Onan quality going down????
I have 7 motorhomes currently, 6 with Onan gensets, 3 4KY bought brand new aprox 1 year ago, 2 4KY 2007 with ~1300 hours and 1 2012 5.5K with 500 hours. I have had motorhome for 15 years, normally ...
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Want to see a mess? An insanely-incredible mess of control circuits in the 300 kw to 1 megawatt large generators? Onan presently does with 3,000 components what Lima, and Kato does with one twentieth the parts. When tax funded entities have all the money in the world, they specify Onan especially government purchasing agents.
California hired me to troubleshoot a generator trailer for CalTrans. It housed an 80 Kw Onan. I found two center tapped transformers burned and a melted regulator board and two fried current transformers. How the @#$%^&! do you go about burning up a current transformer?
Oh the control transformers! They absolutely had to be right on the money voltage wise. Eighty seven volts. Center tapped. 170 va. I still have this stuff in memory after all these years.
The transformers were special order from the distributor. A five week wait and three hundred and some-off dollars, each. The voltage regulator (the circuit board not the housing and terminal block) was three thousand dollars and change.
Field (rotor current) was absurdly high so I was unable to substitute another voltage regulator.
My bill to CalTrans was close to seven thousand dollars. They paid promptly, five months later.
Yet those 6.5 NH self exciting volts per hertz 18-turn models were among the toughest little generators ever built (with the exception of the remote start network).
I troubleshot an Emerald down here and traced the problem down to the power transistor and driver transistor in the voltage regulator. Oooooo Onan had buffed off the "proprietary" transistor part numbers. You don't want to know the price of an entire replacement voltage regulator.
These days, Onan holds an exalted position high up on my ---- list.
California hired me to troubleshoot a generator trailer for CalTrans. It housed an 80 Kw Onan. I found two center tapped transformers burned and a melted regulator board and two fried current transformers. How the @#$%^&! do you go about burning up a current transformer?
Oh the control transformers! They absolutely had to be right on the money voltage wise. Eighty seven volts. Center tapped. 170 va. I still have this stuff in memory after all these years.
The transformers were special order from the distributor. A five week wait and three hundred and some-off dollars, each. The voltage regulator (the circuit board not the housing and terminal block) was three thousand dollars and change.
Field (rotor current) was absurdly high so I was unable to substitute another voltage regulator.
My bill to CalTrans was close to seven thousand dollars. They paid promptly, five months later.
Yet those 6.5 NH self exciting volts per hertz 18-turn models were among the toughest little generators ever built (with the exception of the remote start network).
I troubleshot an Emerald down here and traced the problem down to the power transistor and driver transistor in the voltage regulator. Oooooo Onan had buffed off the "proprietary" transistor part numbers. You don't want to know the price of an entire replacement voltage regulator.
These days, Onan holds an exalted position high up on my ---- list.
