YOUR GENERATOR SUCKS
Long read, but maybe worth it
Mine does too. If you are on jobs sites using it all the time it probably doesn't suck. If you have plenty of time to take care of everything exactly the way you are supposed to, it might not suck as much, but if like me, you use your generator once every year or two when the power goes out due to a traffic accident or a bad storm, you may have found yourself outside in whatever shelter you can find from the storm holding a flashlight in your mouth while you clean the carburetor before you can use it.
I've got three gas generators. They are good generators, and after last night they are all for sale.
A while back I had the dumb idea to get a tri fuel generator, and just run it on propane. Never any residue left behind to gum it up. Close the valve when the power comes back on and hook your bottle back up to your barbeque grill. Okay I went a little further than that with a
100lb gas bottle that should carry the generator at about 50% load for up to 16 hours according to the manual. It peaks at 13Kw on gasoline, but on propane they say it will only produce about 9Kw sustained. It also says you shouldn't run it over 50% capacity for the first 30 hours during breakin.
When I received the tri-fuel generator all I did was take it out of the box, put the wheel kit on it, put all the accessory items in a waterproof ammo can on top of the generator, and roll it in out of the sun. I didn't do anything to prep it. I didn't hook up the battery. I didn't put the battery maintainer on it. I didn't even put engine oil in it. Total elapsed time from rolling it up to the house to everything I wanted powered being powered was (or felt like) much less than the normal time to get one of my gas generators going after it's been setting for a year or more.
It is brand new (not any more I guess), so I didn't hook that much up. It's still in the break-in period. Two refrigerators, an upright freezer, and the power strip that our electric recliners plug into. The recliners have USB charging ports in the arm rests, so I was able to charge my phone to use as a wireless hot spot for my laptop. I added my laptop power supply and a fan to the power strip for the chairs and we were quite comfortable watching one of our regular TV series on Amazon Prime Video on the laptop.
I did the basic power calculations in my head, and I could have certainly added some lights, and a couple medium size window air conditioners after it is broken in and can run full load. The temps were nice (after the sweat from hauling everything into place and running cords to everything dried up) so I didn't worry to much about air conditioning. A fan was more than enough.
Would I recommend this particular model? Well not really. Its a Harbor Freight generator, but most other generators in the same size and configuration likely aren't much better. I expect if you use it like I do and change the oil after the initial break in it might last you decades. If you use it everyday all day long, well it's a relatively affordable Harbor Freight model. I'd probably go with a Honda or a Yamaha a generator instead. I have a Honda and a smaller Yamaha for sale by the way, I am sure both need the air filters and the carburetors cleaned again. LOL.
All said and done I probably spent more time rolling up my heavy duty extension cords this morning than I did getting it going yesterday afternoon.
Seriously though for my rare use for a few hours to a day or two at worst, it's probably perfectly fine. Maybe in five or ten years, after it gets broken in at this rate, I might change my mind.