Thread: Generator Stats

Hi,
Yep! University of life.

Cheers

Kev, Dave

That's some really great info and being an Eu2i and caravan owner most useful.

Many thanks

Steve

Gavin.
I was thinking today.
Are you having solar on the van???
If so an inverter/solarpanel controller may be the answer.
The solar/battery could provide the extra juice needed to start the aircon,the Honda can be powering into the inverter.
See this thread,get onto Dylan for his version.He says there is a Perth supplier.
Combined solar controller/inverter system
Andrew

the reason behind the tank capacity change is the ullage space... I blame the americans (but then I always do when the circumstances dictate that the solution should be removing the warning signs and letting darwin square it up) people were over filling the tank, putting the cap on on a hot generator, by the time they closed up the fuel can, moved it away and went to restart if the tank was overfilled the heat from the genny would expand the fuel so much it would exit the vent as a liquid and then kerflammo. Made worse by fools that run the generator in a semi enclosed space like a box on an aframe or an enclosure built into the van.

From memory the strainer in the filler also changed so that there is less strainer and more solid plastic further down from the top.


just to complicate matters its not just the wattsX amps that come into the count its also the power factor. If your AC has a power factor thats near .7 or .8 you might be able to get a clever sparky to sit down punch some maths and build a power factor correction box that sits on the main feed for the AC unit that only kicks in on startup of the unit. (assuming its inverter drive and once started it never stops the compressor just ramps it up and down) OR if its an older start/stop setup change the start capacitors and shunting so that the PF on the motor during startup is nearer to 1. Ideally in a perfect world you could set that up so that the PF of 1 was achieved on the motor during start up and running (really good thinking would be to do it to the blower fan motors as well)

one last thing that might just save you enough ergs to get the compressor to start is to put delay timers on the fan motors of the condenser and the evaporator, a 3 second delay on the start of the higher draw motor of those 2 and a 5 second delay on the lessor (if they are the same start the condenser first and the evaporator second) and that will give you a staged start as opposed to dumping a massive bunch of inductive load onto the generator at once. one last trick is to add weight to the blower fan of the condensor, start it first, let it get up to speed and then dump the compressor online, as the voltage and frequency drop down the inertia stored in the fan will turn the motor into an generator very briefly and that will help pull the compressor over. of course this wont work if you've only got shaded pole motors driving the fans.

Dave, you need someone to financially jumpstart you with this (and probably many others of your solutions).
I have been doing a little research (always dangerous) and it transpires that virtually no caravan a/c in Oz are yet inverter - there have been some split systems utilised for vans that don't do heavy off road stuff.
There is money to be made marrying the smaller Honda type pure sine wave generators to service off road particularly caravan a/c and other electronics without having to go megasize

get the covers of your gear and post pics of whats in there, ditto the data plates

I'd just about be willing to bet that between me and my old man at Xmas we can get your honda to start and run your AC...

how hack free the end result appears to be depends on your budget.

it also depends on how much AC you want...

why not ditch the big one and mount up one of the portable ones that draw much less current?