generators

Some of the service trucks at my former truck shop are equipped with Onan generators (mostly Marquis 7KW's) salvaged from RV's. On several occasions, we ran those units for 8-10 days during remote recovery operations, refueling on the fly. When I sold the shop to our son-in-law, some of those generators had over 13,000 hours on them without major rebuilds, and all were working just fine.

Longest I have run mine is 25 hours... Longest I know of generators running is several months..... The limit on run time is based upon your fuel tank.. When it runs empty (1/4 full on a Motor home) the generator WILL stop. That is the only limit I know of on run time save time between oil changes and such.

I have run my genset for five days straight many times with no issue. I have 200 gallon tank too.

Hurricane Sandy left my house without electricity for 4 days. I ran my RV generator for 92 hours. Feeds off the RV gas tank (which luckily happened to be "full")...and being gasoline, neighbors did not complain. And...if they did, so what? In that kinds of situation.......
What I had was a 12 gauge extention cord nightmare. Switching back and forth between the RV, fridge and (garage)freezer was a PITA but y'gotta do what y'gotta do.
And that...will never (hopefully) happen again. I bought a second-hand (but almost new) 10,000 watt (gas) generator for the house and installed a transfer switch, which now would give me adequate power and coverage should another storm of this severity hit again. I do start this generator every 2 months. (just like I start the RV generator every 2 weeks or so.)

I went three days on my gas generator in the driveway after an August hurricane knock out power and we moved out to the coach for the AC. Ran an extension cord back to the house to keep the fridge going. Not enough space in the coach fridge to move everything out there. Hardly made a dent in the available fuel in the coach tank. Always park with a full tank.

diazr2 wrote:
Boy bet your neighbors were sure glad on that fourth day :)

A diesel generator on a DP motorhome is actually not all that loud. Everyone was probably happy to have power return to the neighborhood.

The typical main fuel tank on a DP motorhome is 90 - 125 gallons, and it probably used between 0.5 and 1 GPH, so it might have used 1/2 tank in 4 days.

It is good to exercise the generator once in a while - for say 15 minutes each month or so. 96 hours, and you are good for this month! But still start it each month for around 15 minutes to 1 hour. We run the generator at my work for 15 minutes at 10 am on Wednesdays. It is noisy! It also has a 4" diameter exhaust and 1,000 gallon fuel tank. Hopefully ours will never need to run 2 days at a time again, but it has. No problems running it that long. We can have a 450 KW load on one generator and 950 KW on the other.

Fred.

Boy bet your neighbors were sure glad on that fourth day :)

Draw from the rv's tank

You didn't shut it off to refuel it? Or does it draw fuel from the vehicles tank.?

Generators are made to run.