Predator 3500 VS WEN 3800 Full test weight sound and load. BETTER Than Predator???

today we're checking out these two popular generators by testing out their sound we're also going to check out their empty weights and then we'll take them outside for a full load check and to see which one of these two generators might just be the better buy and the option for you guys so we'll take them outside let them warm up then we'll get started all right so let's just take a look at the actual prices of these guys these are kind of everyday pricing and then we also take a look at the win it does have a few more amps and a kind of a cheaper price so that kind of gives it a little bit of an edge right off the bat now as we take a look at the generators for the most part size-wise pretty much identical and before we start the test we'll take a quick look at the panels you can see on the rotary switch on the wind the start button is right on it versus a predator you just turn the switch they both have out of choke but then you hit the start button that's off to the side and then if you do want to shut off the wind you have a manual or the auto off and this auto off drains the fuel out of the carburetor which is a nice feature for storage the predator doesn't have that but it does have a screw you can drain the float bowl both of them have an lcd display but with the predator you can press the little button here and that'll show you your service hours for the win you basically just have to fire it up and then you can see your numbers there both of these do have weather protected switches which is nice except for the reset button on the wind not sure why both of them have the 120 plugs but the wind generator comes with an rv ready plug which is a nice feature versus a predator it comes with the l530 adapter which you can plug in um and that's actually a more popular household plug for if you have a power outage but the adapter makes it work so you can use it on a trailer both of them do have the parallel ready ports and the predator does give you some covers on the ports but one thing wind does give you is a couple extra options like this 12 volt socket and usb versus on the predator i don't have anything for that so it's kind of useless to me both of the battery doors are up front and a lithium ion battery is provided with the wind and we'll take a quick look at the weights here now basically both of these generators they have oil they do have a battery but there is no fuel in them and so we're just kind of that's an everyday weight if you look at it so we'll wait one more time just a scene it basically comes out to 100 pounds flat for the predator and with the wind generator i can actually just set it down normally but we'll take a look at this real quick and as you can see with no gas in it it does hold more oil than the predator but with still no gas it's just a pinch heavier now one thing with the predator i definitely don't like are these smaller wheels you can see how much louder and harder it is to roll it around versus the wind you just pick it up and move it over and they both do have a fuel indicator gauge which the predator is up on top and is kind of like an analog style and as we look at the wind generator the fuel indicator is on the right and so the wind is going to be the first one up for a sound check we'll put the economy mode switch off and then we'll fire this guy up let her run for just a couple seconds then we'll put it into the run position and there we go about ready alright let's start the sound check so with the eco mode off and at about 23 feet away the exhaust is facing us because that's the loudest and after letting this run it's basically coming out to about a 72 db average so run over turn on the eco mode now and see how much quieter it gets so after letting this run just for a little bit you can see they dropped it a lot definitely a lot better levels that we're looking for is those low 60s and after letting this run and average out for a little bit right about 62 decibels so now we'll turn the exhaust away from us and this will help drop it down a little bit more and it was kind of hard to determine at this point about where it was but after letting it run basically a couple times and letting it average out about 60 well 60.5 decibels is pretty much where we're gonna land and that's where the exhaust turned away so it does help keep it a little bit quieter right so now we'll fire up the predator and get it ready for its sound check put it in the run position make sure the economy mode is off and one thing i still don't like is this little wheel lock down here it is kind of loud and it does tend to rattle regardless if it's locked or not all right so eco mode is off if you notice the sound levels already this generator is quite a bit quieter and this is basically the economy mode on on the other generator look at that that's 62 decibels and that's 10 less than what the wind was doing so now we're turning on the eco switch now you can see that there also dropped it a little bit more now we're getting into those real low 60s even getting into that 59 range and after letting this run for just a little bit and averaging out pretty much at about 60.5 decibels so we'll go ahead and walk back over to the generator we'll turn it sideways get the exhaust facing away from us now we're into those upper 50s which these are good levels these are levels you're going to see around some of the hondas and such and some of the other more expensive generators which run around those mid 50 marks we're in the upper end of the 50s but still this is a good number it's real quiet and i think just overall this generator runs a lower rpm and so that's why it keeps it kind of in those lower decibels but i mean overall if you look at the wind generator i do like the design of it better and the carrying handle does make it easier to move it around along with the better wheels but overall the predator really does take kind of the upper edge as far as the sound levels go so we're going to hook up the test meter real quick and get this thing ready to start doing some load checks and we'll get this guy fired up as you can see here in just a second the voltmeter will come on then we're going to use my travel trailer and that's going to be basically our tester to basically put different types of loads on this particular generator all right the wind is the first one up and that umbrella is really just to help keep that glare off the meter so we can see it better and you can see up top to indicator lights on the generator as well and so right now the only thing running is a converter in my trailer and that's what charges the batteries and now we'll turn on that little outside fridge and that's going to give us about oh an amp and a half of draw we'll go inside we're going to find some more power and so we're gonna use this little heater this guy's gonna jump up about four amps and then come back down to three that's about where this little guy lives it's a 350 watt heater at about three amps so come back here we're also going to turn on the fridge because say you want to save some propane we'll turn it on ac that'll take about five to ten seconds to click on and we'll look at the meter there as well you'll see that jump up in a second let me take a look at my little battery monitor here if you don't have one of these or like one i'll put something in the description you can look down below i do need to calibrate that again though i was playing with it a while back and i forgot to recalibrate it all right so we're going to come over here to this 1500 watt heater we'll turn that on to the first notch on low and this is the oil heater so the the power drawn these are a little bit more consistent and we'll go to medium as you can see that the lights on the generator up top are now moving to the three green bars out of the five that you get and we're about halfway up the meter as far as how much power we get out of our generator and we're going to leave the heater there we're going to go find some other power here in a minute while that thing kind of regulates all right so now what we're gonna do is we're gonna use this microwave and this is gonna be about another 10 11 amps we'll turn that on here in just a second watch the generator monitor now you can see the lights are also going to tick up as well there's four bars right there out of five that we get and now we're at 25 amps and if you look at our voltage your voltage is still looking really good at 120 volts 25 amps and so we'll also compare that a little bit later too with the predator so now you can kind of see that regulating down a little bit now we're gonna add this is about another four amps by the time you turn this heater all the way up on high and so now we're actually above the stated amperage that's on this generator so we're going to slowly take up some power here just for fun to see how much we can kind of get away with and now you can see the overload light is also on and by turning on all these lights it makes that converter kind of kick up a little bit more power out of it instead of using about an amp and a half it'll it'll add a few more amps and well as you can see the generator pretty much said no you're above the rating so pretty much shuts down we'll go out here and we'll swap these guys and get the predator ready for its test and i'll kind of show you just how i have the meter set up here real quick i'll stick the camera in here and again i have that umbrella really just to get the glare off of it but you can see i kind of have one camera there kind of shining at the uh basically the meter and that helps us kind of see what's going on with our test so we'll do the exact same test basically we'll get the outside fridge going and you can see the converter is already going as well so go back inside the trailer now we're going to use this little heater again and if you don't know what these are these little heaters are great i have one inside the bathroom in my rv trailer here and it drives my little hand towels and it keeps the bathroom warm when you want to take a shower i'll put a description link below that way if you guys want to see what that is those things are great um i'm definitely going to get another one for my for my bedroom as well but we'll shut the fridge real quick i'm going to get this fired up again as well same test and one thing you do notice though that when the predator generator kicks on you don't hear the motor overly rev it just kind of ticks up a little bit if you did listen to the wind generator it would really kind of throttle up and then kind of come back down versus the predator generator like right here you see right there it just kind of throttles up some but not overly aggressive the wind was kind of really jumping up and then coming back down not that that's really anything that's gonna you know make or break this deal but just something that's noticed all right so we're gonna get the microwave started again and during these videos i normally edit them so they're not 20 minutes or 30 minutes long but on this particular part of the video i'm not going to edit it anymore i'm just going to let it run as is because i want you guys to see what happens with the predator generator as we continue on so as you can see the light is flashing and when the predator light flashes it just means it's overloaded which we're at the rated amps at 25 we're just over a little bit but our amps and our bolts look good and so what we're going to do is we're going to go draw a little bit more power from that heater and then we'll kind of continue watching from there because again i don't want to edit this i just want you guys to see what happens so we'll draw a little bit more power from the heater and we'll continue on now you can see the light is really flashing and you can even see the volt meter that's actually on the predator it says 115 volts and that's where our meter is basically about 115 and we're still good and if you're wondering about some of the voltage drops i guess if you were to look at like the nec standards those are for your houses and stuff you're basically supposed to have at least 114 volts um when it's under load and such um and as far as distance there's some other variables at playing a factor of that but i think they normally want you 114 volts and above but we're going to keep drawing our power here a little bit and as you can see the light is almost steady on when the light goes steady on then the generator will probably shut off in about 15 to 30 seconds but um we're still kind of having it flicker a little bit and again this is rated at 25 amps and our bolts are still fine at 114 we're still doing okay there but uh as we take a look outside it's still running it doesn't smell weird or anything um but i can't see the monitor from inside the trailer it's it's out there recording separately and i have to edit them together but uh so i did this test another time in a different day and it just kind of kept running and so that's why i was wondering at 30 amps i was like i don't know how long this thing will run so i just added more power until it would shut off so we're going to turn on this fan here real quick it's going to be on low it's going to be a couple more amps the ac is not on it's just the band but now you can see that light is steady on and now our voltage is about 111 and i mean that's still good but bad because normally industry standards i mean i'm not a full electrician or anything like that i have had some training but normally i mean you can still run stuff on 110 volts and above um but you can see there the generator finally shuts off and well over it's rated of 25 amps so it's just kind of impressive but it kept going i mean honestly it should have shut down sooner as soon as it got to about 114 that thing should have shut off so we'll take a look out here real quick at the generator and it smells fine it didn't smell overheated but we'll look at the stats real quick and you can see they both claim 57 db and the wind was just a little bit louder and then if you look at the rated amps and then kind of what we hit as far as our peak overall the numbers do look better on the wind generator and i mean still it was pretty impressive of what the predator did um it should shut off a little bit sooner but still i mean it just kind of kept going but if you guys have a question please feel free and leave a comment let me know some suggestions that you might have seen during the video and i hope you guys liked it and until then i hope to see you guys next time [Music] [Music]

Channel: Johnnys Weekends

Views: 93,184

Rating: 4.870235 out of 5

Keywords: Predator, predator3500, WEN, WEN generator, invertergenerator, home generator, rvgenerator, rv, offgrid, wen3800, bestgenerator, drycamping, boondocking

Id: KQp4rLPJwwU

Length: 14min 14sec (854 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021