Can you hook two different kinds of generators together?

[Iamjustaniceguy]

We have a Temporary Tattoo and Face painting business so now we spend pretty much all summer "Camping" either at fairs working or relaxing when we can. We got a used KZ Sportsman fifth wheel this fall and I would really like to get a new larger generator (Looking at a Yamaha EF2400IS). What I/we would like to know is has anyone ever hooked a Yamaha and a Honda generator together to power a camper? I honestly think the Yamaha would power everything but it might be nice to have our old Honda 2000i to help out if needed. We know the Honda won't work for everything at least with our old camper it usually wouldn't handle the air conditioning start up.

So if anyone has ever hooked up a Yamaha 2400IS and a Honda 2000i we would love to hear how it worked and what cables you used.

Thanks!

[map40]

MEXICOWANDERER wrote:
Where in the world did you get the idea I took offense?

I just find it difficult for my fingers to connect wires together with no clue as to the possible outcome. PS: The most challenging of all my curriculum was Celestial Mechanics. The dullest was forensic auditing. The most tedious was chemistry.

Then I found chemistry and electrical melded perfectly with lead acid batteries the MBA reined in a proclivity to expend tempting over-budget dollars for even more test equipment and Celestial Mechanics piped in when I peered outside and found the stars in the wrong place (spending all night on a stool crunching numbers).

My economics exposure led me by my nose on a trail to the Skunkworks auction buried deep in a technical magazine -- .50 pound for brand new space shuttle wire (Just a guess but 5-7 tons total wire purchase would be a fair estimate*) and of course the 15Kw PW+Analog generator waveform generator. The penalty for nerdiness was 100% devotion to educating myself with full-time work and no play except for horsepack trips.

*I sold perhaps 1-1/2 tons of brand new Teflon FAA/PMA certified wire at $4.00/lb. 800% markup. And a job with Lockheed unsnarling a bogus maintenance battery charger for their lab power supply.

The net sum total? Caution. Not some gyro gearloose attitude.

Kelley's Law

Murphy Was An Optimist

As I read your experience, we may have a few friends in common. And I do love Kelley's Law!

[MEXICOWANDERER]

Then there are people who race express freight trains to a crossing swearing up and down those who criticize the practice as being somehow defective.
I readily admit to being "defective".

[Lynnmor]

Perhaps one cannot just parallel generators willy-nilly.

From Honda:

EU2200i and EU2000i Parallel Operation

The EU2200i are only compatible with EU2000i or EU2000i Companion models within a specific serial number range:

EAAJ-2017305 through EAAJ-9999999
EACT-1000001 through EACT-9999999

Connecting an EU2200i with an EU2000i or EU2000i Companion that is not within the compatible serial range above may cause a low voltage output, which can damage tools and appliances powered by the generators. Units outside the compatible serial number range should only be paralleled with another EU2000i.

[MEXICOWANDERER]

Where in the world did you get the idea I took offense?

I just find it difficult for my fingers to connect wires together with no clue as to the possible outcome. PS: The most challenging of all my curriculum was Celestial Mechanics. The dullest was forensic auditing. The most tedious was chemistry.

Then I found chemistry and electrical melded perfectly with lead acid batteries the MBA reined in a proclivity to expend tempting over-budget dollars for even more test equipment and Celestial Mechanics piped in when I peered outside and found the stars in the wrong place (spending all night on a stool crunching numbers).

My economics exposure led me by my nose on a trail to the Skunkworks auction buried deep in a technical magazine -- .50 pound for brand new space shuttle wire (Just a guess but 5-7 tons total wire purchase would be a fair estimate*) and of course the 15Kw PW+Analog generator waveform generator. The penalty for nerdiness was 100% devotion to educating myself with full-time work and no play except for horsepack trips.

*I sold perhaps 1-1/2 tons of brand new Teflon FAA/PMA certified wire at $4.00/lb. 800% markup. And a job with Lockheed unsnarling a bogus maintenance battery charger for their lab power supply.

The net sum total? Caution. Not some gyro gearloose attitude.

Kelley's Law

Murphy Was An Optimist

[map40]

burningman wrote:
What has mechanically syncing large generators got to do with the price of tea in China? I don’t think that was the question.

These small inverter generators are self-syncing.
I’ve connected Yamahas and Hondas. I’ve also connected various different size units.
There’s no different-brand issue.
Do you worry about plugging your equipment into different brand generator’s power?
Do you think your microwave or computer operate differently on Honda 60Hz 120VAC than they do on Yamaha 60Hz 120VAC?
No!
It works fine. The generators don’t know or care where the other source of 60Hz 120VAC is coming from, it is what it is.

Don’t waste an extra $100 on a Honda “Companion”. That’s marketing BS. It’s zero different other than having a 30A twist-lock outlet on its panel, which doesn’t help you anyway because it’s not an RV-30, so you’ll be using an adapter anyway.
You gain absolutely nothing.

What I’d do it if were you is get another Honda, a new EU2200.
It’ll cost less than the 2400, it weighs a lot less, and when you parallel it with your existing EU2000 you’ll have plenty of power.

Harbor freight sells a rather nice parallel box. I’ve always made my own but at their price if I needed one today I’d just buy theirs.

Parallel kit

Agree. At their price, is easier to buy their and reconfigure to your liking.

[map40]

MEXICOWANDERER wrote:
I learned early on that sending smoke signals to my bank balance is bad juju.

They do not moniker "engineering" as a "discipline" for nothing. When data is insufficient, I balk.

I do not know how to diagnose a DC motor inverter, but sure as shooting the cost of a couple of repair items would equal the cost of a new complete generator.

I defer to someone else :R

Lol. You take my comment as an offense, it was not meant like that. I’m not and EE, but I hold 2 different Es, 2 masters and a doctorate. Just none of them in electrical. So far, electrical is not that difficult compared to quemical, mechanical or aeronautical, and some of the skills are transferables. The only smokes signals where when I did my first run of a modular 4.6l ford on hydrogen, but by the 3rd generation worked like a charm. The electrical generators sync was a walk in tha park compared to that. But I’ll keep trying until I get some smoke, I sometimes do. ??

[MEXICOWANDERER]

I learned early on that sending smoke signals to my bank balance is bad juju.

They do not moniker "engineering" as a "discipline" for nothing. When data is insufficient, I balk.

I do not know how to diagnose a DC motor inverter, but sure as shooting the cost of a couple of repair items would equal the cost of a new complete generator.

I defer to someone else :R

[map40]

MEXICOWANDERER wrote:
All wise words. Maybe all the ones I used shared the same cheap chinese inverter chipset. As I said, I don’t know how or why, I simply started with "what would happen if we...". A few week later I was connecting 4 of them.
What I did find amazing it that they will level load to capacity. A 3500 and a 2200 won’t share equally, but proportionally. A higher load would go to the 3500.



Interesting.

Being an EE I am far too timid to undertake a "Shake the jar Dewey and see if they fight" approach to investigating compatibility of electrical events.

And that's the beauty of not being an EE. Enough knowledge to connect, enough equipment to try, stupid enough to make it happen!
Still, it has helped me several times. The ability of providing uninterrupted power for as long as is needed is not easy to achieve.
You have to love the simplicity of the approach...

[burningman]

What has mechanically syncing large generators got to do with the price of tea in China? I don’t think that was the question.

These small inverter generators are self-syncing.
I’ve connected Yamahas and Hondas. I’ve also connected various different size units.
There’s no different-brand issue.
Do you worry about plugging your equipment into different brand generator’s power?
Do you think your microwave or computer operate differently on Honda 60Hz 120VAC than they do on Yamaha 60Hz 120VAC?
No!
It works fine. The generators don’t know or care where the other source of 60Hz 120VAC is coming from, it is what it is.

Don’t waste an extra $100 on a Honda “Companion”. That’s marketing BS. It’s zero different other than having a 30A twist-lock outlet on its panel, which doesn’t help you anyway because it’s not an RV-30, so you’ll be using an adapter anyway.
You gain absolutely nothing.

What I’d do it if were you is get another Honda, a new EU2200.
It’ll cost less than the 2400, it weighs a lot less, and when you parallel it with your existing EU2000 you’ll have plenty of power.

Harbor freight sells a rather nice parallel box. I’ve always made my own but at their price if I needed one today I’d just buy theirs.

Parallel kit

[MEXICOWANDERER]

All wise words. Maybe all the ones I used shared the same cheap chinese inverter chipset. As I said, I don’t know how or why, I simply started with "what would happen if we...". A few week later I was connecting 4 of them.
What I did find amazing it that they will level load to capacity. A 3500 and a 2200 won’t share equally, but proportionally. A higher load would go to the 3500.



Interesting.

Being an EE I am far too timid to undertake a "Shake the jar Dewey and see if they fight" approach to investigating compatibility of electrical events.

[RLS7201]

MrWizard wrote:
Inverter generators from different MFG, using different electronics to create the output power are not safe too connect together

Stream driven or water driven hydro turbines are synced by brute force
They bring them online by slowly applying load ( connecting to system thru inductive load) and using the back EMF to drive them into alignment aka synchronous spinning

Something you cannot to with consumer grade ( inverter output ) portable generators

I totally disagree with how you indicated power plants come on line.
I was in a power plant, while taking an operating engineers coarse, when it came on line. They watched their frequency meter until it aligned with the grid and threw the switch and came on line. If the plant lags in frequency, the grid will help pull it along.

Richard

[road-runner]

10 to 15 years ago, Honda held the patent for self-syncing parallel connections, and Honda and Yamaha were the only producers using that technology. Then Kipor introduced self-syncing generators, was challenged by Honda, and changed to a sync-cable design. Champion introduced their parallel capable generators using a sync-cable design. Fast forward to now, it looks like all (or almost all) parallel-capable inverter generators are self-syncing. As a guess, somebody figured out how to get around Honda's patents, or they're all paying a royalty. The equal load sharing is kind of a natural side effect of a generator's output voltage going down as the load increases. The exception will be when a Honda generator is mixed with another brand, because the Honda output tends to be a few volts higher than other brands. Even though it's perfectly logical that brands can be mixed, I'd never want to take the responsibility of recommending it.

[map40]

MEXICOWANDERER wrote:
As Mr Wizard pointed out years ago, grid tie generators have the luxury of lead/lag pull-in via 1000x the energy in an established wave form.

With a 40KW John Deere/LIMA and a 40 KW Perkins/Stamford

And an owner utterly convinced that synchronization was "as simple as pie" he scoffed at my cost estimate to make the units play nice.

So he made his own paralleling 240 incandescent lamp setup.

He threw the switch (I wasn't there)

The Perkins Stamford started oscillating, from what I heard the oscillations rapidly became out of control. Oscillating means out-of control surging.

Both voltage regulators fried which threw them off-line. The primary exciters overloaded and they too destroyed themselves.

These were manual throttle control voltage regulated generators

I have a question to ask

Do you think there is some sort of peace treaty between inverter generator manufacturers that inhibits them from suing another manufacturer for patent infringement regarding any component dealing with voltage regulation and inverter designs?

Regardless

Are you willing to risk your generator or anything connected to it in an attempt to synchronize untested theory?

Mechanical synchronization is an art. To assume a second different generator can gather data then process it is a rather large assumption.

I can't help but remember Washoe Medical Center chief engineer Dwayne Telecky standing at the curb of east fourth street in Reno NV wondering how a V-12 Caterpillar engine and KATO generator jumped 50 feet through a cinder brick wall in flames (the coolant was flammable). I was on hand months before to see the operation of a six figure auto-start system and paralleling circuit. The load-shed was integrated and just conceptualizing it's entirety gave me a headache.

I believe contacting the OEM tech departments is in order. If even one says "no" I wouldn't try it.

All wise words. Maybe all the ones I used shared the same cheap chinese inverter chipset. As I said, I don’t know how or why, I simply started with "what would happen if we...". A few week later I was connecting 4 of them.
What I did find amazing it that they will level load to capacity. A 3500 and a 2200 won’t share equally, but proportionally. A higher load would go to the 3500.

[Tom_M1]

map40 wrote:
I have connected any of the following in any configuration:
2 3500 Predator
1 2200 Predator
2 2200 Roybi
3 different regular inverters

They all get in sync when you connect them. Even when running under load. I could start both ACs in my 36 feet class A with a 3500 and a 2200 and then move the 2200 out for a few minutes, bring another one and connect it later, and the load would automatically balance between the two units, according to capacity. Don't ask me how, I don't know.
As a matter of fact, once for a Relay for Life event we had 3 RVs (1 A and 2 Cs) and 4 Inverter generators. We bridged them ALL and connected the RVs to them (Gen 1 - C - Gen 2 - A - Gen 3 - C - Gen 4). We were able to shut down one at a time, refuel, let it rest and restart and move to the next without a glitch.
Of course, we had to make our own parallel adapters, which took all but 30 minutes.

Real life trumps all the other speculation.

In my Air Force days, we routinely paralleled two 50kw diesel generators. Start one generator and put it on line. Start the second generator and watch a neon lamp while adjusting the rpm. When the lamp was on, the generators where out of phase. Adjust rpm so that the lamp would slowly turn off indicating that they were in phase then put the second generator on line. Once paralleled they will not go out of phase. Both generators had an old school mechanical governor.

You can not adjust the frequency of an inverter generator so when connecting two or more generators, the synchronization must happen almost instantly. The typical paralleling cord is just two wires so there is no separate sync signal.