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Water in the oil???

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Randyjaco

Randyjaco

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Randy
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I have a Generac 22KW natural gas generator. Today I was doing my annual maintenance and discovered that the oil was milky brown. I naturally thought coolant in the oil, until I realized that it is an air cooled Kohler motor. Anybody got any Ideas on why the oil would look milky? There is really no way that water should be getting to that motor.
 
Change oil. Check again after say 10 hours run. If yours has a crankcase oil heater check operation of it and keep it powered up. A generator that big and expensive I would have yearly oil analysis done. They send you sample bottle. Wow a 22 000 watt air cooled ? Sure it's not 2200 watt?
 
As said, it’s from condensation. One of the joys of living 20 miles from the coast and having constantly high humidity.
 
jbird710 said:
As said, it’s from condensation. One of the joys of living 20 miles from the coast and having constantly high humidity.
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Yep. Sounds to me like the poor thing needs to run more often, and for much longer than it has been. Getting that oil nice and hot will take care of any condensation. That being said, once it gets to a really milky stage, I'd just change it out for fresh and keep up with it a little better.
 
Oh yeah, It got changed before I posted. It automatically starts up and runs for about 5 minutes each week. Any way to help prevent the condensation? Luckily or unluckily I didn't lose any power this year. It is 22,000 watts. It will run the whole house, including the AC on a hot summer day 8^)
 
Set the periodic runtime longer to make sure it gets rid of what moisture collected from the last run cycle. Won’t get rid of all the condensation but will help reduce it.
 
Randyjaco said:
Oh yeah, It got changed before I posted. It automatically starts up and runs for about 5 minutes each week. Any way to help prevent the condensation? Luckily or unluckily I didn't lose any power this year. It is 22,000 watts. It will run the whole house, including the AC on a hot summer day 8^)
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Tom said:
Set the periodic runtime longer to make sure it gets rid of what moisture collected from the last run cycle. Won’t get rid of all the condensation but will help reduce it.
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I would do exactly what Tom said. If it can be set to 20 minutes, I would do that. Being aircooled, the head will dissipate a lot of the initial heat so it will take a little while for the oil to really get hot. Also, take this with a grain of salt, and others might think I'm crazy for this; but I wouldn't run it every single week. It's natural gas so it isn't like you are going to have stale gas making a carb go bad. Once every 2 weeks or heck, even once a month would be more than enough to keep it fresh. If I did a once a month run, I'd run it for 30 minutes to let it get nice and hot just to make sure nothing will fail you if you need it to run for hours on end.
 
DFW_Warrior said:
I would do exactly what Tom said. If it can be set to 20 minutes, I would do that. Being aircooled, the head will dissipate a lot of the initial heat so it will take a little while for the oil to really get hot. Also, take this with a grain of salt, and others might think I'm crazy for this; but I wouldn't run it every single week. It's natural gas so it isn't like you are going to have stale gas making a carb go bad. Once every 2 weeks or heck, even once a month would be more than enough to keep it fresh. If I did a once a month run, I'd run it for 30 minutes to let it get nice and hot just to make sure nothing will fail you if you need it to run for hours on end.
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Totally agree.

Stsrting weekly for a short run is way more damaging than a long run once in a while.
 
Good points. Now I have to figure how to program it. Not one of my talents 8^)

Anybody know how?
 
Randyjaco said:
Good points. Now I have to figure how to program it. Not one of my talents 8^)

Anybody know how?
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Heck if I know! I'm a motors and fabrication guy. What is this "programming" business you speak of? :lol2:
 
tejasbusa said:
Turn your main breaker off and let it run for an hour
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This. Or there is generally a way to test it from the ATS, but it might be a little bit fiddly.

Where I work we exercise our generators once a month for 30 minutes with full building load. The load will help it heat up faster than just running it unloaded. And they get load banked annually up to 80% load.
 
I'd just change the oil annually on any generator and run it frequently as others have suggested.

I had a 22000 peak watt generac with wheels. Largest "portable" one could buy at the time. They still make it. It was great but around $2500 11 years ago. I should have kept it when I moved to TX from CO, as it only had around 40 hours on it. But I thought "gee I live in Hutto, a big city now", not on a mountain top, what could go wrong? Turns out Hutto got hit almost as hard as my little homestead out in the country. I just bought a new Generac, 10000 watt peak, 8000 continuous version for the next snow storm, or other stupid energy failure.
 
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