21 Days to Go - Generator Repairs
Changing a belt on the 7.5 KW Onan generator was one of the final maintenance items I wanted to get done before heading out that-a-way. It is supposed to performed by an authorized Onan service center. (It was my understanding that you have to pull the crankshaft damper/pulley to install the belt.)
I had Huston Electric, Lafayette, order the belt and took the RV up there Friday AM to have the belt installed.
One of the guys started work on it immediately. I watched him, while shooting the bull with him, take the cover off and start picking chunks of magnet from all over under the cover. He said, "This is not a good thing to find." My style of genset has a cylinder with magnets glued to it. That cylinder spins inside a copper winding, which generates electricity. Between 2000 and 2003 Onan used an adhesive that was bad and the magnets come loose, typically destroying the copper winding. Just the parts are $1,500 to fix it. The genset has run only 163 hours in 7 years, which is not necessarily a good thing, I've learned that it is better to run them than let them set. People who have the same type of genset, except theirs has a good adhesive, have over 10,000 problem free hours on some of them. Just in case you are wondering, a new genset costs over $8,000 plus installation.
The good news is that I found out about it now, while it was relatively easy to get it fixed. We could have been some place in the boondocks where we really needed the generator and have it not run. Then we would have had to find a place to take it and wait on parts and repairs. In fairness to Onan, once they recognized the problem they increased people's warranty from 2years to 5 years so that most of the problems were taken care of under warranty. Only people who run the generator very little ended up getting stuck paying for the repairs.
I had Huston Electric, Lafayette, order the belt and took the RV up there Friday AM to have the belt installed.
One of the guys started work on it immediately. I watched him, while shooting the bull with him, take the cover off and start picking chunks of magnet from all over under the cover. He said, "This is not a good thing to find." My style of genset has a cylinder with magnets glued to it. That cylinder spins inside a copper winding, which generates electricity. Between 2000 and 2003 Onan used an adhesive that was bad and the magnets come loose, typically destroying the copper winding. Just the parts are $1,500 to fix it. The genset has run only 163 hours in 7 years, which is not necessarily a good thing, I've learned that it is better to run them than let them set. People who have the same type of genset, except theirs has a good adhesive, have over 10,000 problem free hours on some of them. Just in case you are wondering, a new genset costs over $8,000 plus installation.
The good news is that I found out about it now, while it was relatively easy to get it fixed. We could have been some place in the boondocks where we really needed the generator and have it not run. Then we would have had to find a place to take it and wait on parts and repairs. In fairness to Onan, once they recognized the problem they increased people's warranty from 2years to 5 years so that most of the problems were taken care of under warranty. Only people who run the generator very little ended up getting stuck paying for the repairs.
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