My troubles with Onan and the quiet diesel
Here are my personal reasons why I would never buy another Onan generator again. After 7 years and three dead generators that's enough for me.
One of my major complaints about all Onan generators is the cost of parts. It seems like Onan charges four or five times as much for their parts. I have found the very same parts else where for a fraction of the Onan price. The units are hard to work on and seem to me to be of poor quality as you can see for yourself in some of the pictures.
I have had two 10k diesel units and one micro light LP unit. The micro light unit has about 80 hours on it and it sits DOA in my storage with a major component failure that will cost more to repair than the unit is worth. As for the diesel unit, I feel it necessary to keep a supply of expensive parts on hand all the time to keep it running since we depend on it when we boondock.
The Diesel generator works nice when it works but it is very hard to start in cold weather. I recently had to try and start the unit when it was in the low 20's and it took me 14 cold, smokey hard starts to get it to stay running.
One major cost to an owner of a diesel unit will be the 1000 hour service. Take a look at what I had to do to mine to get the fan belt off and set the valves. I can just imagine what an Onan dealer would charge to do this. The parts alone were bad enough. It took me the better part of a day to get the generator apart and put it back together, not to mention getting it back into the truck.
The good news for parts is that I have been able to find many places to buy the same or equal parts for a fraction of what Onan charges. One major savings area was filters. I was able to find the same Donaldson filters at a truck parts supply for a third of what Onan wanted. As for oil filters I found Luber Finer makes a nice replacement for under $5.00. Fuel filters from Onan will set you back almost $40.00 dollars. I took the Onan filter off and bypassed it all together. It's in a nasty place to remove and too expensive. I purchased a one quart spin on fuel filter with a water trip and all the fittings needed to install it for the price of one filter. Now I can get a replacement fuel filter that has three time the capacity and a water trap for under $10.00 and it only takes five minutes to change it. I just mounted it along side of the truck frame between the tank and the generator.
I elected to build a separate fuel tank for the generator so that I could use off road fuel. Since I had lots of room between the frame rails of the truck it was no problem to get 50 gallons storage. Now I can burn the cheap fuel and not have to worry about running the truck tank dry. Fuel stations sometimes give me a bad time about putting red fuel in the truck, but once they see the setup I have no problems getting the fuel.
The 50 gallons will pretty much last us a month of boondocking if we don't need to run the A/C too much.
If I were to do this all over again I would look at the MQ series generators. I have used the bigger generators from this manufacturer and they are really nice units and quiet as the Onan. Unfortunately for me the units are too big to get into the space I built for the Onan so I'm stuck with the green machine on this truck.
Have a look at all the Onan pages and see just what I went through. Feel free to email us if you have any questions.
For those of you that are thinking about putting the generator on the truck but don't want to go outside to start and stop the unit, I was able to wire mine into the trailer with the same panel that is in the truck. I can now watch the oil pressure, water temperature, and charge rate along with stopping and starting the unit from inside the trailer.
One last thing about the Onan company: To be total fair to them, during the height of my battle with them they did offer to fly me back to MN. to talk with the their engineers. I was not able to get time off work, so I was not able to make the trip. They did stand behind all the bad controllers and I now keep a $500.00 dollar spare with me all the time since they seem to be the week link in the chain, but I ate all the labor to R&R all the bad ones myself. The good part for me now is that I have a pretty good idea how to fix pretty much everything on the unit.
Here are the links. All of the pictures have links to full size pictures just click on them for more detail.
Major restoration Take a good look at the end of this page to see just how much work it is to do the 1000 hour service