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One thing one must remember is that if you have a gasoline generator it must be ran occasionally to keep it in good working order. Back when we were in our motorhome days, and we were looking a pre-owned motorhomes (just for the heck of it) some of the salesmen(?) would say "look at the hours on the generator it has hardly been ran". Upon challenging his/her lack of knowledge about generators and motorhomes in general they usually admitted that I probably knew more about what I was talking about than them. We always ran our generator going down the highway, even the diesel one in our 40 footer. First it put "good" hours on it and if we needed air-conditioning the roof air units were considerably more efficient than the dash air. in addition the frig was running along with the electric hot water heater. In addition dash air puts a load on the engine.
If I was going to purchase a generator, even a portable one I would seriously look at the LP models and for a large backup generator for the house I would go with natural gas if it was available and propane if natural gas was not available.
One thing one must remember is that if you have a gasoline generator it must be ran occasionally to keep it in good working order. Back when we were in our motorhome days, and we were looking a pre-owned motorhomes (just for the heck of it) some of the salesmen(?) would say "look at the hours on the generator it has hardly been ran". Upon challenging his/her lack of knowledge about generators and motorhomes in general they usually admitted that I probably knew more about what I was talking about than them. We always ran our generator going down the highway, even the diesel one in our 40 footer. First it put "good" hours on it and if we needed air-conditioning the roof air units were considerably more efficient than the dash air. in addition the frig was running along with the electric hot water heater. In addition dash air puts a load on the engine.
If I was going to purchase a generator, even a portable one I would seriously look at the LP models and for a large backup generator for the house I would go with natural gas if it was available and propane if natural gas was not available.
Totally agree with this. I have a diesel generator in my motorhome and run it every month or so just to work it in a little during the wintertime and run it in the summer when we're out. My NG whole house generator runs every 2 weeks like clockwork for 30 minutes to make sure its always ready to go.
I have a 6kw Gillette diesel generator that can run most of my house through a transfer switch. It's permanently wired, but has to be manually started. The nice thing about diesel fuel, is it doesn't go bad even if it isn't used more than a few times a year, or not used at all that year.
Next house though will have an automatic generator, hooked to natural gas.
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