Recomended oil for Onan 4KW generator

rjstractor wrote:

tpi wrote:
Onan manuals are always an interesting read. There is an Onan standby generator using our Ford V10. 15W40 oil is recommended, and 5W30 is only recommended to 50 degrees F. FWIW they also call for cylinder head rebuild at 1000 hours (or two years whatever first) on the V10. 1000 hrs. translate to 30,000 40,000 miles of typical driving? Ummm don't think I'll be pulling the heads..

A stationary generator application is a completely different duty cycle than a vehicle, so I wouldn't think you could even translate hours to miles driven. It would be interesting to see how many hours the V10 would run in a generator application.

It would be.. Of course the generator applications could be as variable as miles driven. Generator doing a lot of 80-100%. Or mostly 30-50%. Or short test runups. Generator at hot standby, or not. Still when airport shuttle V10s have gone over 500,000 miles (think of the hours here) and they pull heavy motorhomes along for 160,000 miles or more I would question whether a cylinder head would be worn out at 2 years/1000 hrs whichever occurs first. Especially if compression and oil consumption measured good. These engines in generator duty are running 1800 RPM, turbocharged, and putting out about 170 HP maximum-conditions which may or may not be harder on certain parts of the engine vs. automotive applications.