Originally Posted By: Cujet
Originally Posted By: FFeng7
How do you like the 15w50 in your genset? I thought about getting a quart of it for mine.
Years ago, I purchased rural Florida property. I purchased 2 Honda powered water pumps. They both failed rather quickly, quite earlier than expected. I had chosen Penzoil 10W-30 as the manual suggested for the first one. I changed to M1 on the second. And, I performed regular oil changes.
Here is what happened. The air cooled engines were running at full load pumping water. The outside temperature got up to mid 90's, super humid, and there was little wind in my overgown property. The oil got too hot and the engines failed. Both with connecting rod issues.
My generator, an 11HP Subaru unit was not going to suffer the same fate. I built my house, and ran off grid for many months. I then suffered 3 hurricanes with many weeks of power outages. I changed the oil every 2 days (running 24/7) with M1 15W-50. My generator has a huge number of hours on it, and it still runs perfectly. And, the oil still remains clean.
My neighbors were not so lucky. The local repair shops were populated with broken generator engines. It seems the Florida heat, coupled with heavy loads, for days on end, is too much for conventional oils in air cooled generators.
People were heating water (4500W) with 5500W generators, running AC units and driving well pumps. Our entire neighborhood (10,000 homes) sounded like a sea of 3600RPM single cylinder generators, all run at near maximum load. The number of failures were truly staggering.
The generators are not made to run for days. For the most part they are pretty cheaply made. As technology improves one would hope our power grid would also, but seems more and more people are getting generators.
BTW - high humidity does not effect an engine, it only effect things that sweat to cool themselves like people/dogs/cats. etc.
