Geni and cord question.

[GreyCoyote]

Silly questions:

1). Was the charger attached to (ie, powered by) a generator when you were charging the battery? Or an inverter?
2). Was the battery disconnected from all loads during the charging cycle?

To work properly this charger needs clean 60 hz / 120 volt power. Most portable non-inverter gensets have very poor frequency control and voltage regulation. They also HATE being fed square-wave or modified sine power. Assuming they work at all, they will get very hot, buzzy, and die in short order But most especially it must not "see" a load on the battery during charging or it will do what yours did: apparently not charge and get hot. .

These chargers really only have one achilles heel: the fan. After a few years it dies from bearing failure and the charger pops the overtemp fuse on the secondary. A new fan and fuse puts you back in business, but its way too early for that failure mode to be seen on yours.

But yeah... A generator is the way to go. Spend the bucks on a nice Honda or Yamaha now, and enjoy your burn later. Fiddling with electrics on the playa isnt for everyone.

[GreyCoyote]

For anyone looking at buying a generator for TTITD, I keep seeing some screaming deals on low-end sets at the Big Box stores. It looks like these are a mix of overstock/restock/return units. In particular there was a small 1500/1800 watt Champion unit for $150 that caught my eye. If I needed one I would have grabbed it. This unit has a Honda clone engine and a fairly quiet exhaust note. Definitely not high-quality, but a solid consumer-grade for-occasional-use-only bit of gear. Surely a lot better than some of the HF stuff comparably priced.

The ones with boxes looked externally dusty and beat but were unopened, meaning to me they needed the shelf space or someone woke-up to the fact they were still on the inventory sheet and didnt want to carry them over to the new year.

[maladroit]

GreyCoyote: I can vouch for the Champion generators (at least the inverter series). We had two of the 2000 watt ones and an EU2000i in 2013 and they were all equally quiet and chugged along nicely for 10 days. $150 is a crazy deal, I paid $400 for one refurbished 2000 watt model.

[GreyCoyote]

GreyCoyote: I can vouch for the Champion generators (at least the inverter series). We had two of the 2000 watt ones and an EU2000i in 2013 and they were all equally quiet and chugged along nicely for 10 days. $150 is a crazy deal, I paid $400 for one refurbished 2000 watt model.

Good stuff indeed, Mal. Are they capable of parallel operation? Where did you get yours?

[maladroit]

They can run in parallel, you need to get the parallel kit which sort of stacks two generators together into one tower. Simple but not as simple as the Honda. We got the generators from someone on eBay who sells refurbished ones, SuperGen or something. $400 flat including shipping. But they are getting more popular in big box stores and online, so it shouldn't be hard to find one. I will say that I've only run these on the playa one year, so no experience yet like we have with Hondas (yank the cord in February and it starts amid a big cloud of playa dust). My friend with the Honda doesn't do anything to it year-to-year but I cleaned out the Champion as much as I could.