I owned an 8kw gasoline-only DYNA generator I bought from Northern
Hydraulics (now NorthernTool) for about $1300. DYNA is made by WINCO. They
also had it available as a tri-fuel model for $400 more but I never bought
the conversion. 16hp B&S Vanguard engine. The generator section was
absolutely unusable for household standby operation. The distortion was
horrible, probably 50% or more. The voltage was always low, whether I
measured it with a true RMS meter or not. The governor did a good job
keeping the unit within +/- 2 Hz from no load to full load, but that was a
function of the engine, not the generator. The unit was brushless and
self-regulating, and there are multiple sine waves all trying to adjust the
effective output voltage. I even replaced the rotor and capacitors in an
attempt to fix the output but these made no improvement. In fact, WINCO sent
me a PDF file of the output waveform of one of their 8kw units, and it
looked just as bad as mine. They considered it acceptable - I did not. At
one time, Northern classified generators as Industrial or Professional; I
don't recall if mine was in either category, but there are a lot better
generators out there, waveform-wise.
I would think that the unit would be usable at a construction site where
waveform purity is unimportant. Skil saws and lights don't care. The unit
had plenty of reserve power to start motors and other high current loads,
but none of my UPSes would switch the load to the generator, and the voltage
in the house was never up to snuff. Since it couldn't be adjusted,
everything was dim or ran slower than it should have.
After ten years of suffering with it, and probably only 6 run hours on it, I
sold it for $500 and got a REAL generator.
Bob M.
======
