ALP 1000w Propane Generator Review | Parallel Ready Eco Friendly Compact Efficient

greetings i'm professor hobo and welcome to another hobo technos product review today we have the 1000 watt alp propane generator now this is a 100 propane generator there is no gasoline option which makes it lighter and more compact than a dual fuel generator out promises a lot of bang for the buck in other words a lot of power for a little bit of propane but how efficient is it or is it any good let's find out now as you can see behind me there is plenty of snow on the ground it's quite cold so we're going to go ahead and bundle up and get along with the testing of this so here we are with the alp generator in my 40 degree garage there is literally snow and ice right outside the door and the doors open so the cat can go in and out so i am not going to wear my lab coat today this actually way too cold to be doing this so here is the alp generator inside of its box now i have opened it just to see what was inside but i haven't taken it out yet so let's take a closer look at what we got here's the steel braided hose for running to a large propane tank the user manual and some kind of how to prepare your generator guide then we have the generator itself i did ask for a blue one and they sent me a blue one there are multiple colors available that's interesting so if you want to know what's in the box there you have it oh they also include this very short adapter if you want to run off of one of those little green cans i don't have one right here and they include some battery clamps in case you want to charge a battery now one thing i'm very curious about is they do not include what you'd normally get with a generator which is oil and a spark plug wrench and a screwdriver none of that's here so i'm guessing they're going to assume you're going to buy your own oil so make sure if you're unboxing this and you're taking out in the desert or something and you're going to be running it for the first time make sure you buy oil because it's definitely not included i find that interesting i mean it's not the end of the world but i usually like it when they include the break-in oil so i don't have to go dig my oil out of storage now the generator itself looks pretty nice it's i really like the case so here you have the front of the generator this is the dc out where you can hook in your battery clamps looks like it's got a little circuit breaker there this is your on and off switch your eco mode switch a couple of useless usb ports it does have parallel capabilities so if you want to hook up more than one of these you can actually parallel them that doesn't include the cables i'm sure that's something you got to buy separately here's the circuit breaker for the ac out and the ground if you care to ground your generator you can ground it to there and it has a nice little light which is interesting i've never seen a light on a gas generator before but that's really handy because if you have to go outside in a dark and deal with this i'd almost leave this light on all the time while it's running so that it kind of lights up the panel and everything of course you have your leds over here tell you what's going on so here under this rubber plug is where your propane goes in now note this is a propane only generator so there is no gasoline there is no gas tank and up here it says push to open okay well there's your spark plug right down in there didn't even require any tools to get that off that is nice i like tallest designs because who wants to have to get out a screwdriver every time they want to do something obviously here's the exhaust port with the spark arrestor this is carb compliant so you can use this in california here's your choke run and start and your pool starter i'm gonna have to guess that the oil is behind this which of course means it's not completely toolless i do like this nice flush handle so it doesn't stick up high but it's plenty big enough if you're wearing gloves to carry it and here are the specifications for those interested okay i was trying to figure out what this button in here was i've never seen that before on a generator but i guess it's called a primer button so you actually push this in to prime the system so since it's getting propane you have to understand that there's air inside the lines so when you turn your propane tank on you push this i'm assuming that lets the air out of the lines and lets the pain fill the system up we're going to find out how well that works with the choke and of course as always as i always do on these generator reviews we're going to place our bets as to how many pulls it going to take to start this thing now unfortunately this is not completely a toolless design it does require a phillips to get the screws off and they don't include a screwdriver so make sure you have your own screwdriver i could see myself losing these every time i do an oil change so pretty good quality stuff here's the air filter you got the choke up here on the carburetor your oil fill everything looks very well placed nice and solid all the lines and wires are zip tied it does look like it's a high quality machine now very curious there is oil on this plug so they must have put oil in it at one point maybe to start running it but there's no oil in it now but it clearly had oil in it for some kind of break-in or test does say here that your first oil change should be 10 hours then after that every 100 hours now i would i already understand do not run 100 hours on a generator on the same oil you want to cut that in half you definitely want to change the oil in this every 50 hours okay they include this paper that says fill the generator with 6.7 ounces of oil it should be touching the bottom thread or two use viscosity based on the climate so 10 w 40 or 20 w50 never seen that for a generator but i do have 10 w 40. okay and explains here open the valve press and hold the primer for 15-20 seconds the purge the air from the line so this is like an addendum it's just basically a printed paper that i guess they forgot to include these instructions in the manual so they included this paper but then it gives you an idea what you need to do to get this thing started it says it generally takes three to four pulls of the rope and it may require choke so let's see if it actually takes three to four pulls we'll find out once we get this thing oiled up now i was going to add some of this 5w30 full synthetic because i did get this for my generators but i don't actually like breaking in a brand new generator on full synthetic because you actually do want to wear in that first oil change so this might be a little too slick even though this is the proper weight for near freezing conditions now what i have instead is i have this 10w30 which is a synthetic blend that i use for my other generators but this actually has some marvel mystery oil in it and that's why this looks so gross i've been using this container for like three years because it allows me to measure on the side how many ounces so i already have a bunch of this already mixed up so we're going to go ahead and use this since it has marble mystery oil in it and we'll use this as the break-in oil and yes i got this from the van it says only add 6.7 ounces that's going to be hard to judge but that's about as much oil as my sportsman generator took well it certainly is thick since this stuff's been out there in the near freezing conditions it was down to six degrees fahrenheit last night a little dab will do you that's probably all it's gonna take right there all right i think we're good on the oil so i do have a completely full and this is a new or very new propane tank i'm just going to use the big one i'm not going to bother with a little one i do need to mention that you don't get this hose with the generator but you do get it for free using my code this will allow you to run the generator off of a large propane tank instead of just little bottles you actually need to use this little hose to push it in and then tighten it and then you hook this hose to this hose so it's a lot more makes a lot more sense i don't actually like using multiple hoses like this but i guess that's how it's designed um i have to hope you don't have a leak let's go ahead and open the valve that allows propane to flow into the generator and then it said for 10 to 20 seconds push the purge valve here so i'm gonna go ahead and push that in all the way and hold it for 15 to 20 seconds i can definitely hear propane oh yep i'm smelling propane now next step is to move the choke from the run to the start position it is very cold i am going to expect this is not going to start on the first two pulls but i guess we'll find out now i am going to go ahead and start this inside the garage i do have the door up and we're very close to the door i'm only going to run it for a minute and then we'll have to move it outside for the rest of the tests but don't ever start a generator especially a gas generator inside an enclosed space now propane is a lot safer than gasoline it gives off a lot less noxious fumes but this can still kill you if you run it indoors it doesn't burn completely clean place your bets as to how many pulls is this going to take to start let's find out there's one there's two three okay so there's eco mode on zika mode off yep it smells like a little buddy here all right awesome green pool's to start oh you got to hold the button to shut it off that's different and here comes billy so i gotta move okay we got the generator started i'm gonna go ahead and let it run for one hour at idle with no load and then i'm going to run it for four more hours under a 50 load or 500 watts that'll give it a good break in then we'll start our actual testing okay i've done one hour with no load and now i'm going to do an additional four hours under a 500 watt load let me show you how i'm going to set up so i have the propane generator outside the garage and i'm going to go ahead and close the garage door and run the solar degenerator at 500 watts i already have it measured out using a kilowatt meter so we're gonna let it run at 500 watt load for an additional four hours and i'll consider it mostly broken in all right we're back it's the next day i put this under a pretty heavy load 500 watts for four hours plus one hour with no load underneath it basically trying to quickly break the generator and it did use some oil i did have to add some oil after about two hours under that heavy load but the last two hours it really didn't use a lot of oil i'm changing it anyway so i'm gonna put straight synthetic 5w30 and this is a full synthetic oil it should be perfect for this generator in these very brisk below freezing conditions so i'm going to top it up and then we're going to weigh the propane tank to see how much propane's in it we're going to run this for an additional five hours weigh the propane tank again and now we can extrapolate how many hours do you get on a 20 pound tank so let's go ahead and get the new oil in here and get the test started all right now we have this scale and we have the propane tank now it's not completely full because i did run the generator off this for five hours i didn't weigh this before i started the generator i just assumed it's going to use a lot more fuel than i typically would all generators when they're breaking in use more fuel so i figured give it a good five hour break in before i start doing any kind of tests go we're zeroed out and we're weighing in at 31.8 pounds so it's gonna run the generator and see how much fuel it uses all right so we're gonna go ahead and use the solar degenerator at 250 watts which is one quarter of the rated load of the generator so i got this dialed in to 250 watts and we'll go ahead and use this as our load all right now we got the generator running at a 250 watt load we'll come back in four hours and see what the consumption is all right it's four hours later i brought the propane tank in yes it does have some snow on it but that's not going to affect the weight let's go ahead and put it on the scale and see how many pounds of propane it used over the last four hours so there you have it there's the final result or four hours of runtime 30.2 pounds so we'll subtract the before and after number to see how many pounds total so we did a little math we found out the alp generator consumes 0.4 pounds of propane per hour these are considered a 20 pound tank now they don't ever fill them all the way up to 20 pounds but we're just gonna call it 20 pounds because that's the what the tank's called so at 0.4 pounds per hour you can run 50 hours on one of these tanks assuming that it is 100 full now see if they only fill them up 80 percent most of the time that means you can expect 40 hours off of one of these tanks which is actually pretty good now remember that's only under a quarter load 250 watts that would be enough to charge batteries or run some small appliances small devices if you're gonna run an air conditioner that would obviously consume a lot more fuel captain hoodie here actually i decided to do another consumption test on the generator i figure most of you guys are probably going to want to run a small window air conditioner unit on it those usually take 550 watts while they're running so i decided let's see what the consumption is going to be pretty much double the wattage that i just did to test on which is around 31 of the capacity i'll take that up to two thirds of the capacity of the generator which would run a 5000 btu wall window air conditioner so it's very cold outside so we'll make this quick so here's the setup i got going i got the generator running a solar degenerator as you can see there i have it running about 550 watts greetings welcome to day three final day of testing the alp generator now i currently have about 15 16 hours on the generator total i just ran an additional four hours at 550 watts load to simulate running a small 5000 btu air conditioner it ran without any problems for those four hours so we're going to take the tank off and go weigh it and we'll find out how much propane does this use at 66 power all right 27.2 pounds so it took exactly three pounds of propane to run four hours at 550 watts so that means you can expect out of a full 20 pound propane tank 26 hours of run time to run your air conditioner that's actually not too bad that is much better than other propane generators that i've seen but those are all dual fuel when you have to do dual fuel you have to compromise when you have a pure propane generator they seem to be a little bit more efficient so 26 hours on a full 20 pound tank and of course that assumes the compressor never shuts off you might be able to double that number if the compressor turns on and off 50 of the time so not too bad at all so that means generally you can expect three to four days of air conditioning off of 120 pound tank now if you carry two of these there you go you have a whole week's worth of air conditioning eight hours a day no problem i know you guys want to know how loud is it so in order to test the sound level of the generator we have the generator here and the sound meter three feet away or one meter so let's see how many decibels it is this is eco mode under no load it looks like we're around 73 decibels with no load on eco mode now let's go ahead and turn it up on regular mode looks like we're at 76 decibels at one meter in regular mode well let's go ahead and add a load to the generator that's 100 watts 200 watts it's like we're about 78 79 decibels 300 watts we're at 80 decibels 400 watts 82 decibels 500 watts 84 decibels 600 watts 85 decibels and it doesn't seem like it gets any louder after that so for our final test we're going to do a load test the generator to see how much power can we get out of it now remember we're at 7 000 feet above sea level for every thousand feet above sea level you can expect three percent loss in power so that means we can expect to lose 21 percent power from this generator at this elevation that means it's 800 watt generator shouldn't really be able to put out more than about 630 watts now this is pretty cold today it's near freezing conditions so that's going to help it a little bit but let's see exactly how much we can pull out of this before it shuts down okay we're at 5 30. okay the overload light is blinking at 600 watts that's about what we expect now it doesn't actually shut down when the light's blinking it'll keep running it's just warning you that it is in at the limit of its power so even at 7 000 feet you can still get 600 watts out of it which is pretty good that's a lot better than my sportsman see the lights sort of like faster and faster as we slowly ramp it up see right around 660 670 it's on solid that means it's going to shut down let's back it off a little so there we go we're actually able to pull the rated amount for this elevation that's not too bad that's not too bad at all for 800 watt generator at this elevation i know if i don't do it i'm going to get asked i'm plugging in the battery clamps to the 12-volt output on the generator let's see what kind of voltage we're getting what kind of sine wave we get all right as you can see at low idle in eco mode we're getting 14 volts let's put it on regular mode oh it doesn't seem to make any difference add a load again barely any difference just a little bit increase in voltage not much hopefully you can see that the sine wave is perfect 124 volts at 59 hertz so we're right on the money so as you can see from the results the alp generator is actually pretty efficient on propane it's one of the most efficient propane generators i've seen to date what's really nice is it does have a regulated 12 volt output it seems to be regulated around 14 14.1 volts allows you to safely charge pretty much any kind of battery you can think of and that's nice so it doesn't matter how much the engine is revving up or down you're going to get that constant 14 volts out so what do i like about the alp the fact that it is very compact this flush handle nothing sticking out on the sides makes it very easy to store in fact i could put this inside my cargo bag on the back of the van it would take up about as much space as a 5 gallon bottle of water i also like the fact that this can be paralleled you can buy two alp generators and parallel them together with an accessory cable and double your power but one of my favorite features is the built-in led light more generators should have this as long as it's running you can turn the led light on and it is very bright it lights up the whole area around you and makes it very easy to see plugging things in i also like the fact that it's very efficient on propane i never really wanted to buy a propane generator before because they suck a lot of propane usually one of those 20 pound tanks you burn through that in one day run an air conditioner we found out you can actually run an air conditioner for three or four days off of one twenty pound tank that's pretty awesome and with the included hose you can actually run these little one pounder tanks now if you're doing a 25 load on the generator you can expect a couple of hours out of this you're not going to run your air conditioner for very long off of one of these so i do like that it is economical and versatile now what don't i like about the generator well the fact is you do need to have a screwdriver to add remove change oil that's kind of a bummer in 2020 as we expect toolless ways to change the oil in these i also really don't care for the fact that it is only an 800 watt generator i really wish it was more like a 1200 watt generator but it is what it is if it was a bigger generator it wouldn't be as efficient this is going to suit most people's needs if you're running a small air conditioner or a small refrigerator or small appliances anything with less than a thousand watt surge this should run no problem now even up here at 7 000 feet elevation i still got almost 700 watts out of this which is really fantastic and as many of you already know propane does have less energy in it than gasoline a normal gasoline generator is about the same size and puts out the same power so somehow they got this all very compact and i think it's because there's no gasoline tank worry about spilling it you have to worry about the smells this actually smells much better running than a gasoline generator so that's one of the things i do like about it and as for the safety factor propane is generally safer than gasoline you can't spill it if you get it out in the air it's likely not to explode unless you're in enclosed space now what else don't i like about the generator well it is kind of loud now they say in the brochure like 54 decibels or something i didn't see that in my testing i saw mid 70s decibels on the lowest setting with no load so it's certainly louder than a honda or yamaha but then again this is half the price now if you're interested in the alp generator of course i have a special promo code for you if you look in the description below there's a link to the alp generator website they do not sell these on amazon so don't go look it on amazon for this you have to buy it direct from their website so go into the description below there's a promo code there add the alp propane generator to your shopping cart type in the code and then you'll get for free one of these 25 dollar steel braided hoses now it's a very high quality hose very good gaskets inside it should last you a very long time and you need this hose in order to run this off of a 20 pound tank the hose they give you with this only lets you run it off of a little one pounder tank so you will absolutely want to get this hose so again how this works go to the alp generator store pick a color there are many different colors this generator i asked them to send me blue because everything else i have looks like a jackery and is orange add it to the cart type in the code you will get this hose sent automatically to you for free don't forget you have to add that code in order to get this deal thanks for watching if you learned something today don't forget to give me a thumbs up below and if you're not a subscriber already you know what to do that's it for now till next time odin commands you to like and subscribe and clean my litter box and there's thor patiently waiting for something to pop its head out of the hole over there he's been sitting there for hours staring at a hole in the wall go figure rv golf guys e fox fighter jack smith [Music] [Music] you

Channel: HOBOTECH

Views: 466,782

Rating: 4.9056721 out of 5

Keywords: ALP Generator, ALP 1000w generator, ALP propane generator, ALP review, ALP generator review, ALP propane generator review, ALP generator discount, ALP generator coupon, parallel propane generator, compact propane generator, 1000w propane generator, eco friendly generator, ALP generator promo code, propane generators, propane generator review, ALP, 1000w generator review, ALP generator free hose, hobotech, discount code, coupon code, promo code, Dual fuel generator

Id: hSK_lEqHGr8

Length: 25min 39sec (1539 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 17 2020