Bob & RCA,
Thanks for your help, I appreciate the information.
I started it up again, and applied all the loads again & went straight to the freezer & unplugged it. Still had the same something pulling her down.....
Went into the panel & started the process of elimination.
Here's what I found:
We had an addition put on the house in '97. It's one room, a living room, and evidently we must have been out of breakers because he installed one of those split breakers, where you have 2 15 amp breakers (that are smaller in size) coming out of a spot where normally there'd be a single 10 or 20A breaker.
Anyways, that was the initial culprit. I tracked down what the deal was, and one side of that breaker was/is feeding the lights in that room, the overheads. When thrown alone, no problem.
The other one though, boy was that the one. Come to find out, it went to right here, where I'm sitting. To our UPS. That has about a (lot) of things plugged into it.
When the UPS was disconnected, problem disappeared.
So.....
I'm thinking UPS sees power interrupted & comes on. I enable Lister & power comes back. UPS decides all is good, tries to both feed normal power to all devices plugged in & also recharge itself- at the same time. The draw, like I said, went from 5-6 amps on one leg to 12-15, instantaneously. To the Generator's credit, it only went down to 58HZ, but I'm supposing that's enough to have the UPS decide that it's not going to start?
I dunno.
In any case, I've got an electrician coming out this week. We'll fix that circuit, and once off the grid probably get rid of the UPS, as I'll be on an inverter with large batteries.
Again, thank you all for your help- it's much appreciated.
Chris