 This video is brought to you in part by TrueTechTools, quality tools, essential support. What's going on guys? So you have a Generac, home standby generator. I don't normally make videos for home owners, but because I don't really like running service calls in the middle of the night because people didn't check their batteries, I'm going to tell you the way you can maintain your generator and save yourself some money and save your service guy a lot of hassle. First thing we're doing right now is we're getting ready to get the generator ready so that we can change the oil. What you're going to want is some safety glasses because you got to have safety first. You're going to want some hearing protection too, which we'll use when we're testing the generator itself. So let's go see what we can do to make this thing run efficiently and as reliably as possible. So we're going to squeeze in here. It's better than some. I've seen much worse. Let's go ahead and shut this down so we can talk. Okay, so the first thing I did was greet the customer and let them know I was here, who I was and what I'm here to do, which they should have already known. I came over to the generator, opened it up, looked to see if I had any error codes in here. Then I checked the oil. I made sure the oil was in a safe level. Then I went ahead and started the generator in manual mode. I wanted to get the generator warm because today it's about 30 degrees. The oil is not going to flow very easily. So I went ahead and hit manual and it went ahead and started and ran. I let it run for maybe five minutes, 10 minutes, whatever. I went ahead and shut the lid. That way it traps the heat in there and now that we've let it run, we're ready to get started. So I came over here, we put it back in the off position. Generally, they want you to disable it by yanking your fuse out. That way it doesn't accidentally start on you. Like I said, safety first. A lot of times it may even have you unhooking the negative on the battery. I'm not going to do all those things because I'm not worried about it, but for your safety, I recommend you do them. A lot of them are different. This is the sink with Honeywell, which is really a Generac. Let me go ahead and get this thing opened up. Oh yeah, criteria here. Who am I and do I know what I'm doing? I've been working on Generac Generator since 2006. I've been through the factory training about five times so far. I've been commercial certified, which means I'm a whole lot more than standby generators for homes. Most of your Generac dealers out there are just residential only, not able to do anything higher than 25kW. I had it up to 250,000 and to go through that course, it's a lot more difficult than going through the home standby generator. Not to brag. I'm just telling you when you're looking for a dealer, you want to trust with your generator. You want to try to get somebody that specializes in Generac Generators. Don't go to a Kohler dealer unless the Kohler dealer specializes in Generac. Don't go to vice versa. Go find the dealer for your model. Then do some research. Make sure you find out they have good reviews. Don't look for the cheapest price. If you're wanting it done right, pay the money and get it done right the first time. These are things that are going to save you a lot of headaches. Let's go ahead and get started. First, you're going to need some supplies to be able to do this. You're going to need your disposal tank here to catch your oil. You're going to need the recommended oil for your generator, for the climate that you work in. We're in Ohio, so we use 5W-30, full synthetic. You're going to need your tune-up kit. Now, this is up to you whether you want to go full tune-up kit or if you just want to change the oil and oil filter. This comes with spark plugs, air filter, everything you need to change and get the thing maintained. I just purchased this. This is called a form-a-funnel. This is going to be really good to get inside there and you can form it in any different shape which is going to help keep your generator from getting oil all over the place. Depending on your generator that you got, which model, you've got a door here that has a weird interlocking mechanism. You're going to pull straight up on it. Then you're going to pull out. This has what looks like a truck bed type hook on the backside. As you can see here, the people that have been taking it apart really haven't been really familiar with it because they've bent the snot out of it. So now that we're in the generator section here, but what I'm doing is helping you out. Get something out of it. Great. Give it a thumbs up. Make sure you subscribe. Down here in bottom we've got our battery. There's your positive and your negative. One of the things you're going to look at while you're doing your maintenance is you're going to make sure that these terminals are not corroded. This is one of the number one things that causes problems on generators corrosion. This is a maintenance-free battery, so a lot of times we don't have as many problems with these. Corroding, as you can see, with even no spray and stuff, it looks pretty good. I don't know how old this battery is because the installers didn't mark it. If you look around at the bottom, sometimes you'll get lucky and you'll see a manufacturer's data or sticker on it. I'm going to test this with a digital checker and I'm going to test it with a load checker. The factory does not recommend using a load checker. I like to do both. If this thing had serviceable battery, I would check at the water levels and be checking the specific gravities to make sure that each individual cell is accurate. It depends on how thorough you want to do with this. If you're just wanting to make sure it runs, then just make sure the battery is not bad. Make sure it starts. Do a basic load check on it, or just hire a professional. Here's where the oil drains out. You loosen this up and we'll be able to drain it out. Obviously, this right here is your oil filter. Oil pressure switch. Temperature switch down there in the back. This is your magnetos. Here's your oil cooler. Here's your wiring limb. You want to try to keep all this free of oil. Here's where you fill the oil. A lot of times I'll go ahead and open this up and I'll pull the dipstick out just a little bit. Now that we've got this ready to go, let's go ahead and start this draining. So while it's draining, then we'll do the next steps. We're going to go ahead and loosen this up as long as this is above the bottom of the engine. It's not going to drain out right away. We're going to open up our flap here and we're going to stick our hose in there and we're going to try to keep it about level with the height of the drain there. It's going to come straight out. Now you've got to watch it if this starts to fill up, which this one here holds quite a few quarts of oil, so it's not going to fill up right away and it was already empty. We're going to let that thing drain. It should be starting to come out. There it is. It is coming out. It's coming out in the drizzle, which is the whole reason why I said you want to run the generator to get it warm because it's going to come out really thick and slow. While it's doing that, now's a good time to check our air filter here. Flip up this here. Now, granted, all these models might be different. You've got two clips back here in the back that hold it in place. They're fixed. These usually get broken off. Surprisingly, they're not yet. So this is a little tricky, so you're going to lift up a little bit to get this edge up and you're going to shove back a little bit and you're going to unhook it there in the back. Now you should be able to lift up. You can either just look at it like this or you can completely remove it and pull it off like that. Check inside there. Make sure there's no leaves. Make sure that this filter looks good. Check inside there. Make sure you don't have debris built up. You know what? They're going to give us a brand new filter. This is one of those things that generally never goes bad unless a mouse chews it up. Now, right here, you can see we've got some condensation in here. This is what happens a lot of times when the generator sets for long durations of time. It runs, gets hot like it is now, and then it cools back down. It just, that's natural a lot of times. Doesn't necessarily mean there's a lot going on here. Clean it out. If you look at it, there's a little bit of oil in there, a little bit of moisture. Yes, we can go into checking the valves and we can check all these other things. We're not going to go into all that stuff because that's way more detailed than what most general homeowners need to do. There's plenty of videos out there on it. That's not what this one's going to be. Some of these tune up kits actually come with all that stuff built in there. And as you can see, I'm tripping over trees because they put them right in the way. If you want a good job done, you don't put stuff like that in front of the generator. You want a good job? You're tired of people doing half-ass work? Here's how you get the best performance possible by making their job easier. Here's a little tune-up kit they give you. You're paying some extra money for this thing. You've got your little notice here, spark plug gap. And sure, it's right. You're going to have to look that up. Chances are it should be in your book. Here's your little make-believe funnel. I generally never use that. Here's your spark plugs. These have to be RC-12 YCs sticker. So we actually know when the generator was serviced. A little towel, like I said, originally. All right, so we got some of that wiped out. Let's go ahead and get their new filter in there. And let's get it back together. Now, this is also where, when you're first starting it up, you're natural gas in LP. So if you have a problem and it never has worked right, double-check, make sure the thing's actually set for the type of gas that you're on. This one's on propane. So this one's on propane, so it's already been switched to propane. As you can see, the arrow points to LP. You turn it to propane. There's your servo control. That's what actually controls fuel-air-fuel mixture. Something that's automatically done by the little computer here. So we hooked that back there. We're gonna hook this back piece here. So we're gonna make sure we get that back in there. You can see right there is where it's at. There's one there. And then you got one back over here. And you kinda gotta use both hands and you lock it to there. Pull that up. And there you go. We got schedule B maintenance here. So this thing's never really been reset. So we're in this display here. We're gonna hit escape. So here's your menu. Here's your system. You hit enter. It tells you that it's switched off. Do some schedule B stuff. Escape to get back out of there. We're gonna hit the up arrow. We're gonna go to sub-menus. Now this is only gonna let you in so far without the code. Hit enter. History. You can see your history here. Here's your alarm log. Here's your run log. Run log is gonna show that I just switched it off on today's date manually running it. Exercise. Exercise. Exercise. So you can see all that. Hit escape. Get out of there. And go over to alarm log. What's been some of the alarm logs. Missing AC charger. Low battery. Charger. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, a lot of stuff that probably isn't accurate. Let's go ahead and escape out of that. Let's go over here to maintenance. So here's the maintenance right here. We're gonna hit enter. We can go into run hours. Right now we have 95 hours. So we're gonna write down 95 hours. And we're gonna add 200 to it. So at 295 hours, that's when it should be serviced. We're gonna put at symbol because half people don't know how to read this. At 295 hours. And today's date is 224. 224. And we're gonna add two years to it. So 24, 25. I usually put in here 5W30 full synthetic. The synthetic helps it start easier. Usually I'll stick this where it's easy to be seen. Don't wanna put it over the warning stickers because that puts you at a liability. All right, so we went out and grabbed a wet hand wipe. And we'll clean us up a spot here. You need to put it in plain sight because half the time, most people don't even open up their generator or check their oil or anything else. Looks like the oil's done draining. You wanna do this before it gets cold out. So get your schedule on summer months. It just makes more sense. Now, if this runs 200 hours because you're out of power for like five days to a week, you're gonna need to change oil and oil filter in between that time period. You won't need to go through and do all this other craziness like spark plugs and all that. This is the part that's usually messy. We've got the new filter here. What I do personally is I'll put a little bit of oil inside of the oil filter in advance to help get it back into the engine quicker when you first start it up. I'll fill this up one time. It's going to absorb into the kind corners there. I put a little bit of oil there on the seal here, just enough that it's lubricated. That way it tightens up hand tight, not with a wrench hand tight. You know, you can let this thing rotate at a 45 and that's gonna help it absorb into all the walls of it. We're gonna be able to get up underneath here with all the junk that they put in the way. See, that's gonna leak right down into that rubber and come right out the front here. Now, and that should go right into my container which is gonna be nice and simple. And then when we have that set in there ready to go, we'll be able to wipe off any slurpees and put it right back on. Luckily, like I said, this is a big container. It holds 12 quarts of oil. As you notice, this funnel can be shaped to any size I need. Look at that. It fits right in there like I need it to. Now, I have me a tool bag dedicated for my generator stuff. So, I have a rod out here which is for changing engines because you've watched it in my videos. I have several engines that have gone bad on these. You got your battery protector spray that you're gonna need. You got your cleaner, most likely gonna need what's been on your battery. Some of your different tools you're gonna need like pullers. For the batteries, you got water. One's where you can't get the oil out of it. You got pumps. Makes it easy to pump things out and in. Your hydrometer for checking your batteries. Never sees. It's made by Loctite. I like that on my threads. Here is the oil wrench. You could use channel locks, whatever you want. For me, these are cheap and they're from AutoZone. I think we just loosened it up. We've got this wrapped all the way around it. That's gonna fall right in line with that right there. So, when we undo it, it's gonna drain a little bit. There you go. Look at that. Look at that. It's not leaking anything anywhere. Ain't that beautiful? That's gonna keep your generator from getting all that oil and crap that's gonna collect the dust and everything else in there. Just makes it so much simpler. Because when we take this off, you're gonna see it leak even more. You're gonna have some of this filter. There we go. And if you want, you can sit there and pour that in there and let it fall on through. Because you don't want that to fall on your yard or on your driveway and get oil all over the place. And see how that falls right onto that perfectly. This is called Forma Funnel. I will put a link down in the description below to an Amazon link. If you wanna support the channel, purchase it from the Amazon link. You still pay the same money. Now, we've looked in here. We're looking for shavings. We're looking to see that everything's smooth and clean. Looks like it's safe and good to me. There we go. We've got all that connected. Wipe all that drippage out. Let's go ahead and get this new filter on. As you can see, that oil that I put in there, look at it, nothing comes out. It's absorbed into the membrane of the filter. We can slowly maneuver it over. And we let that continue to drip down into the bucket. That's probably the cleanest I've ever had ever. That's the first time I've got a chance to use that funnel. I purchased it a while back. And my goodness, I just made it super, super, super easy. Now that we've got the oil out, the first thing I like to do is go ahead and tighten this up. Like I said, hand tight. We don't need to get stupid with it, but we've got it on there. This generator can hold anywhere from 1.5 to 1.9 quarts. I'll have to look it up, check your book to make certain. This one here is a 999cc. I would bet you it's 1.9 quarts. I haven't looked for a while, so I'm not sure. So what I usually do on mine, I go ahead and go at a sideways angle. And I drain it in there. That allows it to drain without a lot of clunk clunk clunks. And we'll go ahead and get this thing refilled back. And then we'll start checking it as we get close to it. And we'll add until we get to the proper level. You've got to allow it some time for the oil to drain to the very bottom. You want to use the right oil that's recommended by the factory for the weather you live in. If you live in sunny California on the southern border where everything's always warm, you're going to need a different oil than what you're going to need for somebody that's up in Michigan. So make sure you read your book or hire a professional to do it. And like I said, use the advice I said, find a dealer that's overqualified for what you need. That means the person's going to have more experience than what you need for your generator. And that means they're going to be able to easily work on it. Look for a premier dealer. Look for one that has the most certifications. If the dealer has a lot of certifications, that means they've went out of their way. They specialize in generators. They're not just happens to be subcontracted with Lowe's or Home Depot to install these that doesn't have any clue what they're doing. Just try to make a quick buck to fill in some time where they need some jobs. That's what you got to watch out for. These generators, unfortunately, are sold to anybody. Anybody can buy them. There's no regulations whatsoever. The only regulations is if you want to do warranty work. And even then it's a three-day class. And I'm going to tell you right now you cannot learn how to work on these effectively in three days and be efficient. And what's bad is they only cover the new generators. They don't cover the old ones. Find a dealer that has some experience with them and specialize to them. That is a key fact here. My weakness is sometimes on the motors, which they don't teach you how to work on the motors other than doing basic adjustments. They generally do not have you replace any major components. That tends to get into a engine mechanic. And because I am a heating air conditioning refrigeration technician, I don't specialize in motors. It's not my thing. I can do it, but I don't really care to do it. Now that we've got that on there, we're going to go ahead and put this back together. I'm going to start it up so I can check my level. I'm not going to let it run for a long duration because I don't want the spark plugs hot when I'm trying to change them. So we've got everything back together. We made sure there's nothing laying in around that's going to get caught in the fans or the motor or anything like that. Make sure all fingers are clear. All your animals and dogs and cats and all that's out of there. Let's go ahead and hit manual. Let it start up and run. I'll let it circulate around a little bit. All right, so we're going to shut it back down. That should have filled up the oil filter and everything should be spread throughout the engine and now it's going to drain down. We're going to let that do that for a minute. Now we've got to change spark plug here and the spark plug in the back. They got those mounting brackets on there. I remove these mounting brackets. Those are 10 millimeter. Keep them, save them for later. But they're in the way when you're trying to work. They no longer give you this nice little socket thing that made it easy to change the spark plugs. You're going to laugh. But this right here is my favorite socket for changing these spark plugs. This works on all of them except for the model that has the bigger spark plug at the bottom base. The reason why I like this is it gets right into those tight spots and you can change that handle position and you get in those really tight spots in the back. A regular socket will work just fine. I just find these to be very easy and you just get her on there and presto it comes apart. Do I need to change that bracket? Look how my thumbnail is getting caught on that. I usually do this with my drill but in the back ones you're not going to be able to reach that without a swivel. So go ahead and get this yanked out and then we're just going to snug it back up. This just makes it much easier to get to the plugs and not rip your thumbnails off and everything else. I've changed several motors and I have not needed these things yet and if you're a full-time generator mechanic you should have these in your bag. Normally when I'm doing this with my drill it's not very difficult and it's seriously done pretty quick. We've already got this one pretty much loosened up and coming out. This will give us a chance to inspect our spark plugs and see if we've got a lot of oil on them to build up or what exactly is going on with them. That one there looks like it's burning pretty good. I don't see any oil on them. This is, like I said, propane natural gas. These spark plugs should not be wearing out very quickly but they make this kit convenient for those who want to change everything to eliminate possible problems. And I like to put a little anti-seize on these to help keep them lubricated so they come back out fairly easy when you do the next maintenance. That one looks good too. So, luckily this motor here is burning pretty good. I'm going to double check this and see what kind of gap this requires. Let's see if it's the same ones that they sent me. 12 YC, so they are the right ones. We can use my cheap basic gauge here or we can get the nicer one out and see what we actually have. I've got a cheap gauge here which is better than nothing and I've got my actual valve gauge in there. I'm just coming right in at 40,000s. Oh, that one's a little over 4,000s. Now, for tools that you may want to have, here's a spark plug tester. This tells you that if you're getting spark to it and it will tell you if it's transferring spark through, use a neon bulb. Stronger, weaker, not too bad. But I also have one that I can actually gap it out and that will allow me to see how much spark I'm getting far as the gap and the gap that it can arc tells you how many volts that it's actually doing. All right, so it's been a little bit. Let's go ahead and pull the dipstick out here and see where our oil levels are at. So we wiped it off, we shoved it down there. Some of these are hard to read. Right there, we are right at the full mark. You can see right there. And there, so we are dead on. Looks about like this one right here. Go to spark plugs. 999 cc, 16, 17, 20 and 22, approximately 1.9 quarts. It uses an RC 12 YC. Here's spark plug gap 0.040. So what I like to do sometimes is take my marker and I'll write it inside the generator so that you know what it should be because a lot of times the guys don't have this manual because not everybody goes to the class on it. That's basic information that should be in your manual. Look at it right at 40,000. Same thing here, right at about 40,000. It's off by 0.01. I'm not too horribly worried about it. So we're good on that. Like I said, I like to put a little smear of some anti-season here. This is entirely up to you whether you want to do it or not. I usually like to get it way up high on the threads. That way it doesn't possibly get down on the electrodes. Just a little smidgened. We're not talking enough to get it all over the plug and slopped all over, but just enough to when it goes in there and starts threading, it's going to help keep it from season itself in there because a lot of times these don't get changed very often. So we're going to thread it in by hand. And another nice thing about this little generic wrench set here, you're not as likely to go stupid with it and break things or over tighten them. There we go. And good. And we'll reattach it. Now you could put some silicone grease on that plug. These are fairly new, so I'm not too worried about it. Little silicone grease helps it slide on and off a little easier, but this is fairly new, so not a big deal. Now we're going to want to change our schedule here. Service performed, yes to enter. Now to escape, we're going to hit yes, which yes equals enter. So there we go. Now it's been reset. We're good to go there. And we were able to do that without messing with any of your current settings. Some menus, maintenance, maintenance. There's your run hours schedule. Next hour, 200 hours or 224. So we've got that 224, 24. They're only doing an out one year now. Wow, they've changed that, didn't they? Next maintenance, blah, blah, blah. Inspect battery also. So you want to go through here, next maintenance. So you've got the battery and the oil stuff being all done at the same time. There's your maintenance log. It'll tell you that it was scheduled B. That was the second service, which was today. And you can see that that service had never been reset. We're going down arrow because you can see 34, 33. And you can see that it was either never done or somebody didn't reset it. So we can just go ahead and escape that. Like I said, run hours, 95. This is where you can get into it as a homeowner and not have to worry about needing the code to get in deeper. So we went into edit. We went into language, current date and time. Let's go ahead and get 44 in there, 224, 2023. Hit the exercise time Monday at 12 o'clock. Well, I'm not going to change your date because that's what they're used to. Firmware update, which you should check that and verify that you're up to date. But once again, if you're a homeowner, you're probably not going to be able to do that. Some of the different firmware updates, depending on what it is, and I don't have them all memorized, had extended run times and stuff like that to allow the brushes to de-ice. Now to get into the dealer there, you've got to have a code to get into that. You can screw a lot of stuff up in there. So we're not going to give you that. All right, so we just entered it. We'll go down here to submenus now. We'll be able to get into the dealer area, battery voltage. So instead of just getting the idiot light that says, yes, it's good or bad, we can actually see that our voltage is four-hand-half volts, output voltage, output frequency, speed, utility input voltage, reset maintenance, yes. We're going to go ahead and go in there and go yes. That way I know for certain that it actually did it. We can do our test utility inputs. So we're in test mode right now. No, we still got to test the battery down here, but we're going to go ahead and run the machine here. So let's go ahead and go into manual and we're going to see the utility there. These are your digital inputs and outputs, which we're manual. You can see the inputs are all zero, doing 230 to see that our status here. If you look those up, I'll tell you what they are. 240, output frequency 60.1, engine speed 35 to 3600 RPM area. Don't even have to get our meter out. We can see exactly what's going on. The newer generators have definitely gotten better. I've got a lot of complaints out of the old ones, but the newer ones, they have been a lot better than what the old ones were. This battery generally, they always recommend you unhook the negative, but because it's so easy to get to the positive and the way they've got it situated here, I'm going to go ahead and just unhook the positive, being careful not to let this wrench touch anything because that's the reason why they always have you do the negative, because if you were to be wrenching on it and you hit this metal, you're going to have a direct short and it's going to have a catastrophic event happen in your face. What we're wanting to do is we're wanting to isolate the battery terminal so that we can run our tester on it. Now, this is a load tester that puts a load on the battery. The factory does not recommend you use that. I have a generic battery tester here that I picked up on Amazon. It's a no-name Chinese rip-off, whatever, but from what I've found from it, it actually does a really good job. We're going to go ahead and connect to there. We've got good connections here. This is going to do it electronically. So it's 12 volt. The capacity of this battery, 540 at zero. We're going to worry about worst case scenarios, so we're going to go 540. So we're going to hit capacity. We're going to go standard battery, accurate test, cold cranking amps, and let's take it up to 540. 540, hit enter. Great. Came in at 13.38 volts. That's isolated from the battery charger on the generator. 510 is what it came in at, 89% of that. Your battery, internal resistance, 5.4 mega ohm. So we tested it again. Same thing. You could write those down. That way, as you see the resistance start to change. You know the battery is starting to fail internally as things go along. I've tested this on brand new batteries, and it usually comes right on the money where they rated at. Now, as far as doing a load on it, like I said, they don't recommend you do this. But this was all we had in the beginning days. You hook it on there. You get a good connection. You usually want to go straight to the battery itself. You don't want to go through the posts like I'm doing here, but I can tell that they're so clean that I have no problems. The meter on this is old analog. It's saying somewhere around 13-some-odd volts. When we give it a load test here, it's going to energize the circuit to a little electric heater element in here, which is equivalent to about 100 amps current. I have a DC meter that can measure amp draw off of the clamp meter, and you can see what it's doing, and then you can measure the voltage. I usually like to use a digital voltmeter on the terminals of the battery to see if they drop below 11.2 under a heavy load. I know what this response on this one's usually. It hit no more than 10 seconds. And as long as I don't hit 11.2, usually it's pretty accurate. You can feel that heating up, but you do not want to hold that for more than 10 seconds. And then you should see it start to come back slowly up, meaning the battery is starting to recover. If the battery is junk, it will go all the way down to zero or it'll drop really low. And then when you let off of it, it instantly comes back up. It's usually an indication of a bad battery. So we did that. The biggest thing I think reason why they don't want you to use some of these if the battery is defective and they could potentially blow the battery up and get it on you. Now we want to go ahead and get this put back on the battery and we want to get everything tightened back up. Loose connections and connections that are not clean are all problems. If your generator is not starting, you want to make sure that your terminals are clean. That means taking this off. You see white crud in there and stuff like that. You need to get all that cleaned out. Be careful it is battery acid. It will eat your skin and will eat your clothes up. Your batteries is the most important thing to make sure is ready to go because it's what's going to fail when it's really cold outside. So terminals being clean, have them protected, which this here kind of puts a coating on it and it helps protect it from, I believe the oxygen and stuff. There's gases that come off from the batteries. It happens more on the batteries that can be maintenance but on the sealed ones here, we don't seem to have as many issues with it. So that's only upside of it. Let's go ahead and get this back on. Now those extra wires you see there, the yellow and the black go to a cellular transmitter thing that the factory gave you in hopes that you would keep the subscription going. I don't think it's worth it. Go and get that battery back into place. So you can see should be able to see that it is at 1.1. Let's go ahead and hit start. 129 for a split second. Now we hit inrush. Watch what the amp draw does here under inrush. As you can see, the starting amps is a lot higher than the the amperage that you normally see. 384 amps is the kind of current we're going through there. So you can imagine when there's a little bit of corrosion on those terminals, that's why you're going to have so many problems with the generator starting. Clean connections are vital. If you follow the rules that I'm saying far as making sure your terminals are clean, stuff like that, you don't need a $400 meter. So we know that the battery is good. We know that our oil is set to the correct level. We know that we have the spark plugs replaced. We have a new air filter in there and everything is working so far as it should. Now what we want to do one last test and this is the way I do it is I like to make sure that the generator will start and transfer. Transferring is the important thing here when it loses power. Otherwise, it's great to have a generator that starts, but who cares if it starts if it don't transfer. Now, this is something that I wouldn't normally show you because I don't want homeowners in this area because this is dangerous. If you decide to do this and get harmed, that's entirely on you. What I generally do is I will unhook my utility sensing which this here is all dangerous. This is 240 volts and keep capacity here of 400 amps. You can see we've got multiple wires coming in there. It's kind of scary how much they cut into those wires there when they did that. I do not recommend getting into this area at all. I'm going to grab my fuse puller and we're going to pull one of the utilities there. This is not what the factory tells you to do. What you should do is just turn the power off to the house but because that would kill everything in the house and potentially take out their clocks and all that stuff, this is the only reason why I'm doing it. So I do not recommend you go any further than what I've just showed you. I would recommend just turning the breaker off and let the generator start up. Verify that transfers over that that starts and you have everything working inside. Flip the power back on. It should transfer back. Cool itself down for a minute and then shut off. If that's the case, you're done for the service. The generator, if it is in auto mode, it says it lost power. It's counting down. It's getting ready to start up. Cranking, running, warming up. The transfer switch is going to transfer here in a second. Boom, that fast, baby. So the load on the house right now is 8.3 amps on that leg and 9.9 on that leg. This meter is pretty much on standby. So I have cheap meter leads on it right now. These are just the cheap basic fluke leads that came with it. So going to the actual load. This is 230 volts. We're running 242 volts. So we want to check frequency now. We're going to go ahead and hit the yellow button. We're at 60.2, 60.1, 60.0, 59.9. So the sample rate is a little slow on a clamp meter. Generally, they're not ideal for generators. That's why you would use your higher end like a fluke E75 or one of the 117s or something like that. So we're doing good there. That's just the sample rate. It's a little slow on that. But there we know the frequency is right under load and it's running. So now we're going to go ahead and put that fuse back in and make sure it transfers back and then we'll finish this thing up. It's not blinking. They're just transferred back and she is golden. Now, as long as it shuts down, we are good to go. Now, the only reason why I did this was so I didn't have to go in the house and tell her that, hey, I'm changing your power over, blah, blah, blah. I didn't want to race her clocks and interrupt anything that's going on in there. Otherwise, like I said, you might as well as just flip the breaker. I mean, if this is your own generator and you're doing your own service, obviously you can make that decision, whether it's that big of a deal to mess with clocks or whatever the case. Now, if you have one of these doors, they have pins at the bottom here that have to be engaged to the spot right there and there. What I do personally is I hook it right there and there. I bring it up. Remember that little piece there? It was all screwed up and there's one over there. You want to come into this and then drop down. So what I do is I bring it up to it like that. Obviously you can't just shove it in now. You got to lift up just a little bit. I put my knees against it. Just a little bit of pressure on it. I lift up enough that it clears it. And then I shove in, shove in, shove down. Done. Biggest thing you want to make sure you are is you're on auto. Big mistake. Those left and off. Not a good thing. Make sure this dip sticks in. Make sure that fill is closed. Make sure there's no leaks around your oil filter. You know, you should be checking for loose wires, things like that, far as your cables. There's a lot of things that are going into this that the homeowner may not know what to look for, but these are some things that I sometimes look for, making sure that there's no clanking noises. Just things that you're going to know to look for that you've been doing it. Then lock it up and you're good to go. This one was not locked, so I'm not worried about it. If you do these simple things that I just mentioned, you will set yourself up for a much better result when the power goes out. All right, guys, that's going to wrap this one up. I hope you enjoyed the video. I showed some things that are by the book and I showed some things that aren't in the book. Some of the things you may like, some of the things you may disagree with, but either way, they're just the way I do it. And if you take something away from it that helps you become more successful at doing it or prevents you from having a service call in the evenings, then I would call that a win. If you would, hit the like button. You'll leave a comment down below if you like something. And if not, if you would have done something different, feel free to put something down there that actually would be constructive. And until next time, guys, we'll catch you on the next one. Thanks for watching. Later.