I know there is a tool (a long metal stick thing) somewhere in the storage compartments for manually cranking the slides in. I would figure that out if I HAD to but when it's sitting in my driveway I figured there had to be somethign else going on and I wasn't in a bind to have to resort to that.
When the dip stick was pulled from the generator the oil started welling up to the opening and DH closed it up right away as one drip started oozing down the side. I observed this happed. He said this meant it had plenty of oil. Is there reason to assume otherwise? It's been running for a good 30 min now with no issues which makes me think I can rule out the "low oil making it shut itself off" think that happened last year. That was what I first thought since it was running a couple minutes and cutting off. Still not sure if the hosue batteries are charging off the gen.