bottle of it over here, I think that's what it's called, it's called Stable
Fast Fix, STA-Hyphen-B-I-L, small engine treatment. It says this little bottle says it treats 20 gallons,
so you put like a teaspoon of that in your tank for every, I don't know, two or four gallons or
whatever, and that will help keep it from going bad. So anyway, I'm going to fire this up,
so you can hear my generator running, and that'll probably be about enough of this. So the things
you have to do to start a generator, this is what I didn't even know. When my friend Corey and I were
trying to get this thing started, we were like, what, how do you do that? I mean, there's not a whole
lot to it, but if you don't do things in the right order, then it might not work. So you've got
to turn the run switch to the run position, put the choke all the way on, and then you have to open
up the fuel line if your generator has a fuel cutoff, which is a great thing for it to have, by the way.
And then you start it up, and normally after you pull the recoil, you have to pull the choke down
pretty quick to keep it from, I don't know, whatever. So let's see if this starts up.
There we go.
Okay, so it started right up, the first pull, and I'm going to let it run for a couple of minutes.
It's very noisy over there, so I'm walking over here to a different part, a different side of my
house. When I get the new generator from my dad, my hand made down big generator, it will be able
to power way more stuff. I think it's something like 12,000 watts or 15,000 watts instead of just
4,000. And also, it will hook directly into my natural gas line. So it'll use a cleaner burning
fuel, and it's a fuel that I won't have to go fill up with those little red cans, and it's a
pain to do that. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful to have the generator that I do because
it's wonderful to be able to turn your power on after a hurricane, but I'm looking forward to having
the one that will automatically recognize when the power gets cut off and will kick in so that
you have the minimal interruption in power. At the same time that I was getting the generator
interlock installed, I also had the guy install a whole house surge suppressor, and so that should
help keep my electronics safe in the house as well. I guess that's about it. I hope you all have
enjoyed hearing about generators. Not the most exciting topic, but it's been strangely compelling
to me lately. Almost all the stuff I've been watching is YouTube videos on how to fix generators,
and I find it very pleasing. So I highly recommend James Condon's channel. I'll put a link to that
in the show notes, and I'll talk to you all some other time about something else. Bye now.
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