I rent some stables and a field where there is no mains electricity. I manage with cordless tools for most jobs, and with a 900 W (inverter) genny which will run the angle grinder, a mains drill, or circular saw on the rare occasions I need them.
I'd quite like to use a larger Bosch shredder up there soon and I doubt if the current generator will do it. I see that you can get basic nominal 3 kW ones for between £200 and £300 (not inverter, obviously) and I suspect these would run the shredder.
I know these will not cope with the inductive load of a traditional stick or MIG welder, but I've recently got one of the little Lidl inverter stick welders (nice toy, BTW). I guess that might have a kinder load characteristic, any ideas whether a cheap generator might cope?
Any other views or advice? I realise that hiring a petrol shredder would be cheaper, but I like collecting things.
My shredder (on checking) is 2 kW. Not had any problem with 13A fuses. Obviously, they are a slightly nasty inductive load.
I had a "cheap" 900 W before the inverter generator, it would run 450 watt induction motors OK although they take a second or so to come up to speed (almost instant on mains).
But you make a good point; I'll be interested to see what others say.
Aldi used to sell cheap 2.8KVA 4 stroke petrol powered emergency gensets cheaper than that several years ago. My first one cost me 180 quid about
5 or 6 years ago. The following year they were selling them for a mere
150 quid. In the light of that, I think those cheap Chinese examples are way overpriced (and that's assuming they were made to at least the same shoddy standard as the Aldi unit!).
The last time I was checking out 3KVA rated inverter gensets (some 5 or
6 years ago now) to replace that entirely useless for my needs conventional genset (see below), the lowest price point was around the
600 quid mark (a far cry from the 1800 quid being asked by Honda for their i3000e inverter genset!). You might be able to purchase the much more flexible inverter type 3KVA genset for not much more than the 300 quid priced Chinese units you've mentioned (are you absolutely sure they're not the inverter type?).
At the time, even this price gave me pause for thought so I held back on making a purchase. I suspect such inverter gensets will be a little cheaper by now but I haven't checked out the pricing recently since I'm hoping to snap up an Aldi or Liddle 1.2KVApk unit for a mere 150 quid or less the next time they make them available. A recalculation of my requirements suggests this might be all the emergency power I'll be needing. In any case, I'll be able to verify compatibility with my existing UPS before committing to a more expensive inverter genset purchase.
Inductive loading is the only type of reactive loading such gensets
*can* cope with (and take in their stride provided you don't draw more than the genset's maximum current rating).
What such basic gensets can't tolerate is capacitive loading since this causes self excitation of the rotor which the AVR module cannot compensate for. For example, I discovered that a mere 4700nF (fluorescent lamp ballast PFC capacitor) wired across the output terminals of a 230v
2.8KVA genset head was all it needed to send the output voltage north of the 270v mark.
This proved to be the true nature of the "Dirty Mains Supply" so oft referred to when powering electronic loads (particularly when such loads are protected by a UPS) since the capacitance of the PSU mains input filters could prove to be sufficient to cause the genset to start over- volting.
In my case, it proved particularly problematical when the APC SmartUPS2000 presented a couple of 4700nF capacitors effectively in parallel across its mains input terminals, causing the genset to go north of the 275v mark until the UPS switched to battery power which disconnected the capacitors and the load from the genset which then reverted back to its nominal 230v output, triggering the UPS into switching back to 'mains power' which then set off another cycle of 'Bad Mains Supply Voltage' triggered fallback to battery power ad infinitum until I switched back to the Public Supply Utility's source of power (the actual mains supply).
Since most households are now using a mix of CFL and LED GLS lamps where most of the LEDs use a wattless capacitor dropper, a market for cheap
1.2KVApk inverter gensets seems to have opened up, creating a demand for cheap mass production of these modestly rated inverter gensets which the likes of Aldi and Liddle put on sale about every 12 months or so.
The small classic 720VA two stroke powered gensets if used just 'to keep the lights on' are now more likely to result in blown lamps due to over- volting from a largely LED lighting based lamp load which I suspect is the reason for the appearance of relatively cheap inverter gensets (circa
150 quid in Aldi and Liddle stores... whenever they become available) which are free of this over-volting response to both capacitive and inductive loads.
Not a full answer but my Honda powered british built 4kVA genset will only start my 2kW compressor when it is completely unloaded and the reservoir devoid of air, even then it struggles for a while but once running it's fine.
At work we used 2.8kVA chinese gensets for site lights and these coped with our inverter stick welder up to the 90 amps that I used but would only run 4 500W halogen lights. Nowadays discharge lights and LED battery powered lights are used.
I'd still prefer a 5hp petrol shredder if there is one (most of our chippers were 30-50hp diesel)
I have a cheap genset, a Briggs&Stratton fourstroke bolted to a generator -- it's an asychronous one. That means that on overload it keep happily spinning, but doesn't generate any electricity; generally used on cheap gennys.
The generator is rated at 2000 Watts. This is useless in answering the question "will machine X run"...
I have a Bosch AXT Rapid 2000 shredder, which will happily spin up and run and chop quite thick branches, and generally do what it is supposed to. Start genny, plug in, turn on, just works. (This may a have a motor with brushes, going by the spares diagrams.) It'll stall on branches that are about what the manual says are the maximum for the shredder. Might be a bit more powerful running off mains, but this is a matter of degree.
I have a 1500 Watt scarifier. Motor, capacitor (so a cage motor), and a switch, motor driving a shaft with blades on it via a belt. This will not run, at least not without elaborate rigmaroles: Running just the motor with the drive belt removed, and spinning it up to speed with a cordless drill didn't work. I did eventually get it to run by placing a small resistance in series with the motor. This would let the motor start to spin, and accelerate very slowly without choking out the genny. Bridging the resistor would then allow operation of sorts.
The resistance I used was a parallel circuit of a clothes iron, a hairdryer, and a 1000 watt halogen bulb. The motor would then very slowly begin to spin, and reach operating speed within about 20-30 seconds. Then a second person would close a switch shorting out the series resistor. I'd drop the scarifier blades in the grass, and the motor would stall easily, causing a repeat performance. The scarifier Just Works off a 16 amp main, and doesn't stall, either. It's pretty much useless on the genny, and I only go through the rigmarole with hair dryer etc. because it's still less trouble than scarifiying by hand.
Otherwise, I'm happy with the genny: it's noisy, yes, but it was cheap. But my use is infrequent, and small tools like a 115mm angle grinder are no problem at all.
The only way to find out if the Lidl inverter will work is to try!
Lots of stuff is made in China, some of it is reasonable quality and good VFM. Aldidl generally offer proper guarantees on their stuff, if you bother to keep the receipt.
Point I was making. Much of that sort of stuff is made in China. And they'll make any the quality the buyer is willing to pay for. Certainly for a lot less than it would cost to make in Germany.
You don't need the receipt but it saves you having to talk to the head office. AFAICT they can tell when the item was in the shop from its code/model number so they just tell the shop to do the warranty.
They can almost certainly say when the last one was sold (in each shop) so if you said last week and they know it was two years ago they might decline the repair/exchange.
A lot of shops can go back through daily sales to find one that matches when a customer claims they were sold an item, I have seen them do this in Currys, then they print a new receipt.
JOOI, I had a look on ebay and found this tempting item which might be more suited to your requirement.
Apologies for the very long url.
If you're handy to Peterborough, you can collect it yourself and save 35 quid on the carriage inclusive price.
I was tempted to order it myself but it's a little bit OTT wattage ratingwise (I'm still on the look out for the next appearance of those Aldi-Liddle 1.2KVA "Specials").
How can I recognise the junk parts of a url like that? I can see that I need to keep the "
formatting link
" bit and also the need to include the "263383424663" unique item code but how did you translate the "/itm/HP5100i-Inverter-Generator-Petrol-Generator-with-Battery-Key- Starter-generator/" into "/genny/"?
I'm all for eliminating the "JunkPadding" out of very long urls so would love to know the 'rules' required to perform such a "JunkPaddingectomy". :-)
BTW, rather annoyingly, the specifications don't mention voltage, frequency[1] or type of sockets used which in the light of the mention of "Gasoline Generator" on the fuel tank sticker leaves me rather nervous of ordering such a product even if I hadn't already discounted it as being needlessly more powerful than I require.
Indeed, try as I might, I wasn't able to track down any more information than was shown on *any* seller's web pages I looked at. Anyone looking to order one of these gensets will have to interrogate the seller for hard information on these three key aspects (output voltage, frequency[1] and socket type) before striking a deal.
[1] Some inverter gensets can be programmed for both voltage and frequency output options.
for eBay you can lose the www. as well if you like
anything between /itm/ and /theitemnumber is pure search engine fodder, you can chop it all out for the absolute shortest
or replace it with anything you like
The same sort of tricks work for toolstation and screwfix, and many but not all newspaper sites ...
I keep meaning to put up a website that will strip a URL to the bones, but leave it pointing to the original site, as an alternative to using a redirection shortening site like tinyurl.
Thank you very much for that tip, Andy. That's going to save having to apologise for overly long url strings in the future (at least as far as ebay page references are concerned).
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