How To Convert Your Generator to Natural Gas or Propane

on this episode of repair geeks something a little different I show you how to convert your portable generator to natural gas or propane so I'm going to be converting my rigid seven thousand watt portable generator over to natural gas reason being in the event of a long power outage I'll never have to go get gas all's I have to do is hook the generator itself up to my natural gas line and it will run indefinitely anybody that's in like a hurricane area or an area that's susceptible to a lot of tornadoes kind of knows what I'm talking about if the power goes if the power goes out in a widespread area chances are where you go to get gas it also is not going to have power and if they do there's going to be a very long line of people waiting to get gasoline for their portable generators so I'm trying to be a little bit proactive here I the whole reason I'm doing this is I have a well so if the power goes out for a couple days I don't have any water so I can't flush the toilet and after a couple of days you can see how that would be an issue other reasons why you do this it's also cheaper to run than gasoline especially at today's natural gas prices compared to what they were you know eight or ten years ago I know it's kind of a a minor point but it's something to worth worth considering I doubt I'll ever make my money back from what I've spent on this kit but it's nice to know that it's not gonna cost me as much as gasoline also on a side note it is much cleaner than gasoline the hydrocarbon emissions are much lower so if you'd like to be kind to the environment maybe this is the way you should go I'm gonna bring you guys over and show you what exactly I bought and I'll show you how to get it installed alright so over here on the left is basically what you get in any sort of natural gas or propane conversion kit it comes with some sort of governor regulator this is made by Garrett Stan is a model KN a carburetor spacer carburetor stud extensions and this one has a street elbow that's been modified to accept a bolt in the top which then connects to this hose which is a 3/8 LP hose and connects to the bottom of the carburetor spacer so this stuff here on the right is what I source myself this is a rubber LP hose with 1/2 inch NPT fittings on both ends those are going to accept these quick connects that one is going to go on the house and the other one is going to go on a generator so in the event that the power goes out I simply connect those up like so fire up the generator and I'm done I don't have to break out a crescent wrench and manually connect it to the house I will say this the hose and the fittings I have almost as much invested in the hose in the fittings is what I do this conversion kit I got the conversion kit for 125 bucks and I want to say the hose was 60 these were around 35 apiece and I believe these were around 10 apiece so it's not cheap to do it this way there's no reason you can't hook this directly to your natural gas line on your house it's just not nearly as convenient the final two things that I have here is this is an LED light mouth for a quad and the reason I'm using this is I'm gonna use this to mount my regulator a lot of people will drill holes in their frame and run a nut bolt through it and hold it that way I think this looks a little bit more professional and if I never need to take it off the generator my generator doesn't look like Swiss cheese these back here are spacers and what I'm going to use these for is I'm going to raise the engine or maybe in your case you may need to move the engine the reason I say that is because when you put this spacer between the carburetor and the box it moves it moves the airbox out so that may start to contact the frame and if you move the motor back in the chassis it may give you enough clearance that you can you don't have to cut the frame a lot of these kits want you to break out a saws on cut the frame I have enough room that I can simply raise the motor up a little bit I'll be able to clear the frame and I won't have to break out saws off if you had the option try to modify your motor mounts or move your engine around as much as you can to try and get this spacer in there without having to cut the frame I understand if you're working on an inverter generator you may not be that lucky you may not have that much space to work with but it's something worth considering as you guys can see I've got my spacers installed over top my engine mounts so I have a ton of clearance down here on the far end for my airbox so I don't need to cut the frame or do anything crazy like that so I'm gonna go ahead and pull the airbox off and go ahead and get the spacer installed alright so for the airbox I got two clips here the lid comes off pull your filter out then I've got five bolts in here for eight millimeter and 110 and I've got that off I've got two 10 millimeter bolts here holding the intersection of the airbox to the carburetor my PCV hose attaches in the backpack here I already pulled it loose and that just pulls straight out like that and then you're gonna go ahead and take your spacer and it is marked which side goes toward the carburetor so that is gonna sit it's gonna sit just something like that but before we get there we got to put two stud extensions on carburetor so as I was going to install this I see the spacer against the carburetor and what to put the airbox back on and if you look by my pinky there there is actually a gap between the airbox and the spacer itself so you're possibly letting unfiltered air into the engine this kit was specifically designed for a Honda GX 390 which this is and obviously they didn't take into account the style of airbox that I have so my solution to this is I made a aluminum spacer which then sits on top so when I put the whole thing together I have plenty of room so this spacer issue kind of creates another issue for me and that is the stud extensions because I added this quarter inch piece of aluminum my stud extensions are no longer long enough to be able to bolt the air box on my solution to that is I picked up some metric bolts the same thread pitch as the stud extension I'm going to cut the head off the bolt and use that as my stud extension just so you guys can see there is the spacer and my space are mounted everything's secure not going anywhere so we're going to go ahead and get the regulator mounted the tee fitting is going to go into the bottom it's actually marked outlet on the regulator I'm going to use a little bit of thread sealant on the threads they say in the instructions that you can mount the regulator in basically any direction as long as it's vertical if you mount it flat there's a diaphragm inside that might get pulled on by gravity and it may not work correctly it may not shut off like it's supposed to this thing is actually designed if the engine stalls out it will stop all gas flow so you don't just start dumping a bunch of natural gas or propane outside your house the hose they only supply one hose clamp for and it goes on this end the the end that goes on the carburetor adapter doesn't require one they don't provide it you can put one there if it makes you feel a little better but according to nashville it is not necessary on this kit just to give you guys an idea of what everything looks like once it's been installed this is what you're gonna have well at least in my case the only thing I do not have connected is there's a line right there going to the valve cover going into the air box that's a crankcase event I need a longer tube to be able to connect that up so to see if there's any performance reduction running on natural gas I'm going to go ahead and run this thing on regular gasoline using probably my dryer or my air compressor and take it as close to 7,000 Watts as I can I'm going to repeat the test once I get the natural gas kit installed in case any of you guys are curious I'm back feeding my panel using an interlock kit in this outlet on the outside of my house I can supply 30 amps of power anywhere in my house with this kit so I can run a hot water tank if I'm out of power for multiple days I can run my well pump my oven what you name it I can run it off of this the only downside to doing this is I don't know when the power comes back on because my main breaker is turned off so you kind of got to pay attention to your neighbors and see whether or not they actually had power alright so as you guys can see I am now running on generator power slowly the only breaker that I have on is this one here for the lights and this one here which feeds my dryer I tried running the air compressor and the generator just doesn't have enough power to get it started so I'm going to use the dryer I'm going to do low medium and high and hopefully you guys would be able to see what exactly how much wattage that draws on each face that is the dryer on low so to give you guys an idea I'm gonna do this test again once I'm on natural gas and see if I'm able to get this same amount of power out of this thing if I push this thing any harder I'm gonna start losing frequency out of my generators so my lights are gonna start flickering it's gonna start doing weird stuff you can kind of already see it's flickering a little bit here and there so I'm gonna go ahead and shut the dryer off and go ahead and do the conversion alright now that everything is done on the generator this is what I installed on the outside of my house is another quick-connect fitting just like what I have on the generator that will accept the mail and on the hose so in the event that my power goes out I come outside will generator outside plug in there plug in there hit the Prime button pull the cord I'm off and running so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and hook this thing up to the wall or to the gas line and pull the cord try and get it running and then what I'm gonna have to do is I'm gonna have to dial in the air fuel ratio using the bolt on the governor regulator my generator has a Hertz readout if yours does not you need some sort of tachometer that needs to read 3604 most generators so you know you're getting 60 Hertz out of your generator which is what normal house current is in America if you live overseas it's probably 50 Hertz depending on where you live all right so now that it runs and I get it working what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hook it back up to the house just like I did earlier and turn the dryer on just like I did earlier and we'll see whether or not this is actually has any performance reduction on natural gas as opposed to gasoline I've heard tale of it going both ways you know some people say that natural gas it runs exactly the same and other people say there is a noticeable reduction so hopefully with the with the dryer running on this thing we'll find out all right we're gonna switch over to the generator here all right I'm gonna run that over and turn the dryer on real quick and we'll see what we get well I will say this it's definitely doing it and it's much smoother than what it is on gasoline I think being able to regulate the air/fuel ratio with this natural gas kit keeps it from surging under high load so I think that's why the voltage or the why did I should say is much more stable than what it was in the first test but just so you guys know that I'm not screwing with you she's laboring a little bit for sure [Music] all right guys so what do I think I'm kind of blown away personally I did not expect this to run nearly as good as what it did on natural gas honestly it blows away gasoline it doesn't surge it doesn't hesitate it runs like it's supposed to run basically even if I had to go back and adjust the air fuel ratio on this not a big deal because it's just a bolt in the bottom of the regulator whereas the carburetor you'd have to change out Jets so I'm pretty happy with the kit other than the fact that the adapter didn't fit if I had to do it over again I would have probably just bought a governor regulator myself and piece together the kit and probably made my own carburetor adapter simply because I probably would have saved some money this kit was 125 bucks it was probably one of the cheapest ones that I found online there are quite a few other kits out there this one I felt had the least amount of compromise to it meaning if I ever wanted to go back to gasoline the throat of the carburetor is completely open so it's not gonna be any restriction my jokes gonna work correctly there's one kit in particular made by US carburation called a motor snorkel kit and it has a tube that runs through a gasket and then goes through basically into the carburetor well if you're going to run the engine on gasoline and you need to use the choke the tube going through the middle of the carburetor isn't going to choke plate closed and you're gonna have problems getting a getting the engine started so I went with this one because it was cheapest and there was the be the carburetor bore was wide open a couple other things you may need to know if you're gonna run this on natural gas you need to size your natural gas line accordingly I will put links down in the description to a couple charts that I use to figure out what size natural gas line that I needed to be able to run this thing at 7,000 Watts does not have any issue if you're gonna run propane because I didn't use propane I didn't show this but there is an additional regulator that you're need to buy that goes on the propane tank all's it does is it regulates down the 300 psi of tank pressure down to about five psi for the governor regulator other than that the kits are identical another side note on propane a typical 20-pound gas grill propane tank is equal to about five gallons of gasoline if you guys are wanting to look at running on propane so just to give you a night guys an idea of what the runtime might be that's the best information that I found I don't know personally I haven't tried it as always guys I thank you for watching if you liked the video hit like do you want to see more content it subscribe

Channel: Repair Geek

Views: 787,354

Rating: 4.8955598 out of 5

Keywords: repair geek, How To Convert Your Generator to Natural Gas or Propane, natural gas generator, propane generator, generator, natural gas conversion kit, natural gas conversion, portable generator, alternative fuels, fuel, gasoline, portable natural gas generator, portable propane generator, tri fuel conversion kit, tri fuel generator, tri-fuel, natural gas, propane, conversion, kit, convert generator to nautral gas, convert generator to propane, convert generator, hurricane preparation

Id: nO839Sayci0

Length: 22min 35sec (1355 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 16 2018