I purchased a used rigid generator with a 14hp electric start Subaru engine and 8kw /10kw surge head that did not make electricity.  Since the rest of the generator was clean and the engine only had 96 hours on it I figured i would take a shot.


I am good with engines but not so good with generators so any help would be greatly appreciated.   If there are any other things i need to add please let me know as i only took readings i thought were relevant, but, again i don't know a whole lot about gen heads.    

When i applied 12vdc to the brushes i got 46vac out of the generator.  Suspecting a bad AVR I ordered a new one and replaced the old one.  To my dismay it was still not producing power.


I took a volt reading across the brushes with the engine running and got 5vac (brushes looked good and the slip rings were clean.

When i ohm the rotor i got 61.5 to 62 ohms of resistance (dont know if that is good or bad)


There are 4 heavy gauge wires coming from the stator 2 black and two white.

When i ohm these wires i got

L1 to R1 0.2 ohms
L2 to R2 0.2 ohms

R1 to R2 0 ohms
L1 to L2 0ohns
L2 to R1 0 ohms
L1 to R2 0ohms

There are 4 smaller wires coming from the stator  white, green and two blue wires.
I only get resistance between the white and green no other combination results in any reading.

Is there a way to check the smaller wires which i believe are the harmonic winding but i am not sure. do i need to do this with the engine running.

Thanks for the help in advance


Carl

Anybody run Rotella t6 (full synthetic) 5-40 in their Lister/Listeroids?

Thanks

Carl

I want to replace this rats nest with a bridge rectifier but can't figure out what is going on with this wiring.
this is a 4kva Indian gen head anyone have any idea
I can't seem to insert an image into my post but here is a link to it 


  http://listerenginegallery.com/main.php?g2_itemId=1585

While we don't have power outages ofter or for long periods of times we have had two since Saturday.  The first on Saturday was for about 3 hours and last night was from about 6pm to 11pm. Needless to say the wife is now a listeriod fan and we were the only house in sight that had power.  While we are in a rural setting we do have about a dozen houses in sight from our home and they were all dark.  I had the TV, computer, Satellite dish, etc running and using my dual fuel diesel/natural gas combination. The listeroid only used about 24 oz of diesel and 360 cubic feet of natural gas @ 1.50 per 1000 cubic feet in the  5 hours it was running. I must say it was a great feeling to see the listeroid powering the house while the rest of the neighborhood was in the dark  .

Carl 

I have been playing around with the idea of running my lister on Diesel/natural gas for a while now.  I recently came across a small J&S carburetor (not much of a carburetor) but I was able to make it work pretty well.  While some fine tuning will be in order I can say that by fogging the intake with natural gas through this carb the engine is working well. This carburetor does not have a variable metering device so you only have an adjustment setting for the gas flow and that is it. I removed both the throttle blade and the chock  plates.

I was concerned that the 1" bore would be too restrictive but that doesn't seem to be the case.  I made up an adapter plate to attach it directly to the head. Running on diesel with no adjustments the engine ran the same as with just the pipe and air cleaner through the entire load range.

Starting the engine on diesel with no load i marked a line of the injector pump rack as a reference point.  When i turn on the natural gas the injector pump closes to what would be the required rack setting if the engine were running about 350 rpm I know this because i turned off the natural gas and moved the rack by had to where it had closed when the natural gas was on and my tach red 347rpm.

While i only loaded the engine a 6/1  metro to about 2500 watts the rack only moved slightly above where it would idle at no load. While i have no hard data on fuel consumption or on the amount of natural gas going into the engine right now I suspect that i am probably substituting at least 60% with natural gas.

At one point when it was running at no load if I increased the natural gas a little to much the rack would go too far closed and the engine would start to misfire. I suspect that there was not enough diesel going into the engine to light the natural gas off.

I will post a video in the near future after i get a little further along in my testing.  I think i need to take a fixed amount of diesel and a flow meter to see how much natural gas is really flowing with a constant load and see how well it does.


One thing i wanted to point out is that I did not modify the lister governor in any way I am just fogging natural gas into the intake at a fixed amount and the governor will add additional diesel if the load increases. Since it is easy to adjust the flow of natural gas I will set it for maximum efficiency at around 2,000 watts.  In this way while it will run with a little too much natural gas at no load it is quite happy from 500 watts to 2000 watts while never moving the rack past where it would run at no load on just diesel.

When the natural gas is not turned on the engine runs as it normally did on diesel.
I have a low voltage DC gas valve that I will wire into the generator (using a 24 volt dc power supply) so that no gas can go to the engine unless the generator is actually producing power so if the engine were to brake or stop for some reason the natural gas valve would close. This valve also has a manual on/off valve that will only allow gas to flow if the valve is on and power is applied.  I will use this valve to turn off the gas flow for startup and shutdown of the engine.


Carl

For those who run their engines a lot.

Has anyone thought about using an automotive A/C unit to help heat or cool by liquid phase change?  My thinking is that if you are running your engine at a relatively light load you may want to add some additional load to the engine for greater efficiency and an automotive a/c compressor might be a good way to add a constant load to the engine.  Depending where you place the condenser and where you locate the evaporator you could either put cold air into the house or hot air into the house.  Since these use a simple electric clutch system uncoupling them from the engine drive is quite simple.
You could use one compressor with two evaporators and two condensers fitted with three way valves for both summer and winter use thus making your own heat pump.

Carl

In the last video i was unable to get the exhaust on the outside of the house, It is really quite quiet. I started far from the house so i could include our wind turbine, 10kw of solar PV's and our solar hot air panel.  You really cant hear the exhaust until you get real close. Unfortunately where i have the crankcase vent coming out of the garage wall is very hard to see in the video. If you look at my other video you can see the check valve i used coming off the crankcase cover.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp9w12H6HX8

Hope you like

Carl