Don't tempt Murphy - aka ideas to make my backup generator more reliable

Sooooo, in this thread:

https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/off-topic-discussion/learn-me-preparing-the-house-for-extreme-cold/149762/page1/

I talked about how I wasn't super worried about the cold in the forecast. I had bought plenty of food/water/warm clothing/etc. I think my old friend Murphy must be a lurker on here. 

So around 4am the power flickers, and then goes out. (wakes up the wife and I because we have a lamp in our bedroom that is 'default on' so if you unplug it and plug it back in it is automatically on, as well as many appliances beep when you power them up). About 30 seconds later the trusty generator kicks over. Well, it sorta kicks over. It is turning over, but apparently not fast enough to start itself in -20 degree weather. DOH! It does its best, trying the starter for about 15 seconds on 15 seconds off about 10 tries. no go. by the end, the battery clearly sounds weak. 

My wife and I ran around the house and covered up all our basement windows with pillows and put blankets over all the glass we could. Then we turned on the water in the pipes that have a gravity drain (luckily most of the house). The basement drain uses a sewage ejector pit so I put a bucket in the tub and turned on the tub to 'dribble'. When we hopped back in bed around 4:45 the temp was about 60 in the house (-20 outside). 

I didn't do much sleeping (how do I go help the generator start? do I pull a battery from one of the cars? is the fuel line blocked? do I have an adapter to run it off a propane tank?  I have whatever is left in the grill and another full tank. can I spray some ether into the gas line and reconnect? That sounds scary. Should I start a fire in the fireplace we have never used? I THINK the flue should work. Do I have any dry wood? on and on...)

Anyway, kids room was still warm because we run a space heater in there at night for them; of course it had kicked off but the warmer starting temp held up. They slept through until normal time for them. So about 6:30 they hopped in bed with us and we made a plan for the day. We would go to breakfast, stop at ace hardware for wood and other supplies, and come attack the problem with warm full bellies at least. Judging by my nose, I think the temp in the house was about 45-50 at 6:30. I did grab my thermometer from the garage (which was still 25 degrees inside - impressive), but didn't wait for it to equalize before we left for breakfast around 8:30. 

We came home at 10:15 or so and the power was back (thank goodness). I could tell from the oven clock it had been on about 15 minutes. Thermometer was already back to 50 upstairs and 51 in our basement. House is continuing to warm up currently, but very livable inside with long johns. All our water seems to be working, but I will be very careful to check multiple times for leaks today. 

to sum this all up:

1. Please give a huge thanks to all the utility workers today. Losing power on a day like today is scary, and these guys and gals are up at 4 am climbing power poles in -50 windchill weather to fix it for us pampered weenies. According to the outage website, about 1200 homes in our immediate neighborhood were affected by this outage. 
2. Don't tempt Murphy, you idiot.
3. I would like some ideas for how to give the generator a better chance at -20. a bigger battery will be going in for sure, but I might also try to review my plumbing. Can a regulator freeze? Maybe some water in the gas lines stagnated and froze, constricting the line? Should I mess with the regulator to provide more fuel (im not even sure this is possible)? The generator starts and runs every sunday around 1 pm for 12 minutes to run a self-test, and I heard it run just fine last weekend. So at least it's not wildly out of tune or something. Social media from the neighborhood that indicated that we were not the only ones with a backup generator that failed to start. 

I'd just do the obvious: fresh, bigger battery, new gas with stabilizer added, new spark plug, new synthetic oil in the lightest acceptable viscosity, and go. New fuel every six months is probably a good precaution, unless you can get non-ethanol gas, which stores better.

In reply to 02Pilot :

yeah. I can do the oil, battery, and spark plug. It is hooked up to the natural gas from the house though. runs on LP or NG. It is an older 7kW generac model. a bit less than 200 hours on it I think. 

My friend was a firefighter in cloquet, Minnesota. They have three generators. 2 Briggs and Stratton and a Honda. The Briggs engines would struggle to start when it got super cold. The Honda would fire up first time, every time.

I don't know whether they were running on gasoline or not.

Heated battery blanket? Maybe find a way so that it only turns on when the temps hit below a certain point.

Sounds like the natural gas isn't vaporizing very well at cold temps. Warming the lines should help, maybe that heater tape used on water hoses could work or something similar.

Can you move the battery inside with longer cables out to the generator? Otherwise I would get a battery blanket and some sort of oil heater that run to keep those warm.  Often times you can get thermostat plugs for heat tape that will control the circuits, and even a strategically placed light bulb in the right spot might be enough. 

It doesn't really sound like this was the battery to me. The easy check would be to hook up a known good battery. Yeah, it is dead now, but it tried for 15 seconds 10 different times. 

My Generac (Kohler) likes to no-start in the cold due to a stuck open choke. When you get a charged battery on it, manually start it and watch to see if the choke actuates.  

0W40 synthetic is a big help. Way lower viscosity when it's this cold, little higher viscosity hot.

I don't know about natural gas but propane doesn't like to fire in the cold.

Does your generator have a block heater?  I'm not that familiar with the residential ones.  Our generators at work all utilize block heaters that heat the coolant to 100 F or so and circulate it through the engine while it is sitting idle.  These are natural gas engines, many of them are outside.

If the block heater isn't an option, I wonder if you could install heat trace cable around the gas line to warm it up some. 

Thanks for all the ideas so far, I actually think a heated line or engine blanket might be a good idea. It is an air cooled engine though so I might have to be careful about the blanket part.

Additionally, this happened today, maybe right around 2:45 or so? I'm REALLY glad I was home and heard it almost immediately.

If that looks to you like water on the wrong side of a copper pipe, you'd be right.

That is a line that goes to a hose on the back of our house. It is the one I was most worried about. There was no shut off valve so no way to shut it off and drain it for winter, and yes it froze today. When the water thawed... I had a bit of a mess. 

But good news is that aside from cutting some drywall the the basement bedroom closet ceiling, the upgrade was really easy.

Ball valve with shark bite ends. I bent the other end down and put a bucket underneath so as the rest of the line thaws it should drain into the bucket. When spring comes, I'll replace the entire line from the outside hose valve to this ball valve - only about 6 ft.

And then, I'll be able to turn my damn hose valve off for the winter.

It's been a long day.

Oh, also, here is a shot of my plumbing. I happened to be out here while looking at the above spigot issue.

Now that I think about it, I may have created a water trap in a really bad spot. I will at the minimum try to turn my loop sideways so any water could drain and not block or constrict the line.

Just to give a quick update here, I haven't personally touched the generator since this no start event, but it is fixed!

Since we had an ice storm warning last night (with lots of possible power poles down and power outages predicted), and with me being in NY for work this week, I figured I should have my wife take a quick look at the generator.

The owner's manual states that after an over crank error (what we had), the generator needs to be switched from auto to off, and then back to auto to be reset. There is also a manual run position to fire up the generator manually. So I had her go outside, and flip the generator to manual to see if it would fire. It started right up no problem. So she ran it for 5 minutes, shut it off, and flipped it back to auto. So at least it still works just fine at normal temperatures.

Finally, I saw in the manual that it recommends thinner oil for temps below 20 degrees. I'm pretty sure it just has standard 10w30 in it now. Manual recommends 5w30 for lower temps, and synthetic 5w30 for all temps. So, I will definitely be changing the oil out for 5w30 synthetic.

I would think a battery blanket would do wonders... not only because it would keep the battery warm, but it might keep the temps inside the doghouse about 10-15 degrees warmer than outside.  What about maybe pipe tape on the gas line?  That would warm the first half CF of gas and transfer a little heat to the carb.