yeah out of all the strange things to start working again i have a working onan generator
let me tell you a little story here
hey everybody how you doing hang on a second let me kick this off and we'll have a little chat here
so the youtube world has been following me in this generator issue for six months and let's let's not
even go back into how many repair shops certified mechanics i visited onan cummins and all the money
spent the purpose of this video there's there's two purposes of this video one i want to help
any of you out there with an rv in something that looks like this an onan generator mine's a 5500 qv
rv generator by onan and uh i want to help people but i also want to brag a little bit and say
i fixed it with the help of my friend kevin over in kentucky and i want to show you exactly how we
diagnosed it how we fix the real problem here and i can move forward because yesterday i ran this
sucker for six hours under load with no problems it works we fixed it a lot like one of my friends
uh cleve clive who said you know you want to keep the oil dipstick oil full to about three quarters
full you don't want it over three quarters full sometimes it gets it gets confused in there well
let's go inside i want to talk with you about what the problem was and maybe you have something
similar and how we went about fixing this but one of the things i've learned about all the youtube
experts out there that i call them the armchair experts if you will is that there's a lot of bad
information going around out there and you know you can google search what happens my generator
dies there's like 50 different problems let alone 500 different answers and resolutions so from the
start everyone i know has always said this is a fuel delivery problem a fuel delivery i've had the
carburetor rebuilt four times i have four new fuel pumps the entire generator has been rebuilt and it
still still shuts down randomly anywhere between 10 minutes after running or 45-50 minutes after
running how do you diagnose something like that spoiler alert it was never ever a fuel delivery
problem at all with my own ingenerator ever i wasted forty five hundred dollars on rebuilding
the entire generator when it was something so much simpler i'm going to put an email address
in the video description below if you want to reach out and thank my friend kevin in kentucky he
is a mastermind he is an awesome guy he loves helping people he spent hours on the phone
with me walking me through things to test and diagnosing and trial and error stuff like that he
likes helping people out in the rv community so if you're having a similar problem with something in
your rv send them an email tell him you heard what what how much he helped with nomadic fanatic and
or just send him a thank you note for being this mastermind genius genie out there in the world
so anyway that's in the video description below also i'm uploading this video with nomad internet
link in the video description for that if you need unlimited internet here was the problem that i'm
facing was facing in my rv remember all the times in the last six months where i said the generator
cut off randomly turns out it's not actually quite so random i've got a ceramic heater going right
here it's a 1500 watt heater the generator isn't running right now by the way but let's pretend
like the generator is running and i'm plugged into the generator and i'm powering this heater or this
microwave up here either one a high appliance when this reaches temperature and kicks off
the heater or when i turn the heater off within three to five seconds the generator shuts down
after the big load has been released off the generator well that's significant right
and kevin noticed that right away he's like eric wait we're on to something here that's great news
why didn't i necessarily know this for sure in the past well you remember when i was up
at aja's place in flagstaff williams arizona area i didn't know when it was shutting off
because i was gone i was hanging out with people i would come back and the generator would be off
you know why that was because my rooftop ac had reached internal temperature set on my thermostat
compressor kicks off generator would shut down after three to five seconds randomly you might
say as i said same thing with the microwave and same thing with the coffee pot so oh we need to
go back outside again real quick okay in case you don't know this information a great place to start
if your generator won't fire up or if it's shutting down like it was doing to me
you have a hidden secondary code so say it shuts down this light right here by your start button is
going to blink that means it's time to check for your secondary code and to check that you just tap
the start button once then you look and see how many times it blinks in my case it would
always blink once and then pause and then blink four more times and repeat that sequence hence
giving me a secondary code of 14 1 and 4. you go into the onan manual and there's a whole list
of stuff that might be able to help you and that was helpful information for kevin over
the phone we were talking with he said man what you need to do is you need to go get yourself a
kilowatt meter and ironically i'm like i know exactly what you're talking about i have one
kevin and i use it all the time what i use this thing for is to check the wattage and amps of
certain appliances so you plug this end into the wall and then you plug your appliance into this
end and then your readout is going to tell you how many watts you're currently drawing on that device
and i find that really helpful when you're boondocking to know exactly how many amps and
watts everything is pulling inside the rv but it turns out this can help you diagnose a generator
frequency problem so i mean in in a sense and remember if you're not comfortable doing this then
don't do this but when i plug this into my system and i'm running my generator what it's reading
inside the wiring is what it's reading from the actual generator so we can go like this and then
check there's hurt wait there's hurts 60 60 hertz right there but the generator is not running right
now and again this wasn't saying 60 hertz when the generator was running it was saying 64 to 66 hertz
okay so from here kevin and i spent two hours on the phone going back and forth making adjustments
to the generator i'm going to show you how we made those adjustments but basically i had the heater
sitting here on the table plugged into this we do the test i tell him what it's like then we shut
the heater off then we turn the generator off and then every single time i'd have to come out here
take the cover off this and make some adjustments i'ma show you some of those adjustments and what
we found once we started looking in here okay so there's this adjustment right here you can
see the the the teeth on there and this spring right here that adjust the frequency throttle so
we adjusted that back quite a bit and then we realized that there's a secondary adjustment
up here where you can rotate that 10 millimeter nut right there and get that to move even more in
there and once we did that i don't know if you can see up here but the threads
well i saw silver threads on top of that nut and those silver threads tell me one important thing
and that is that in flagstaff at flag tool and repair they had made the adjustment remember
they hooked up that fancy frequency tool they had made the adjustment but the adjustment had come
loose because they didn't put any loctite on that nut that's why i was seeing those new
silver lines on the thread because the nut had simply vibrated itself back down into the wrong
position giving me the wrong frequency so in the end you could almost say that this entire
generator problem issue was based on not using loctite on a thread essentially it's a little
more than that you know because every next repair you go to who's onan cummins certified is looking
at all the receipts from all the work and all the stuff we've done and they simply looked at
that information and this is why that information was bad is because oh you even had your frequency
adjusted and fine-tuned by a specialist yeah i did but they didn't do it correctly they didn't put
loctite on it to secure it so as a mechanic you're going in thinking okay well the frequency is fine
can't be that let's put another fuel pump in so it's almost like you're giving these new mechanics
too much information and then they base 100 of it thinking well everything's fine we got
to go somewhere else ideally it'd be better if i were working with one owning cummins
repair shop for the entire six months and all that money but you can't do that when you're on the
road and the generator runs perfectly it no longer shuts off randomly it is 100 in working condition
and i could not be happier however i have my second backup champion generator inverter that's
going to go right here in the corner in case this ever happens again in case i ever have a problem
or in case i just you know maybe my gas tanks under a quarter tank in there but i can run
this or something um i'm really happy to have the generator back i can't thank kevin enough
for helping me and and wanting to help so many other people so i'm i'm sharing his knowledge and
information with everyone in the rv community and again if you're having a similar problem he might
be able to work on other things on an rb too shoot him an email and if nothing else at least at least
say thanks to kevin because he really helped me out he really really helped me out and uh i made a
new friend well anyway that's my really good news hope there's more of that to come before christmas
gets here too because i do have other projects but uh and i feel like we all should just like
have a beer together and just kind of celebrate you know what i mean how about christmas coming
on the way uh shawn and jill and i went up to the racetrack here uh just north of alton and i saw a
fantastic christmas light show and it was one of the coolest drive-through christmas decoration
setups i've ever seen and i want to end with that to help get you in the christmas mood and bring
smiles everywhere because i'm smiling otherwise i'll see you guys in a couple days okay bye
do
mm-hmm
foreign
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bye