All About Boats... So it goes...

Last weekend we started having problems with our faithful Honda EU2000i generator. We bought it 4 3 months shy of 3 years ago in Sint Maarten for $1100 after our other Honda died.

We weren't doing anything special, just running our battery charger for a bit.  We noticed the change in the sound of the engine and noticed that the red overload light had come on and, while the engine was still running, it was no longer producing power (which is normal in "overload" situation).

After that, we had intermittent problems. We thought maybe it was the electric light we had plugged in because it worked OK the next time without the light and just running the charger. Fritzed again. With NOTHING plugged in, it still goes into overload mode. We performed various tests that we could and everything seems fine.  A friend sent us bits of his shop manual which didn't give us a YOWZA That's It moment... In fact, most of the solutions were to "Call Technical Service" and this is for the guys in the shop.

I now declare that it is permenent and not intermittent as it hasn't worked in about 5 days. Darn.

We assume it is probably the inverter portion of the unit which was also the problem with the previous Honda.  The inverter costs over $650 and how much more for the service of diagnosing the problem, buying and shipping the part, and installation, plus getting it to and from a service repair center?

We can buy a new Honda from Indiana for $899 including shipping to 47 states for free. He would ship it to Florida to VI Cargo for us.

But, do we want another Honda??? They are great while they work, but after having two quit...

So, we have decided to buy a Honeywell HW2000i portable generator.  Yes, it is a bit louder but it is $417 from Amazon. There are good reviews and bad reviews but some people enjoy complaining while others don't read the manual, plus sometimes you get a unit built on a Friday :)

I called the Honda car dealer (who, we've been told, also repairs generators) Friday afternoon but the store was closed, probably due to the Crucian Christmas Festival's Children's Parade. Many places close down for that.  So Monday we'll see what they have to say, and then order the Honeywell.

If the Honda can be fixed, we'll sell one or the other.  If not, I wonder if anyone wants our Honda for parts as the motor runs great. It would be a shame to throw it away.

So It Goes...

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Amazon now has a "GO GREEN" category that you may wish to check out.

Since we live aboard our boat, So It Goes a CAL-34, we are very interested in being environmentally friendly and also in ways of generating power (solar & wind). We converted our CAL-34 over to an electric motor several years ago before it started to become hip... that's us... trendsetters :) Although, we are a sailboat and that is what we do... SAIL! We only tend to use the motor for things like going through the channel to go into the Lagoon or other tight, unavoidable spots. We usually anchor and up-anchor under sail.

Amazon has other handy things such as reusable shopping bags. I wonder how these will hold up as cat toys? As you can buy 5 bags for under $10, I could afford to give one to Willow & Buffy for a destruction test. Our kittens love playing with paper bags but after a few days they get quite a few holes in them

We heard the other day that IKEA is going to start selling solar panels. That's great!

Enjoy!

This is an update to our post of March 22, 2008 as many people come into our blog via this post:
New portable generator All-Power 1000W with inverter

While the All Power 1000W portable generator with inverter was relatively inexpensive and locally AVAILABLE (very important), it just didn't have as much oomph as we wanted to run our 24V battery charger and the occasional circular saw usage.

About 2 weeks later, we bit the bullet and bought another HONDA EU2000i from Island Water World in St. Maarten. We were lucky because it was the last one they had on the island!



Still works great, of course. And our modification that we made so we can run the generator off of an external gas tank is wonderful. We have a hooked up to a 3 gallon gas tank which is easy to fill and lasts a long, long time. It's easy to do! Take a look at Bob's Boat Bits Blog and see how you can do this too:
CLICK HERE: Upgrading the poor mans Hybrid system...

Enjoy!

Last week we had to purchase a new generator. We had our Honda EU2000i for over 5 years so I guess it was finally "it's time". It still runs perfect but it doesn't produce power. We've checked the obvious electrical bits but no joy, so we think the inverter is kaput. We searched the web for other people having this problem but hardly anyone has any problems with this Honda generator. They are great machines!

We had great success with the Honda as we never did much maintenance-wise. Changed the oil and cleaned the air filter a few times. I always meant to make a cover for it but that project is still on "The List". We used the Honda for electric power for use at night before we hooked up the inverter. Then we used it to run the Xantec 24V charger/inverter, run power tools, charge the 12V when necessary... that sort of thing.

So, we didn't want to pay $1200 for a new Honda in St. Maarten and we bought a 1000W Honda clone, an All-Power 1000W for about $450. It is a 4-stroke, portable, silenced unit. It works well but it didn't have enough ooomph for our Xantec charger/inverter. We turned down the charger and got the new generator to charge at 13amps but if we turned on the circuit breaker so we could run our computer, the generator stopped producing power and saying "overload"... darn. We are again wasting time as we are now taking longer to charge the batteries and we cannot get on the internet while charging. It did the 12V battery charger just fine.

It is not as quiet as the Honda EU2000i either, but not that bad... just not as good as we are used to. But, we'll use it for now as we have it and we can decide what to do about generating power as we go along... so it goes

See our August 2008 update: CLICK HERE