The Gold Standard
As most readers of this blog know, I am a big fan of redundancy, especially when it comes to important systems. It’s for this reason that we brought ZTC’s Honda 2000 generator on board One Love last summer. My thinking was that if the Leopard’s generator was to fail, and I didn’t want to run the engines, I’d be able to hook up the Honda to charge the batteries.
While we haven’t found ourselves in the position of having to do that, one of our friends who was having some charging issues on his boat asked if he could borrow the generator yesterday. Now, that Honda has sat in a locker unused since last June when we put ZTC on the hard so I was quite curious to see how it would work. As we have come to expect though, that generator is virtually bulletproof and it fired up almost immediately for him (I had run it completely out of fuel when I stored it so he needed to pull the cord a couple of times to get some gasoline into the system). That’s why these generators are considered the gold standard for cruisers everywhere, they work when you need them to!
No boring pics of generators today.
Instead, here are a couple shots of a turtle that we swam with yesterday!
The secret was running it out of fuel, if you had left the fuel in it the carb would have most likely needed to be cleaned out.
I learned that lesson a long time ago, the hard way.
I’ve got two of them. The standard eU2000i & the companion with the 30A outlet.
Those things sit in the shed most of the time, fueled & ready to go.
Sometimes it’ll be 6 months between runnings.
I use StarBrite fuel stabilizer. It works awesome!
The gas in them is 2+ years old & doesn’t smell like varnish. Genny runs great!
Another satisfied customer.
My Honda 8HP is the same quality IMHO. 14 yrs old it starts on 1st or 2nd pull every time, be that the first start after winter storage or the start needed to drop the sails.