Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 76
 Waste of time and money October 29, 2009
Business (Seattle)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Started once and then never again. We are an electrical construction company and should have known better than to invest time and money in this disappointment of a unit. With a generic troubleshooting manual and no spare parts available, it is not worth the effort to repair. Buy a Honda and you will never go wrong.
 great item October 24, 2009
P. R. Madden (virginia)
great little generator for the money. did a barn renovation using this generator and it did not fail once. started each time with no effort. would recommend highly.
 Great little generator for it's price and specs September 15, 2009
M. E. Munoz (Virginia Beach, VA)
I bought this little generator about a year ago in preparation for any power outages in our area due to the occasional hurricane or tropical storm that occasionally blows through. We have been relatively spared but a mild rain storm knocked out the power to my neighbor and me. We used it for about 1 hour but it worked well and I'm sure it would have done well with a much longer outage. I tested the generator when it first arrived as many of the other reviewers suggested. I even pulled the spark plug and checked it out for shipping damage. No problems. I Ran a tank of gas through it and put a small load ~100w and let it run until it ran out of gas then I stored it.
This past outage, I was able to run 3 9w CFL bulbs spread throughout the house (using extension cords), a curling iron (85w), and a hair dryer on medium (600w) without a problem. As others have mentioned, when large loads are placed on it (such as the hair drier) it will load up the engine and the engine will compensate. In the interim though the voltage dips so you have to be careful that whatever you are running isn't too sensitive to power fluctuations. You also have to keep in mind that the generator is not a true sine wave output (it's modified sine wave) so some electronics may not do well with it.
For the price (I got it for $109 here on Amazon) it's quite excellent. The price seems to have jumped up considerably though since my initial purchase (Summer 2008)
------------
Update November 2009
Well, we just had a Nor'easter here in Virginia Beach, VA and our power was out for about 24h. The generator worked well and powered my devices (four 13w CFL's, 2 cell phone chargers, an LED spotlight charger, the curling iron and the hair dryer) simultaneously without a problem. It was loaded ~80% load for only about 15 minutes and 10% load for about 3 hours. No problems. A word of warning though. I put a voltmeter in the plug and got a reading of 103v fully loaded, 115v unloaded. This may be unacceptable for certain devices. Luckily, all of my power bricks are rated for worldwide use (100-240v) so they didn't have a problem with the low voltage. Also, the lights would flicker a bit so the power is not clean.
I would still maintain the 4-star rating as this genset is a very economical way to power your basic needs (lights, battery chargers [cell phone, battery powered tools, NiMH batteries, car batteries, or solar battery banks) for very long periods without wasting large amounts of fuel as a large wattage generator would.
product works great, I purchesed it to do small jobs where there was no power, and it did as expected September 12, 2009
Phillip J. Monie (oh usa)
This product works great for the project that I purchased it for, it worked as advertised, for the price you can't go wrong
 Don't expect too much from this July 28, 2009
A. Webster (Carmen Sandiego's House)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I bought this expecting 1250 watts of output - Let's be very clear - it's and 800 Watt generator at best. It's nice and quiet, smokes a little at first and takes a good strong arm and foot to get it started, but once running it's ok. The 12V DC power cable is nice, but the wire is too small for the 8 amps and they get hot to the touch after just a few minutes. Buy it as an 800w generator, not a 1250w. My friend bought one at the same time 7/24/2009 and as of this review 07/28/2009 - his is dead (40 hours of use) - broken piston ring. Buyer beware.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 76
|
