Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Ordered on September 4, the day the State of Emergency was declared here in Florida for Hurricane Irma, with plenty of time to get it fueled up and oiled up and checked out before we lost power early morning of the 11th. Generator handily powered both a side-by-side refrigerator and a small chest freezer, as well as a desktop PC, cable internet modem and wifi router, and various fans and LED light fixtures, all simultaneously, along with intermittent use of a hot plate and 700 watt microwave. Typical runtime with that load was 9 - 10 hours. Overnight we would disconnect the refrigerator and freezer (both stayed plenty cool overnight) and run the unit on Eco Mode from about midnight to 8am, and then would boil enough water for coffee and tea using an electric kettle, and fry up a quick breakfast using an electric hotplate before hooking up the fridge and freezer again. This load would get us about 12 hours on a tank of gas. I estimated for our purposes it used about 2 1/2 gallons per 24 hours of runtime. For the first couple of days we ran only ethanol-free gas through it, after that we had to refill our cans and had to settle for what we could get, but the generator still seemed to run fine on E10. Would still only recommend a quality branded ethanol-free gas however. After the initial breakin period, replaced manufacturer provided oil with Mobil 1 5w-30 that I already had, but when we got our internet service back and reading some threads and advice on the Bobistheoilguy.com forums, replaced that after 24 hours with Shell Rotella T6 5W-40 to get a little more safety margin running in the Florida heat. Also, the Rotella was on sale for $21 for a gallon, which I figure will probably last me quite a few years with this generator. Pros: - Compact and relatively lightweight. About the size of a bulky suitcase. - Quiet. My neighbor's portable non-inverter gensets were for the most part perceptibly louder to me inside my house than this thing unless it throttled up to handle a transient load. Overnight at minimal load it was difficult to hear over the fan I had running in my bedroom. On the back porch, it was impossible to hear from the street, which much reduces the odds of it becoming a target for theft, which is important considering how easy it would be to carry this thing off. - Sips gas. We didn't have any 5 gallon gas cans before the storm, only two 2 Gal cans, a 2 1/2 Gal can, and a 1 Gal can. That would have been enough to last us the entire outage of 3 1/2 days of constant running including what I had already put in the generator. 3 5 gallon cans + a 2 1/2 gallon can (to make the generator easier to fill) should last an entire week. - Easy to start. All it needed was to turn the dial from Off to Choke or Run, make sure the gas cap vent was turned to On, and Eco Mode was turned to Off. The starter cord was easy to pull, and the machine usually started on the first or second pull. Not really a Con: - Can't always start our side-by-side refrigerator on Eco Mode. Turning Eco Mode to Off keeps the generator running at high idle, which is good for quickly handling transient loads like starting electric motors, but uses more gas. Eco Mode drops the running speed down to the minimal possible idle for the current load and only spins back up as increasing load is applied, saving gas. I found that sometimes our fridge refused to start when the generator was in Eco Mode, as the generator couldn't spin up fast enough to handle the demand. The fridge's compressor would trip off in overload while the generator spun up to maximum power, then reset and try again a few minutes later, repeating the cycle. It wasn't consistent, and I think whether the Generac could start the fridge in Eco Mode depended on how recently the fridge had been running [liquid refrigerant in the compressor makes for hard starts] or if other loads on the generator were keeping the speed enough that it could respond quickly to the demand from the fridge. At any rate, the fridge started every time when I turned Eco mode off, and then once started I could turn the Eco Mode back on to let the generator slow down again. As I didn't want to leave the genset in Eco Mode Off full time to make sure the fridge would start if I wasn't attending to it, I would disconnect the refrigerator overnight. Our chest freezer never had a problem, and I expect newer and small fridges than our 17 year old GE side-by-side wouldn't either. This isn't enough to subtract a star from my rating, just my observation. Altogether, I highly recommend this little generator for exactly the purpose we used it for, which was to keep essential appliances running through an extended power outage. I think many people would also find this generator to also perfectly suit their needs for brief voluntary periods off the grid, such as tailgating, camping, weekends at the cabin, or running power tools and electronics at a remote job site.