So Friday about noon I get called by the boss and told 'get to Provincetown MA ASAP' to meet the Generator tech to do an 'emergency start up' of the 80 KW Generac unit I mentioned earlier in the thread. He also said 'Do not leave that customer until that genset is ready for use and circuits cut over from a dead generator.
So I get there about 3 hours later, 130 miles and weekend Cape Cod traffic, the Generator tech is there along with a plumber from the company that ran the propane line. They tell me that they had it running, great life is good.:thumbsup:
No says the generator tech, when he started it he heard a noise, it turned out to be a shaft that extends the engine crankshaft out past the radiator to run the fan. It was not correctly aligned with the crank shaft. It has a 'flex' coupling but the misalignment was so severe it would have needed a universal joint not a metal 'flex plate' type joint.
He calls the factory support, gets the run around and finally gets a guy who knew that had been an issue, he explains the fix. It took the generator tech and plumber at least two hours working together to pretty much disassemble the entire front end modify some brackets and put it all back together again.
When the tech asked for job number so he could get paid for this extra work he was told that was part of the 'adjustments' necessary that he was already being paid for under the 'start up' pay.
In the mean time I am helping out by pulling out the single 300 amp breaker it shipped with and installing the 200 and 100 amp breaker it was specified with, the gen tech would have done it but his hands where full as it was.
When we first saw the misalignment we talked about bringing in a portable genset and wiring that up outside ......... but can't do that because the Generac transfer switch has no provision for two wire start that a portable set would need. The Genrac ATS actual has no brain at all, that is in the Genset, the genset board runs the ATS (two of them in this case) via an RS-485 data connection. You also need a lap top plugged into the genset to make changes to voltage tolerance, transfer times etc.
I was done at about 2:30 AM Sat morning, drove about an hour, slept in the truck for about 1.5 hours and finally got home about 6:30 AM Sat.
I hate Generac.