[Vwdiesel] Chinese diesel gensets?

[Area31 Research Facility]

Shawn,

In your application I would shy away from a new Chinese diesel plant for the 
reason that you don`t have someone who will be available and willing to 
constantly tinker with it like a hobby engine until all the bugs are worked 
out of it.  If budget is the reason you are thinking Chinese get a used 
North American made plant on ebay that has been used gently (just a few 
hundred hours) as a back up in a telco installation or institutional 
setting.  Grab one if possible that has the transfer and control panelboard 
included.  Onan, Kohler and Kato or Katolight are good names. Marathon makes 
a very good generator head (alternator).

In your application you might be able to use natural gas instead of diesel. 
If so, this really opens up the assortment of available gensets that will be 
available to you.

Rob

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Shawn Wright" <vwdiesels at gmail.com>
To: <vwdiesel at vwfans.com>
Sent: Monday, November 05, 2007 9:43 PM
Subject: [Vwdiesel] Chinese diesel gensets?


> 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
>
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