3000W Chinese Gensets Info.

jbobst wrote:
Because it ran so well at night, and never gave me problems during the second day when I had it in the shade the whole time, I can only assume this thing is fairly susceptible to over heating. We were in Arizona, but we were camping in Sierra Vista, which is a somewhat higher elevation for Arizona (still high desert though). We did have a fairly mild weekend with temperatures, but I am just wondering if anyone could maybe confirm my suspicion of the problems being related to heat? Also, there really wasn't any additional load on the generator the day it gave me problems, other than the AC of course.

With an altitude of around 5000ft, and temps in the mid 90s, that is a fairly high density altitude, somewhere around 8500. Could be the engine is running too rich. I had an Onan that did exactly the same thing you describe, the low-speed jet was too lean (tamper-proof, non-adjustable) so the last person to work on it adjusted the high-speed needle rich to compensate for it. In hot weather, under a load, it would bog down and not clear itself even when the load was removed. I ended up popping the tamper-proof :) cover off the low-speed needle, adjusted both needles correctly, and got it running normal again.

Even with the fuel mixture correct and at that altitude, you are probably only getting 70% power. Also consider that the thinner air will cool the engine and gen-head less efficiently, so you really need to derate the generator to something a lot less than 3000 watts, IMHO.