Generator

[Joey@HAT]

I have a Kubota phaser generator. The engine part runs great, however it is not producing electricity. My friend thought it might be the automatic voltage regulator.We did a test before the AVR unit and found no electricity. The generator didn't run for a while. I'm thinking it needs to be excited. Does anyone know how I go about doing this. It's a 7KW generator. What does anybody have any advice what to do. The new head for the generator run 2 thousand dollars. I rather not spend that at this time.

 

[alldodge]

This is a tuff one, Phasor has next to nothing I can find on the web, guess if you hold all the info, you have to go back to them to get it fixed.

Most all Gen's to my understanding work the same way. The armature winding is excited from voltage coming from the regulator. There should be two wires going from the stator back to the regulator and one of them will have a fuse.

Here is something out of a Westerbeke manual

 

[funk6294]

There area couple of ways to do it. One uses a battery and I have not tried it due to increased risk of componentry damage, the other uses a drill to back feed some power to excite the windings. Here is a video showing the drill method.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sYBZrjeaDVc

 

[gm280]

I have no knowledge of your particular generator, but I have repaired my neighbor's Onan Emerald Plus 4K generator and it is now working perfectly. I know on his unit there is a little switch on the side that turns on the actual AC to the output. If that is in the off position (not real easy to see on the Onan unit) you will get zero output. So maybe there is such a circuit on yours as well. Odd you have no output at all. I would expect even a defective generator would have something coming out even if a wrong voltage or frequency. Therefore having zero output makes me believe there is something like a switch, circuit breaker or fuse blown. JMHO!

 

[bruceb58]

I had to excite a Honda generator that was sitting for a long time that lost its self excite charge. I just looked at the schematic of the generator and figured it out myself where to connect a 12V battery. You have to be very careful. You can get electrocuted when the gen actually comes up.

EDIT: I used the first method here.
http://www.auroragenerators.com/information/troubleshooting/136-no-output-voltage

After I energized the wires going to the brushes while the engine was running, I turned off the engine, plugged back in the wires and the generator worked after that. When you have 12V attached to the brushes, you will actually see 12V output on the gen's voltage meter.

I would probably try the drill method first..sounds a bit safer as long as you get your hand away from the chuck.

 

[NYBo]

The answer is a really, really long extension cord.

 

[Joey@HAT]

No Title

Hello again,
I took some pics of the generator. Where would I hook up the 12v battery too? Dump question, is the panel in the first pic the AVR?

 

[alldodge]

I wouldn't be able to say based on pics, would need to know were each of those wires go to, and even with that may have issue.