Our generator has been a weak link on Calypso since we purchase her. It has about 2000 hours on it, 500 of which we put on it during our travels. So it's done work, it just wasn't well maintained by the original owner. Then John (previous owner) did some service to it but really didn't use it at all. When we purchased Calypso, we left the dock immediately for the Bahamas and Caribbean....Using it and patching it up along the way. When we came back to the states, we knew that it was time to give it some love.
It's had cooling issues, raw water leaks and electrical problems. When we were heading back to Florida, we ordered everything that we could get our hands on from Cummins Onan in Fort Lauderdale. The package arrived and Jeremiah went to work.
We removed and replaced a bunch of parts to include the oil pressure transmitter, impeller, fuel pump, belt and all filters. Actually my father got to play with it a little bit during his visit, rewiring a few of the wires you see in the of the photo above which got her running. Jeremiah got to dive a little further into it, replacing a few parts and sealing those wire connections up and it's now running like a champ!
The bottom pan (the housing) got damaged from the salt water leak but it's cleaned up and looking much better! We're excited to have her purring like she should....Even if we don't use it as much anymore.
When we originally purchased Calypso she was power hungry and didn't have a lot of ways to make or store it. The flooded cell batteries would quickly die, which caused a lot of generator time to recharge. Like twice a day for an hour each time.
Since then we've added a ton of solar, we've rewired the main engines to charge the house bank while they're running and we've added lithium batteries to store all that power. Quite honestly, since then we only use the generator for powering the AC's, and hot water heaters. So it doesn't get used as much. We start it here and there just to keep her running well.
Some of the boat factories are going away with installing generators onboard...Adding more batteries and ways to charge them such as hybrid set ups. While we like that, we also like the redundancy of having a spare way to get power when you need it. As long as it's running, we love it!
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