Back-up home generators

[LS6 Tommy]

Onan is not the Onan of "old". They were bought out by Cummins in 1992. Cummins does market under that brand name.

Thanks for the info!

Tommy

 

[Stuart in MN]

Onan is not the Onan of "old". They were bought out by Cummins in 1992. Cummins does market under that brand name.

They were bought by Cummins, but they still build Onan generators in the same manufacturing facility in Minneapolis.

(A little offtopic, but at that facility they have a small museum with an interesting display of Onan generators, going all the way back to one of their original generators from the 1920s, a little 300 watt model that used a Briggs & Stratton engine.)

 

[Bigbandguy]

A few years before we moved into our current home there was a big storm that had the neighborhood out for two weeks. The horror story was recent enough when we moved in that we went ahead and had a 17 KW Generac installed. It works fine but scheduled service is a must. At least once a year is a good idea. We sized it big enough to run an one AC unit at a time and at the time we had an electric stove. Now we are on NG for the stove. The Generator is a NG unit.

You should know that Murphy (of Murphy's law) is in charge of power outages and of generators. The only time the damn thing failed was in a storm. I was at home and switched it manually. The fuse had blown on the transfer switch probably due to a lightening surge. If you get one installed make a point of learning how to do a manual transfer and where those fuses are.

Otherwise it has given excellent service and in general is good insurance against an outage ever happening.

 

[thammel]

Check out Winco. I bought and did the installation myself of an 8kw winco powered by our buried 500 gallon propane tank. 8 kw is plenty, as long as you don't run the; oven, heat pump or AC. We have a well pump and a propane gas furnace, a propane stove, propane gas fireplace a propane water heater, and let's see - how many refrigerators... the kitchen one which has two compressors, wine cooler, backup fridge, freezer and bar fridge. The 8kw handles it all perfectly.

Also, I put in a ASCO automatic transfer switch which feeds a subpanel. This gives versatility in what I want the generator to handle.

Tom

 

[theoldwizard1]

They were bought by Cummins, but they still build Onan generators in the same manufacturing facility in Minneapolis.

The "classic" Onan generator was powered by a 2 cylinder horizontally opposed gasoline engine, from about 15hp - 25hp (?). This was "premium" engines in many garden tractors (bigger Wheel Horse models) during the 60s-90s (?).