Marathon - Genset battle goes on and a crowd on Friday night at Marathon

 

A great perk of Marathon is the nearby Home Depot almost next door

My relationship with my Genset has not been a happy one. It seems to find creative ways to refuse to work. The first time it was the oil pressure sensor. The oil pressure was fine, the sensor was bad (it turned off the Genset automatically when the sensor showed no oil pressure) but at least that was fixed under warrantee. The technician complained all the way that Kohler only paid for the defective part and not for the diagnostic time to find it. 

Quite the crowd on a Friday night at the Marathon cabana

The second event was non-starting. There was a swaged connection to the starter motor that had come apart from the motor vibrations. That was found with a call to the local Kohler troubleshooter that said it was a common failure mode. I cut off the old connector and swaged a new one and then complained to Kohler on the stupid failure mode.

The third fail was lack of coolant water leading to overheating and another auto shutoff. That was traced to a heat exchanger that had growth inside the tubes resulting in blocked water flow and thereby no cooling. Several thousands of dollars later, that was removed, cleaned, and reinstalled. 

The fourth fail was another sensor, the water pressure sensor that’s supposed to detect a lack of coolant water incoming. It was turning off the Genset after 5 minutes of run time since the Kohler chip thought there was no coolant flowing. I got tired of replacing sensors so I just unplugged it.

The fifth fail occurred multiple times. When the Kohler was installed, it replaced a much smaller unit with start motor wire from the battery that was fine for the smaller unit (100 amps) but was not fine for the Kohler (200 amps). The installer thought he wanted to balance the weight so he put the starter battery on the other side of the boat which resulted in about 20 feet of starter cable. The excessive length of cable combined with the undersized gauge meant that every connection had to be perfect to flow 200 amps. If any of the connections were less than perfect, the Genset would not start. I’ve battled this one for years by recleaning all the connections (multiple times) and replacing starter batteries. Eventually I got tired of that and today I mounted a new battery about one foot from the Genset. Hopefully, that will fix the starting problem. 

There is no way a Genset can ever be costed out to be cost effective as opposed to staying in marinas but sometimes you just want to anchor out and have the convenience of 120v. Oh well.

I think I spoke too soon about there not being much action here at Marathon. There was a huge crowd at the marina tonight with food, drinks and corn hole competitions. I guess we just haven’t been a round long enough to meet everyone. 

One Saturday, we’ll take on fuel and water and generally get Fleetwing ready to move again on Sunday, a calm day for travel.