 My name's Rick, I do HVAC videos. I appreciate you guys taking the time to check out the video. Today we're working on a generator. We're gonna go ahead and see what's going on. Currently the customer says that the generator went off on oil pressure switch failure. So we're gonna go over here and check it out. If you guys end up liking the channel, make sure you hit that thumbs button. And let's go ahead and get started. All right, so since we're gonna be looking at the oil pressure switch, I got a oil pressure gauge here. This is something you can pick up at AutoZone. I'm sure they have a fancier kit out there. This is just what I use. This is my tape container here and I put my hose in there. Basically we're going to look and check the oil pressure. We're also going to check, you know, obviously the oil and a few other things. So let's go over here and take a look to see what we got going on. Now one other thing, we also have a battery in there that's about five years old. So we're going to check the battery too and see how it looks. So I've got a battery tester here. Generally I recommend changing the batteries every five years, whether they need or not. This is just a generic one here. They all about the same. And like I've said in the past, you can always use one like this. Either one of them does a pretty good job. The factory recommends you go with the electronic one. I've used these forever. These aren't the most accurate gauges in the world but usually you can check your load with this one. This one does it electronically. So we're going to do both of these things. Since we're not going to look just for one problem, we're going to look for multiples. That way we cure the problem the first time and hopefully catch other ones that are just about ready to happen. All right, so here we are with this generator. It is a Honeywell, which is the same thing as a Generac. One of the things I always check when you're talking to a battery like this is making sure our water levels are good. Make sure you use a junk screwdriver because you do not want to get this on your good screwdriver. I'm going to do it right now because I didn't grab my toolkit for my generators that's dedicated for it. So our water levels are up on some of the older generators. We had issues with them overcharging and what it would do is it boil the water right out of it. And then eventually, once that water's out, the battery would explode and then blow acid all over the inside of the generator. So it looks like the water levels are up pretty good. One of the other ways you can test out specific gravity. So we look really good there on that part. Go ahead and put this back on. Now when we test that, we're going to want to remove it from the circuitry when we do it. For a load test, we could do it with the in-connected and other things checking for corrosion. So if we wanted to do the load test, which like I said, you got to be really careful with that because you don't want to overload it. Also, some batteries have been known to explode. So you got to be really careful with those sort of things. Coming in here, we're looking at the meter. We're up here on over 14 volts, which is meters, not the most accurate thing. Hit the load switch. You don't want to hold it for more than 10 seconds. And it's getting warm. It's holding there about 11.2 area. So I'm going to say if it bounces back up quickly, which it did, you're probably fine and it went down slowly. So the battery is most likely fine. We can do a full blown test on it with the digital one when we get around to it, but I don't foresee the batteries being an issue. So the problem we had here was a low pressure switch. What we can do is we could always try starting it over after checking your oil level, which our oil level is right there in the middle. We're fine there. While you're at it, you should probably also check your air filter and just do it once over on the whole generator to make sure there's nothing in your air vents that you don't have grass or small cat or a dog or a moose or something like that stuck in your generator. So everything's tight. All of our spark plugs are on there. So we can clear this thing out by going to off and hitting enter, switch to off. The date looks to be correct. So as time is off, just a touch, which these are easy ones to adjust and go into edit, reset maintenance. We'll go ahead and there's your exercise time. It's set for Tuesdays at 10.40, current time, go in the hour, correct the minutes a little bit, which we're about ready to go into a daylight savings time. On some of these older controllers, they did not have daylight savings time built into them. So they'll be off by an hour here real soon. So the date and years, what I'm more interested in, freaking mostly 60 English, start up to late 10 seconds, reset maintenance. Because we're gonna go through it, make sure everything's okay. We'll go ahead and do that. That way they don't call back for something unneeded. Let's go into debug. Let's go into inputs, utility voltage, we're 243. I think that's about all this show on that one here. Outputs is gonna show you your digital codes, 000 all the way across. Output zero. You can go in the book and look that stuff up. Here's your displays. It does the full blown display test, which, and then here's quiet test. It'll put it into a quiet test. I myself do not like the quiet test. It has issues. Here's your exercise time. If you're going at quiet test mode, yes. I go to no and leave his time the same. He'll have less problems that way. Reason being on these old ones, they had issues with the slip rings, which are located down here on the end, actually freezing into place. When the brushes are not making contact with the slip rings, it will not generate voltage. And it'll go out on, oh, under voltage. And that happens when it's really, really cold out. So we don't want that. Let's go into our current status. States, off status, display, run hours. How many hours does this thing got? 96. This thing runs a lot, which is surprising. Here's your battery voltage, 13.8, which seems to be pretty accurate and your frequency, which you only see when it's running. So let's go ahead and escape out of this. Let's put on our hearing protection. There we go. And flip this thing on and see if it runs for very long. If it doesn't, then we'll go ahead and check the oil pressure switch. So obviously it ran the whole time until I decided to ground it out. O is always your zero, or your zero is always your ground. So I went ahead and grounded it to the stud there. So it did work. Obviously these connections are nice and tight. My question is, did we have a pressure switch that did not open like it's supposed to? If I remember correctly, without looking in the book, which obviously kind of confirms with what I did here, that it starts out grounded when it's not running. And then once it builds pressure, it opens a switch, removing it away from ground, then allows it to run. So I'm going to go ahead and check the pressure because I have a feeling that maybe we had a faulty switch, it's working now, but customers don't like you to come back later. So if it's just a simple switch that we need to replace, then a lot of times they're going to want that done. And if not, we're going to give them that option. And then if that fixes, if they don't choose to do it, then you've at least offered the option they chose not to do it. And then, you know, you're not the bad guy for not fixing their problem. Most of the oil is going to be drained down the bottom. We'll probably get a little bit here, but as you can tell, he's had some minor leaks so far. So I made this thing nice and short. So we're just going to go ahead and undo this. They've got their dielectric grease all over the place. Let's see if we can actually get your mark. Yeah, we do a little bit, don't we? Yeah, we'll just wipe that up, not a humongous steel. It's not very often that you get these oil failures. I think I've only had to use this thing like once or twice in the last, I don't know, six years, seven years, which I'm not doing. Actually, it's a longer now, holy crap. I started doing these in 06, I think. So yeah, we just, I don't do a lot of them anymore. So I'm not running into the issues as often as what I used to. Everything's fairly tightened. Let's go ahead and start it here. Let's put our headphones back on for our ear protection. It doesn't seem loud at first, but it adds up. We had about 57 PSI each time. So I'm not going to assume we have any issues with the oil. I mean, there's always something that could be there. I'm gonna look through the book to make sure there ain't something else they'd want us to check in addition to. But as of right now, it appears to me we had a defective oil switch. See if we can drain this back into the engine. So make sure it doesn't go down in the engine. So we're gonna roll it back a little bit so it's out of the threads. There we go. So we should be free and clear there on the end. Just have to be quick about it like we were last time. And as you've noticed too, it didn't leak even with nothing on it for us. Thread sealant. We're gonna go ahead and hook this back up again. You know, it might have been a fluke thing, but that's why I'm gonna tell the customer, hey, here's what I found. What would you like to do? Switch I'm sure is not too horribly expensive. So we'll just recommend that and let him make the decision of which one he wants to do. Simple as that. So the oil that kind of tends to drip is another reason why I put it inside this little container here. Just labeled it however. And then I just throw this back in my toolbox. Like I said, it's generic, but works. Okay, so we went ahead and unhooked the ground cable over there and there's 12 volt battery capacity, standard battery, accurate test, cold cranking amps. This one has cold cranking amps of 540 inner testing. Great, it says 13.65 volts. Cold cranking amps tested in at 557. The internal resistance is 5.01 mega ohms. That's it. You can do startup load, max load. This is just a generic one I got on eBay. It works. I mean, these guys basically copy everybody else's stuff. We'll go ahead and hook that back up. I'm gonna probably spray a little bit of cleaner on this battery here. That way it's got some protection on it and we'll wipe some of this oil off. It looks like it's kind of gotten a little bit of everywhere in here. If you can rotate that, it's too loose. That one's upside down, looks like. So we have a sync controller here and sync is the same thing as Nexus and Evolution. These are not the most friendliest books in the world. So come over here in troubleshooting flow charts, which there's all kinds of different ones. Shut down alarm during crank or run or start. And basically we have test 61, check oil pressure switch and wire 86. So we look for test 61, which I would have put the page number to go to there, but they don't do that. This book's a much better than it was, but the layout sucks. So they can let you to go into the digital section and look to see that it switches from a one to a zero. Normal operating pressure is 35 to 40, which ours is higher than that. Looks like we still have a little bit of drippage going on here. Sometimes you're better off just to run a little bit of engine degreaser on this thing. It's just crap, sprayed off. Otherwise it tends to drip later. Let's undo that. See how it just changed. We're from zero to one. Starts out in a closed position. So closing it, there's a one, remove it, goes away. So you can do the same thing by running the machine. There's closed, open, closed. So that's fairly tight, no problems there. And like I said, if it was loose, it wouldn't be an issue. Let's go ahead and start it. Back to number one. Well guys, that's kind of be a simple troubleshooting procedure here on one of the Generac Generators. This is not a very common issue that I've had. Basically, it's just a regular oil pressure switch that's normally grounded when it's not running. It opens up from ground when it is running. It verified that we had pressure there at the oil pressure gauge. We went ahead and checked other things like the battery, got that all cleaned up. Still need to check the serif filter real quick. You know, it's a little dumb things that cause problems down the road. So you wanna make sure you always check all these other things out to make sure that you're not missing anything. It's gonna create other issues down the road. So, got a little bit of oil in that one little pocket, which could be condensation. Like I've said in the past, these have a tendency, see how it's completely smashed down? You wanna raise that just a touch. So that just clears it just a touch. Cause what'll happen is when this is really super cold, it'll freeze in place. And it's just a lightweight little solenoid. I mean, it's very lightweight. I do that to pretty much all of them. And that basically helps it start in the winter. So if you watch what it tries to start, watch what it does when it chokes. So, yeah, you can see a little blowback through the blur either there, which that's not too uncommon. Unfortunately, you can see the condensation from starting and stopping. That's another reason why I like the generator when it's gonna run to run full bore and not in that stupid test mode. I know the theory behind it is to save money. Honestly, it's for the environmentalists out there so that they are happy because they wanna get rid of all combustion engines, airplanes, cows, meat, anything else that makes life enjoyable. So basically, they put this little gimmicks on there to satisfy them to make EPA happy. So anyhow, that wraps that thing up guys. I'm gonna blow this thing out with my little blower and then we'll call this thing a day. All right, so that's a little cleaner. All right guys, like I said, if you enjoyed the video and you wanna see more like it, make sure you subscribe. If you guys got some value out of the video, smash the thumbs button. And until next time guys, we'll catch you on the next one.