[Vwdiesel] Chinese diesel gensets?

[Shawn Wright]

Little VW-D content here, please skip if you're not into diesel gensets... ;-)

I know there is a wealth of diesel experience here, and quite a bit of it 
related to diesel gensets, so I have a question about them relating to my 
workplace. For the past 5 years or so, our campus server room has had 
backup power provided by a 250kW Cat generator. It was great during many 
long winter outages, but recently, reliability is crap, ie: it rarely goes more 
than 4 hours without the voltage going haywire and blowing equipment. The 
guys in charge of it are ok with say 95% uptime, but we need 99.999% or 
better. This past weekend was another example - a technician spent a 
whole day servicing the unit before a scheduled two day outage, and the VR 
died 3.5 hrs into the outage! I'd say find a new tech, but it's not my job. 

So... I am looking at a 30kW unit dedicated to keeping our critical data 
systems running, often for 2-3 days during the winter - batteries are 
expensive, so we only have about 40 minutes worth to handle transfer time 
and emergency shutdowns if the genset fails (I'd rather avoid this!). I can get 
a Chinese made 30kW diesel for about $6-7K from a few ebay vendors, and 
they appear to use Cummins 4 cyl clones (4BT?). Are these any good? 
What other options are known for reliability in this size? Realistically, we'd 
probably only use it about 100-200 hrs per year, but would test it monthly 
(not currently done with the big unit), and probably draw fuel from a very 
large boiler fuel tank to always have fresh fuel on tap.

Sorry for the off-topic post; please feel free to reply off list...

Thanks :-)
Shawn Wright
http://members.shaw.ca/vwdiesels
'88 Westy 1.6TD 5 speed
'85 Jetta Diesel 1.6NA