for years we used my hobart champion 10kw welder/generator as a backup generator for when the power was out. we pretty much just run the whole house and show no mercy. usually i try to turn off the electric hot water heater and the pool pump but it has been known to run them both when i was at work.... this last summer the power was out for almost a week and the thing was killing me on fuel so i decided to build a lister cs generator over the winter. Got this built this winter and ran it a bit, I am very pleased with the power of the engine. i have been able to run the whole house and it only drops by about 1 hz. it seems to have plenty of power to spare. I may even change pulleys and lower it down to 650 rpm and see if it can haul the mail as good as it does now. any way it seemed like the lights on the computer power strip were flickering. then a day or 2 after a test run my well pump shit the bed. (it could be by chance as it was over 10 years old). sort of made us question the waveform of the ST head and wonder if it could be improved upon. So i bought a cheap o-scope off ebay from china and a 10x attenuation probe. took a round of readings, then added two 1000 uf DC capacitors to the DC going into the field. I thought maybe that would smooth out the waveform some. I feel like you can see the capacitors effect on the Z winding and on the rectifier output but they ultimately seem to have no effect on the actual generator output. they don't seem to hurt and maybe they would help with starting the well pump. looking for insight as to weather or not this will help or hurt. here are my scope pics. it was fun anyway and the DSO138 oscilloscope was well worth the 30$ i have into it, i would buy another one in a hearbeat.
grid power for reference,
hobart 10kw generator no load
hobart 10kw generator running the house
lister/ st head output no load, no capacitors
lister/ st head output no load, 2 capacitors on field
lister/ st head output running the house 2 capacitors on field.
Z winding output no capacitors
Z winding output with 2 capacitors on field
DC rectifier +DC output no capacitors on field
DC rectifier +DC output 2 capacitors on field