To recap the generator house saga:
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Our backup generator was way too loud and the beast was exposed to weather. I wanted to buy a generator housing from ZombieBox because I have heard great things about them. Their boxes strain the budget, but are probably worth it for me except that they don’t appear to have a local dealer and shipping to the island was way beyond budget.
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Instead I built my own generator house (in the 1970’s I built speaker enclosures for my band) and bought an aftermarket exhaust system adapter made by ZombieBox (and much more shippable then the whole enclosure).
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I ended up getting a different generator than the one I’d bought the exhaust system for, but it appeared that it would fit. The kit comes with several adapters and screws and gaskets and such, and is a clever design that looked good.
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Alas, there was nuance. The screw holes on my Generac iQ5200DF were slightly too far apart to accommodate the adapter. Slightly… like less than 1/16”.
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I tried putting just one of the screws in, but it would very quickly rattle out and the exhaust pipe would fall off.
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I eventually used a Dremel tool and a small cylindrical burr to widen the too-short screw slot just a bit, but then I discovered that the muffler surface to which I was bolting it was curved enough that the screw still wouldn’t reach.
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I bent the flange ears on the adapter, and it got close enough that I could get both screws in, but it still leaked enough exhaust to trigger the generator’s carbon monoxide detector (even when the generator was outside the generator house) and the generator would shut down trying to save my fool life.
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I tried putting a thick layer of high-temperature silicone gasket cement around the gasket, the muffler, and the adapter. I let it cure over 36 hours. It still leaked too much and would shut down. When I disassembled it, I learned that the gasket cement still wasn’t completely cured.
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In desperation, I wrote to ZombieBox. They answered almost right away! They offered some general suggestions that I had already applied. They also asked for some pictures.
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Once they got a photograph (this one) they wrote back quickly again, and suggested that, with the adapter installed, I put a block of wood over the adaptor and hit it with a hammer to try to flatten the surface of the muffler. I tried it, then tried to re-tighten the screws and noticed that they had quite a bit of play in them after the hammering. That seemed a good indication that things had worked.
I ran the generator for a couple of hours today with it inside the generator house, and the CO detector didn’t trigger. I can’t be 100% sure this was a success yet, because it was a really windy day today, but I have great confidence that the generator is now able to run while inside its cozy little house.
In any case, the customer support from ZombieBox was awesome!
—2p