chim
Elite Member
Generator reliability. Reminds me of a call we got form a hospital almost 30 years ago. There was a power failure, and after running for a while, the generators shut down. Very big deal.I am friends with a BIG TIME operator in my area. He got a 5,000 gallon diesel tanks off a big milk & dairy producer for $0!!!
The dairy producer had huge new Cummins diesel generators installed, and the installer refused to give them a warranty on the generators unless the old tank and fuel was removed And new ones installed.
So my farmer friend got the tank & remaining fuel in it for nothing. He just had to remove it from their facility and bring it to his farm.
Just thought it was interesting that the generator company would not give a warranty on gen sets unless they had NEW tank and NEW fuel. They said too much risk that injectors and pumps could be ruined.
Power came back and the generator vendor came and got them up and running. Then they simulated failures without finding what happened. The hospital maintenance staff said the generators ran out of fuel (but they had thousands of gallons in underground tanks).
Our technician discovered the flaw. These big gensets have "day tanks" in the generator room. The fuel needs to be pumped from the storage tanks to the day tanks, which then feed fuel to the gensets. The pumps that transfer the fuel from the storage tanks to the day tanks were on NORMAL POWER.