Re: Generator battery charger woes

Dan I have not had personal experience with your Kipor brand generator but I have encountered the problem when I was a sales engineeer for Xantrex.

You never menttioned what brand of inverter you have. What follows is general but possibly applicable.

You said the charger stopped but no mention was made of what if anything your generator did when this problem matereialized.

When I worked for Xantrex we announced a new product. Very quickly we recieved complaints that the inverter would not work with some gensets. Our engineering department quickly found that the included power quality circuits was not happy with the wavefor produced with ssome gensets but was fine with others.

I even visited one major genset manufacturer to test out product with their generator. It worked. I discussed generator output waveforms with their engineering people in order to learn why some worked and some did not. Apparently it has to do with how the generator regulator works.

Bottom line. Either you do product compatibility testing or else you use an oscilloscope tp examine waveforms in an effort to determine if they may be compatible.

Either way you are not going to be happy with my suggestions because it will cost you money. I have not heard any detrimental comments about the Kipor generator. Yes it is a chinese manufactured product but some of them are fine to use. My suggesttion is to find a manufacturer whoe product is able to run with the Kipor. I have found Victron brand products to be very good. 10 years of using them in my desigjn projects have not yielded bad results. In fact the US military are very happy with zero failures so far. They are not the cheapest but then again quality never is.

Personally I no longer use conventional 220V AC gensets driving general purpose battery chargers. I have found DC gensets to be more fuel economical.

Best of luck