February 27 2016 Generator work day

I started the day with washing my clothes.  Then I cleaned the heads through out the day with interruptions to help Dave.

Dave decided to dig into our generator.  Back before we left Florida, it wasn’t running smoothly.  That’s when we bought the Honda eu2000i generator as a backup.  He was told by the NextGen representative that he needed a Hertz meter.  Well we had met someone in Marsh Harbor when we first arrived that had one, Clark on Undaunted.  He was still here, so Dave borrowed it for the day. 

He waited until now because you have to pull everything out of the starboard lazarette that is stored on top of the generator.  He thought that we were not getting power at the circuit breaker because the lights don’t work until the generator warms up.  The hertz meter has a 110 plug that Dave put into one of our outlets with the generator running.  It read 58 cycles per second (hertz), so he adjusted the throttle on the diesel engine part of the generator to increase the hertz to 60.  Now the throttle is set right, but the light is still slow to light up on the circuit breaker.  BUT the next time he talks to the rep, he can explain the motions he went through.  He is expecting the usual comment “what? I’ve never heard of that!” 

He sprayed inside the motor windings with Corrosion-X, but you can use Boeshield T-9. It’s very helpful in marine environments.  The heat exhaust duct is plastic and was tearing.  Dave decided to go into town to replace it.  He forgot that most of the stores close at noon on Saturdays and didn’t have any luck.  Since it had a wire frame, he took the advice of the Canadian Red Green and made himself a duct tape duct.  In the process, he noticed the heat exhaust fan was mounted backwards and changed that.  So the generator should run better, but we still have the original problem of having to let it warm up before it is at full power.  Dave will continue to research what he can.  He can’t call the NextGen rep until we return to the states.  I guess if it shuts down, we’ll hire a generator mechanic to figure it out.  In the meantime, it works, just still puzzles us with this change.