Quote:
Originally Posted by Rusty
Do you have some data to back that up?
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My brother in law bought a Generac generator to power the essentials if the power goes out. It would NOT power his forced hot air furnace, when he flipped it to generator power it cut off and there was a voltage alarm on the panel of the furnace. Flip it back to line power it was OK. Power coming from the outlet seemed fine. Call to the manufacturer resulted in the following: if you want to power this with a generator you need one with an inverter. So he got a Honda with an invertor and it worked fine.
I blew the brain box in my brand new Samsung fridge after putting it on the generator. Since it was under warranty I called to have it fixed, when the guy came out to repair it he asked if we had a power surge, I said no BUT I was running it off my generator. He asked to see what I was using and told me yup get rid of that thing and get one with an inverter OR use something to clean up the power from that before it gets to the fridge. he said all these new appliances and electronic gadgets cannot handle the power fluctuations these generators are notorious for putting out. In fact he said he has replaced tons of fried circuit boards because of this.
Bottom line - some things may be less sensitive to this than others, but the way I see it I'm not taking the chance. Yes I have tested the output of my old generator with a meter and it was running a little hot and bouncing around a little bit. This was also not an old generator.... I sold it with only about 50 some odd hours on it. I now have one with an inverter on it and have not had any problems since.
Here's a little blurb on Honda's website concerning inverters:
Honda 's inverter technology takes the raw power produced by the generator and uses a special microprocessor to condition it through a multi-step process.
First, the generator's alternator produces high voltage multiphase AC power. The AC power is then converted to DC. Finally the DC power is converted back to AC by the inverter. The inverter also smoothes and cleans the power to make it high quality. A special microprocessor controls the entire process, as well as the speed of the engine.
Honda uses only high quality inverters in our generators, which produce stable, consistent power.
The end result? Clean enough power to run even the most sensitive electronic equipment.