Generator Won't Turn Over
Onan 5500. Soooo...... We camped this past weekend at the local lake/state park. Had an awesome time! On the way there, as I always do, I ran the generator so I could run the house A/Cs and to...
Forum Discussion
10forty2 wrote:
I may be on to something with some research. It appears that the Trojan T-605s that I bought and installed for house batteries have no CCA rating, and the Onan specs call for minimum of 360/450 CCA. I'll try jumping it with a known good starting battery and see what happens when I get some time this weekend.......
The batteries should not be the problem; they can supply sufficient current to star the generator, even if Trojan doesn't list a CCA specification. You have a poor connection somewhere between the batteries and the generator's starter (or maybe, but less likely, a bad starter, or starter solenoid, or connection in the generator's control module, or....). The bad connection(s) may be along the positive path or along the ground path or both.
Using a battery and jumpers straight to the generator is helpful to verify that it is a bad connection somewhere, but don't misinterpret the results as meaning that your new batteries are insufficient for the task as I very highly doubt that to be the case. You could jump the other battery to them directly (assuming it starts the generator when connected to the generator directly) to demonstrate that the problem is with the wiring between them.
