Re: Old Iron (engine generator)

Hard to tell without an ammeter on it. If the "strip heater" is a low surface temp type (not the red hot wire), it may not have much of any resistance change while heated. For a load with no resitance change, your 4500 watt at 240 is 3283 watts at 205 volts.

Lloyd E. Sponenburgh wrote:
"RoyJ" <spamless@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:y1CJg.3945$bM.3742@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

As much as I like the old IRON equipment (I have a nice 6.5HP Wisconson powered fire pumpfrom the 50's), I'd suggest that your strip heater load is about as gentle a load as you could have put on the generator. Most of the new units have at least some surge capacity, it was obvious that yours bogged down enough to match the load to the available power.



Gentle, yes; as in, "no inrush" (to speak of). No... it didn't "bog down". The engine never sagged, the voltage did, because of internal resistance in the windings.

At 205V, the heater never got up to as high a temp as it would have at 230v, so it actually drew more current.
The 4.8Kw load was probably real.

LLoyd


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