We’ve had three dark days in a row. Today, at least, we got ⅓” of rain. But the solar output hasn’t been enough to keep everything up and running.
This morning, I carried five gallons of gasoline down to the studio, filled the generator, and started it up. Everything went swimmingly for 25 minutes, then the inverter disconnected from the generator. The inverter is pretty picky about generator power, and it occasionally disconnects for a couple of minutes when there’s a big change in load. This time, though, it didn’t reconnect.
I checked out the generator and everything seemed fine, except that it was running just a little rough. I watched for a while and, sure enough, the inverter would occasionally try to draw power from the generator, which would hiccup a little bit, then the inverter would disconnect.
Over the course of the morning, I found the generator manual, asked HA to pick up some Sea Foam on the way back from town, and I planned a series of things to do.
- I added Sea Foam to the generator’s gas, fired it up, and let it run for an hour. Things improved a little, but not enough.
- I took out the air cleaner. I can wash the air cleaner, but it would take hours (probably overnight) to dry. This way I could determine if it’s the problem without the wait. But it didn’t fix things.
- I cleaned the fuel filter.
- I removed the spark plug, which looked great, and I brushed it off with a wire brush. I don’t have a gapping tool; it’s been decades since I’d gapped a spark plug.
Nothing made much of a difference. Even without being under load, the generator ran a little rough and hunted a bit, a subtle change from what I’m used to. In order to narrow it down to something to do with the fuel system vs. something else (electrical?), I put a propane tank on the generator and switched fuels. The generator ran much smoother with the propane fuel, but it would still die when the inverter kicked in, even after I set the inverter to not draw over 3,000 watts from the (ten-thousand watt) generator. I’m not sure that means anything, though. When I’d first tried to run the generator from propane, I had exactly the same problem. I solved it with sea foam and switching to ethanol-free gasoline, and I never tried going back to propane. I expect the generator just doesn’t run well enough on propane to make the inverter happy.
It seems that either there’s a carburetor problem, or we got a can of bad gas. The gas came from the station we always use, but I suppose that’s still potentially a problem. We can pick up some new fuel tomorrow and I’ll drain the tank (ugh!) and try with the new fuel. In the mean time, we’ve turned off all the unnecessary electrical devices. I’ll switch the kitchen sink back to propane. We’ll just have to survive without the hot tub, electric car, and clothes dryer until I get this sorted.
What I’d really like is to find a high-quality 240V inverter generator. That would address the problems caused by my inverter not liking the dirty output of the mechanical generator. It would also be much quieter. And I can fix up the DuroMax so that we have a backup when we need it. But can we find the right generator on the island? And if we do, can we afford it?
In the mean time, we’ll be living more like off-grid folks should be living.
—2p
addendum 2026-01-06T20:21-10:00
Today, to rule out a bad batch of gasoline, I drained the tank and refilled it with some gas I knew to be good. It seemed to help. I was able to run the generator though it was so sunny today I didn’t need to. When I started charging the car, though, it still failed. I suspect that the generator, at baseline, is just on the edge of clean enough for the inverter to tolerate. My current plan is to get an inverter generator (quieter with cleaner output) and make that the primary, keeping the DuroMax in reserve as backup.
Alas, 240 volt inverter generators seem to be almost impossible to find on this island, and shipping costs from the mainland are around $1,000.