Salt Lake City got an arctic blast and weather change on Monday night. We had winds of up to 100 mph for about 12 hours. I know those of you on the gulf coast are welcoming us to the party, but it's not something we are really used to. Lost power Tuesday morning about 7:45 AM. I connected the generator to the fridges and freezers about 4:00 Tuesday afternoon. It died unexpectedly about 90 minutes later. No compression.
This morning still no power. To put that in perspective, there are 12 people at my home including my parents, my wife, our six kids + a son-in-law and grandchild. The son-in-law and I telecommute to work, two kids are in college online, two in high school online and one in middle school online. Not being able to charge laptops, tablets and cell phones was a real challenge. I was keeping up with a deep cycle battery that had plenty of amp hours left and an inverter.
Tore into the generator today. It has Briggs & Stratton overhead valve engine and the push rod for the intake valve had gotten off it's tappet and wedged the intake valve open. Luckily it is not an interference engine, so I was able to reseat the push rod on the tappet and set the valve lash and it was back in service. About 20 minutes later at 2:30 or so the power was back on.
It's good to have the power back. It is also a good experience for my kids to see what it takes to deal with the challenges nature throws at you from time to time.
So, I guess it was fun, after a fashion.
Great job on the generator sqlbullet, I'm sure your family is grateful for your handiness 😊
Nice to have skills.
I lack skills but learned to spell Generac :o
I live in Iowa and we had the Derecho Storm come through last month. There were 140 MPH straight winds in parts of Iowa and where I live it was 90 to 100 mph. Lots of crop damage.
I lost the tree in my front yard but other than that no damage. No power for 2 days but my neighbors had their services taken down and it was a week for them. The storm ran for over 700 miles and 1.9 million customers had power outages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_2020_Midwest_derecho
My sister in Ames told me about that wind storm, sounds like it did a ton of damage
Sort of been out of touch down here as we were preparing for Hurricane Sally.
sqlbullet, glad you got the generator figured out, if I recall the valve lash is only 0.004" and they have been known to get loose with use.
BEEMER, I must have missed the info on that storm...but we had been watching what was going on down here.
Take care guys!