Thread: Portable generators - advice

I have a 6.8kva Honda gen and it’s about ten years old now, but I bought it after a few lengthy blackouts in our area.

I live just up in the hinterland above the Gold Coast and our power went down late Sunday night just as were off to bed so I didn’t do anything about the power till Monday morning.

I have a house full of visiting relos and the Honda was able to run two fridge/freezers, a 40 amp battery charger, 1 LCD TV, 1 Plasma TV, two Austar boxes, two HDD recorders and charge and run 3 laptops, numerous phone chargers ( not that they were of any use ) on the first day,

That night, around 8pm I shut the gen down and ran all the entertainment, lights and computers off a 1,000w inverter powered by an assortment of batteries totalling around 550Ah.

Next morning the gen was put back to work and it took the battery charger nearly 8 hours to get the batteries back up over 95% at which time the charger got a rest and the off peak hot water tank got 3 hours of charge, while running everything else.

The Honda is quite loud and I had it down in the workshop but you could still hear it around the local area.

I supply both Honda EU 20i and the Subaru R1700i gens and while they are not as load as the 6.8kva, they are anything but quiet, as we all learnt when the neighbour across the road let his inverter gen run till midnight.

You could hear it quite clearly once we turned the TVs off.

AS posted earlier in the thread, if you want to keep all your creature comforts powered during a long blackout, these little gens, while great for camping, are just not up to it for powering house electrics.

Buy a good quailty unit I like Honda and Yamaha theyre very Quiet.
For Campimg they are great just be mindful of other's in the area some get cranky