I have a new 2014 210 Popular Chevy equipped with the latest state of the art Cummins generator...... wait... read on!! Yesterday I decided to change the oil. First thing I noticed was that the outside cover is different. You will need a screw driver to unlock the cover to access the dip stick. To change the oil you will need a 9/16 socket wrench with a short extension. Now here is where the fun begins. When the drain plug got to the point of release (the drain plug is on the bottom of the unit so when it releases it will fall to the ground or is supposed to! LOL) down poured the oil and the drain plug flew into the bottom cover surrounding the access hole. Now to be more specific, there is a cover on the bottom of the generator that is about an inch or so below the drain plug and the entire generator. To access the drain plug, there is a round opening just wide enough to get about two small fingers up to the drain plug, but barely. To make it even more fun, there is a lip surrounding the access hole that keeps anything from coming out the hole. My drain plug was sitting on the area surrounding the hole but I couldn't get my fingers up in the hole to grab the drain plug. The lip around the hole made it impossible to retrieve the plug. For the next hour I tried everything possible to grab a hold on that drain plug. It's made of brass so a magnet didn't work. Finally, I used a surgical tool that I happened to have with curved ends and I was able after several tries to grab hold of the plug, lift it over the lip and out the hole. Now.. read on. It's get better.
Pouring the oil in the fill hole: The fill hole is about two or three inches into the unit and on an angle and the fill hole is small. Now.. how do I get oil in that fill hole?? hahaha I happened to have a small funnel and I attached a 4 inch rubber hose to it and inserted it into the fill hole. As you know, you must lie on your back as you are doing all this and the funnel, after inserting it in the hole, is near the top of the coach, not much room there to get a bottle of oil angled to fill the hole. This was another ten minutes to do this because of the angles and the fill hole being too small to accept just a small amount of oil at a time.
Now this project which should only have taken 15 minutes ended up taking about 2 hours. I can't imagine in my wildest dreams what the engineers at Cummins were thinking when they designed this new generator. On top of all this, the generator is extremely noisy, much more than the previous model. Regarding the drain plug hole, all the engineers had to do was make the access hole on the bottom cover about an inch or so wider and it would have made all the difference in the world to access the drain plug. And I would personally like to see the engineers try to put oil in that fill hole!!! The design is about as unfriendly as it gets. All they had to do was extend the fill hole out near the outside of the unit and it would have been at least easier to access.
I called Cummins and they had no answers for me regarding all this. The Cummins engineers get a big fat "F" for the design of this new unit. Apparently they have no common sense on how customers must deal with these units. Good luck to all of you dealing with this if you buy a new Roadtrek with a Cummins generator.
