[Vwdiesel] Chinese diesel gensets?

[William Longyard]

I've owned several Chinese diesels of various makes and styles.  Simply put: 
they are junk.  They require in inordinate amount of maintenance, and the 
work to prep them to run properly is labor-cost prohibitive for all except 
home owner- hobbyists.

Bill Longyard


----- 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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