Ran first MEP-803a test on the house

Finally got to load testing the generator on my house. It ran a 4 ton AC, 2.5 ton AC, pool pump and everything else at right around 90%. I attempted to add my water heaters to it as an experiment and it pulled the machine to a halt. No overload light or anything. Looks like the water heaters and range are the only items that require manual load management.

She smokes a bit (light bluish), I'm wondering if there is a bit of wet stacking that needs to be burnt out as the is a bit of slobber leaking out of the muffler to manifold connection. I'll keep an eye on it next outage, but the load on the house is such that it should keep the guts clean in normal operation.

Thanks to everybody on this forum for the help along the way!

If you are pulling 90%, let that go for a couple hours and the bluish smoke should clear up (just be home when this is occuring, so you can be mindful of any burning gunk your machine decides to jettison from the exhaust system...). Feels good, doesn't it?

Congrats. I hope to do a load test on my machine in less than a week.

6 hours will clean it up.

An electric stove makes a decent (and cheap) load bank for these generators. The ones with the exposed eyes are cheaper to repair than the newer smooth top units. My Kenmore 'Load Bank' has an extra element in a warming drawer that allows me to consume ~52 Amps.....or 100% of my 803's rated power.

While running this unit today, I was thinking, what if somebody were to build a load banking device right into the radiator exhaust vent? Seems like it could be a cool idea to have it all self contained.

Even cooler if somebody could work the implementation, would be to have a self contained load bank that would add to the gen load while running to prevent wet stacking.

Many, many, many moons ago, we had such things. The MEP-004 through 005 had a bolt on load bank, that was mounted to the front of the gen set, allowing the air that passed through the radiator to cool the load bank. The load bank was rather simple to install and operate. It was the first real effort to combat wet stacking. The majority of the load banks were provided to the ADA world. ADA has a history of long running time, versus low load. Only when the missle system gets ready to fire, does the load increase on the gen set. The load banks were not loved by the crews. The high temps, along with the long running times, vibrations and increased weight to the front of the gen set and or trailers, insured that dislike.

When the darn things got hot, and that's just what they are, heaters, getting near them was uncomfortable. And the unreliability of the load bank was high. Soon, most were non-op. And as you had been issued the things, you had to keep them. Repair parts were about as plentiful as hens teeth. Raping one load bank to fix another was common. That only worked so long, before everyone simple ignored the eyesore mounted to the sets. Just before I retired in 93, someone, (thank you Col. Possinger) finally came to his right mind, at least in 32nd AADCOM, and ordered them removed. Good idea, bad execution in materials composition.

Im sure your pool pump can be turned off for a few hours/days...first world problems. Lol

I don't remember the ones that mounted to the front of the units, but at one point in time (back in the mid 80's)
We were manufacturing load banks that mounted to the top of the sets, Guy do you remember those?
We called them coffins because they were about 3 feet wide and about 6 feet long.
I was testing one once and when I was shutting the piece of crap down and opening the 3 phase breaker the breaker shorted line to line and blew up the top of my hand, not pretty
Not a fan of gen mounted load banks

I won't run the pool pump most likely in an outage, but this was part of the bigger experiment

I get the whole avoid wet stacking thing...

But an outage comes in two forms, a short one where I'm not worried about wet stacking the generator. Or a large and long one, where I'm more worried about fuel conservation.

devilphrog said:

While running this unit today, I was thinking, what if somebody were to build a load banking device right into the radiator exhaust vent? Seems like it could be a cool idea to have it all self contained.

Even cooler if somebody could work the implementation, would be to have a self contained load bank that would add to the gen load while running to prevent wet stacking.

Click to expand...

Was load test day for mine. Wish I would have thought about building my load bank into the machine when i made it. Would have been a simple process and I wouldn't have had to have a fan or something else to store in my shed.

After I tested mine this morning the power went out this afternoon for a few hours so it got a good run in today.

rhurey said:

I get the whole avoid wet stacking thing...

But an outage comes in two forms, a short one where I'm not worried about wet stacking the generator. Or a large and long one, where I'm more worried about fuel conservation.

Click to expand...

The rule of thumb I believe is so long as you can keep it at 30% at the lowest... you should be good for long durations. You will of course need to run it hard after a real low run, but I think 30 is kind of the threshold I have read here a few times.

Zed254 said:

An electric stove makes a decent (and cheap) load bank for these generators. The ones with the exposed eyes are cheaper to repair than the newer smooth top units. My Kenmore 'Load Bank' has an extra element in a warming drawer that allows me to consume ~52 Amps.....or 100% of my 803's rated power.

Click to expand...

What is that tubular thinghy that your wire goes through, laying next to the stove?

Dewie38 said:

I don't remember the ones that mounted to the front of the units, but at one point in time (back in the mid 80's)
We were manufacturing load banks that mounted to the top of the sets, Guy do you remember those?
We called them coffins because they were about 3 feet wide and about 6 feet long.
I was testing one once and when I was shutting the piece of crap down and opening the 3 phase breaker the breaker shorted line to line and blew up the top of my hand, not pretty
Not a fan of gen mounted load banks

Click to expand...

Sure do. I almost wrote about them in the above post, but figured no one wanted to hear about them too. Once again, first efforts to combat wet stacking. Once again, mostly for ADA. Each Firing Battery had eleven 60 KW's, and a battalion had about forty-forth five sets. In Germany there were at least twenty battalions. So lots of these gen sets over here. The load banks were up on top of the sets, like Dewie wrote. And yes, looked like a coffin. They had the same problems as the 15 & 30 KW's. No repair parts, heavy, HOT HOT HOT, cooling fans were not sufficient to properly cool the coils. And soon most were non-op. The heat was the killer. The paint pealed off, the components got brittle and broke off. And like Dewie wrote, the breakers would tend to blow up. The nice thing about the smaller gen sets was the fact that the load bank was far away from the operator, when it shorted out. The load bank for the 60 KW was near your head. Fun, fun, fun. In 1985, A friend went to the DRMO and found about twenty of the darn things and brought them back to the shop. Out of the twenty, He got six to work, built a LOAD BANK for testing the 150 KW gas turbine gen set for Patriot. It was mounted on a huge metal frame, on wheels. When I took over the shop in 1987, it was in disrepair. Spent some time fixing it. Got it to work. About 170 KW load! But the darn thing scared everyone to death. No one wanted to touch it when it operated. We used long commo poles to adjust loads up and down, insted of simply rotating the knobs. It had about three ground points, and my troops made darn sure they were all hooked up!! The frame was made to fit into a M813 drop side truck. We loaded it up with a fork lift. Great tool, but kinda risky. When something shorted out, I had a huge pile of the load banks behind the shop, for "running spares".

USAMilRet said:

What is that tubular thinghy that your wire goes through, laying next to the stove?

Click to expand...

That's my attempt at rain proofing the connector. It's a piece of 4" PVC drain pipe. One end is open, so certainly not water proof but will keep the main drops off of my twist lock connector.

Details on Rain Guard

The section of 4" drain pipe also helps keep the connector clean when not in use. On the generator trailer I've got a spare male connector that I plug the generator connector into when storing. I close the open end of my rain guard to help seal out critters. When connected during an outage I plan to elevate the rain guard on a piece of wood or plastic chair to keep it out of puddles. Probably overkill, but that's the way I do it....

Yes, keep it out of puddles. One of many ways to do the same thing, try to make it water resistant when it is not. I see some people using shrink wrap (the clear stuff that they use on pallets) and a heat gun to seal as best they can the connections. That and keep a brick under the connector.