There's nothing like blowing past those idiots on hills - the 440-3 just pulls and pulls. We couldn't do it until we replaced the car torque converter some idiot had installed (and it exploded as a result) with a rebuilt correct truck torque converter and put in a shift kit (Transgo TF-2), but once we did, look out. It almost felt like we'd replaced the engine, the difference was so dramatic. Hills we barely had crawled up at 35-40mph, we flew up at 60+.
We haven't used our motorhome in a few years, but we needed it desperately this past week. Very strong storms came through Thursday afternoon and lightning hit the pole where the transformer for the 5 houses right here sits. Blew it, of course. Power went out at 3:45pm on Thursday and we got it back at 12:03am Saturday, for 32 hours out. Since it was only 5 houses, it was low on the priority list. If we weren't the last repair, we were one of the last.
But the Onan 4.0 CCK in the motorhome ran everything we needed - the fridge, the chest freezer, the sump pump, the well pump, one AC unit and device chargers. It just chugged along like the load was nothing. We had to chop it out of the jungle that grew around it this spring first, though - vines and weeds and a couple small trees conspired together to keep us from the genset compartment, the rear fuel tank and the front door (the shore cord is stored in an inside compartment).
The gas in the tank is 7 years old, but we put Star Tron Enzyme Fuel Treatment in when we filled it. I had a good battery here, so we swapped it with the 15-yr-old battery in the compartment. The Onan started like it was fresh gas from that day and never missed a beat in that 32 hours. So we filled it back up yesterday, giving the new gas the Star Tron treatment as well. That stuff works as advertised and was recommended by my BIL, who's a marine mechanic, as better than Sta-Bil.
My husband (finally) is drawing up plans to have the shore cord (30-amp twist-lock) connect to a box inside the house, then BX from there to a box and outlet at the things we need to run, so no extension cords needed. Safer, no adapters, no cords all over the floor, and we'll be able to run more stuff. We didn't want to overload the adapters; they got pretty warm as it was.
We hadn't needed it for a while, but our power company (BGE) hasn't spent a dime on infrastructure around here in 20 years and the number - and length - of power outages has been increasing for the past 2 years. The idiots don't even trim trees any more unless they get a large number of complaints for that section of wire.
