Westinghouse igen 4500 Review Setup Test Inverter Generator

today we're setting up this guy to go through a test and review and we'll go through all the features that this particular generator happens to have and to see if it might be a viable option for you guys but before we get started we do have to get the generator set up so we'll get everything out of the box which includes that little remote a box full of goodies like this and you'll see that this particular generator does provide us with the oil a oil funnel a little tool kit and also a battery charger to keep that battery charged and ready at all times but before we get started make sure to open up that owner's manual familiarize yourself with some of the content inside because you just might learn something first thing we need to do is get that battery out and get that thing tested to see well what is the voltage on it because my battery happened to be a little bit low on the voltage so get yourself a volt meter take a little test reading and see what it looks like i charged mine for about six hours so now you can see that it's ready to go so all we have to do is take that quick connector and hook it up and while you guys are here if you happen to like the video make sure to like subscribe and ring that bell if you guys want to see more and we'll continue on and get this thing finished setting up so now that we got those little protection caps back on we're done with the battery so now we'll go ahead and move on to the oil as you can see right here it has a little sticker that shows you the amount you need the proper weight and well this one already provides you with the oil that you need so all we have to do now is pop open this little oil cover here and then you can see there's your dipstick right there where the oil goes and also a little drain bolt that is off to the side and so then the next thing we have to do is go ahead and take out that dipstick and we'll just put that off to the side and grab that funnel that they're provided with and you just go ahead and thread it in like so or i'm just gonna go ahead and use my own funnel been using this one a long time easy to do so we'll go ahead and get our oil out and get this thing ready and so when you start filling this up make sure you don't fill it up all the way because what happens is that sometimes these generators when they ship them they will have some oil in it and then when you go to fill it up you're going to easily overflow it make a big old mess and so what you want to do is just put in about a third of a time and check it until you see the oil is up on the threads like that and then you're good to go and you can go ahead and replace that dipstick and if you do happen to change the oil you can use that little bolt right there but in the manual it actually recommends you screw the funnel into that and tip the generator out even though it does have this little drain plug on the bottom i'm not particularly a fan of that because it does kind of make a mess and this oil door is a little bit smaller than some of the other generators out there so not particularly a fan of how they have it set up so we'll take a look at the features this generator has and you can see this one comes with a 30 amp travel trailer plug and then it does have the 120 plugs like normal and then off to the side of that you will see that it does have a couple parallel ports so you can run two of these generators at once with the protection caps on all of your circuit breakers and switches which i do like that your efficiency mode switch there over here you have your run and stop switch and now that lights up since the battery is connected your main on off switch and then this guy here is where you would plug in that battery charger a little start indicator light and then you do have a fuel selector switch which you turn this guy on and then when you're not using it you turn it off and that'll run the generator out of fuel out of the carburetor indicator lights there and then a little lcd display there that shows you some info we'll go over that later you have your dc port here with some usb ports and a big red reset button which you'll see right below that all right so first thing we got to do now is get some fuel inside this generator and then we can go ahead and put that cap back on and we'll get this guy fired up for the first time so the first thing we need to do is turn on the fuel we'll go over here and then turn on the run switch press the button and well not yet so let's see what happens here it'll do it again probably just has to prime the lines get fuel to the carburetor and there she goes up and running and says we take a look there a little bit of smoke coming out probably some fogging oil or maybe assembly oil from the engine but now this guy's up and running as we take a look at the front display and uh currently it actually doesn't sound like it's running correctly seems to be missing so let this run for another minute all right so i let this generator run for about 45 seconds or so and it's still kind of missing so i'm wondering if this one might happen to have one of the problems these westinghouse generators has had and the problem is what happens is when these generators are shipped or either during manufacturing they're not hooking up this automatic choke cable that's connected to the carburetor it's basically an electronically controlled and so as you can see here the generator is actually pumping out smoke which is indicating a rich condition so i'm assuming that's a problem that the choke is partially closed so we'll pop off this side panel real quick and take a look and kind of see what's going on so now that we got the side panel off i'm taking a look at the choke lever and sure enough it's halfway closed and so now when i push it all the way open the symptom goes away so probably it is the choke cable that's not connected and i'll show you what i'm looking at here so that little black lever that's the choke and when that guy is all the way open you can see now that it runs fine it doesn't have the issue anymore so what we need to do is basically take apart this thing a little bit and go look for that cable and see if it's disconnected so we're going to go ahead and take off four screws on the left side we'll take off four screws on the right side and we're gonna pull this panel forward a little bit don't pull too hard and basically we're gonna look for a harness that comes from the carburetor and goes down to the right lower side of the generator and sure enough it was completely disconnected and it wasn't even attached to anything and came right out so this little guy actually connects to a module that's right down there behind that vent so we're going to go ahead and take out all the bolts that are on this side and we're not going to take off the panel basically just going to disconnect all these so we can get some room to work and after we get all these out we also have to take out the screws that are on the back of that exhaust access panel and now that we got that out you can see we can just bend the panel out enough to where we can get some working room and sure enough you can see that's where i routed the cable back down to where it originally was and so this guy has to plug into that little black module that's on the side and when you reroute this cable if you did happen to pull it up make sure it's underneath your pull cable there you don't want it on top of that and i'll show you where this guy gets connected you can see right there it's not connected so i'm going to try and connect this while looking through my camera that way you guys can see just for the heck of it so um if you didn't happen to have the camera it would be a lot easier just kind of plugging it in like so you hear it snap into place and so now we just have to put this thing back together and basically reverse order so we'll start with that rear access panel then we'll go ahead and start working our way to the side panel and putting in all those bolts and again if you guys like the video go ahead and hit that like button for me so you can see with my super human speed it's already back together so go ahead and turn on that on switch again now i'm not going to edit the video i'm going to do this live basically so you can see exactly what happens uh i'll do it just uh you know so you guys can see if it did fix it if it didn't well this thing will get shipped back so there we go we fire it up now it appears to be running right but one thing i don't know is that did i reset the carburetor choke so i am going to actually manually open the choke or basically close it you should say so you see the little black lever again i'm going to stick my hand in here and i'm going to open it up and then there we go so now the choke is fully on and you can see it kind of moved about half closed or half open however you want to say it so now what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to turn off the generator we'll let it sit for just a second and then we'll turn it back on and then when we do fire it back up it's basically gonna rotate that um choke automatically with the little stepper motor and then we'll know if this thing really did fix itself so i'll position the camera here so you guys can see it watch the little choke lever so hold on here and there we go you see the choke moving halfway half open fully open there we go looks like now we'll fix the problem so we're good to go get that side panel back on it looks like everything is running good all the lights are working correctly and now it sounds much better so before we go out and start testing it we'll go ahead and look at the specs and basically it's about a 950 on amazon right now peak watts are 4500 the running watts is 37 it's rated at 31 amps and 110 pounds it's just a little bit of gas in it and has a decent sized tank at 3.4 gallons so we'll get our testing underway with our sound check first and i'm going to do this sound check now my front yard basically i don't have any grass or any walls kind of deflecting the sound or kind of absorbing it and so basically we're at 23 feet away and you can see my little chalk line right there so this will get me a lot more consistent tests as far as you know which generator is kind of running where and so basically what we're going to do is we'll look at this and we'll let it average out just a little bit and the economy motor efficiency switch is on right now and you can see it's about 62 decibels on average and if you were off camping somewhere it would be a lot quieter but just for perspective this is a predator 3500 and it's real popular because it is so quiet you can see just off the bat it's about four four and a half decibels quieter and that is actually a significant amount if it comes to these generators when you're talking about you know how loud it really is but i mean it just all depends how important is that to you because the westinghouse does have actually more usable power so it also is heavier by about 10 pounds on average so and this is another generator i did which was a caterpillar generator and in this guy you can see it also runs a little bit quieter i was actually pretty impressed with that guy seemed to be assembled nice but so i decided to take a walk down the street to see how far i could you know make this key fob work and in the instructions they don't give you a lot of information they just tell you to press the on button so is that a short press a long press double press anyway so i played with it and basically a half second press is all i need and works just fine but i was about 200 feet away and it didn't quite do it and you know now that i'm a little bit closer about 15 feet closer it went ahead and fired up and i think it's only rated for 75 feet give or take i was trying to find out you know what the distance was it really didn't say much but when i tried to shut the generator off it definitely took a few presses to to start working you can see here as i play with it it didn't really want to shut off so i kept playing with it and just did a long press and finally the generator shut off so just to kind of give you an idea now we're going to go ahead and start up our load test so i have a little meter down here off to the side that'll kind of show you and that'll kind of follow along with the meter that's built into the generator and so right now that little f kind of indicates your estimated run time that's left on how much fuel you have that there is the power rating so you can see it says 14 watts on the left so that'd be 10 watts 20 watts would be two and so on that's our voltage and you can see all that kind of matches the meter on the left and then kind of this button is a little sensitive so as you press it that should be the run hours which i don't really have any it's about 30 minutes i did a few heat cycles how many liters and so basically just has those those four or five settings there so we're going to go ahead and just leave it on the load setting when we start the test here and that'll kind of follow along with the meter that's on the left just to give us something to kind of give us some reference and so we're going to use our travel trailer here so this guy is a 30 amp service travel trailer and we have a few items that we'll use inside to kind of put on our load and give us a little bit of testing to kind of give us an idea of how well this generator does so the ac unit in my particular trailer is a 1500k unit or 15 000 unit i should say and it does not have a hard start easy start soft start however you want to call it but those are options you can add to your ac unit if you wanted to start on basically a smaller generator so i'm going to start up the ac unit and it's going to be on high and you can see that the fans already kicked on and then we're gonna wait here just for a few seconds for that compressor to kick on and you'll see on the meter there here just a second that that thing will jump up and then you'll see the compressor will kick on and now that it's going we'll get some cold air coming out of here in just a second and so while we let that kind of equalize that a little bit we'll go down here and take a look at the battery meter there's something i kind of installed just to give me a general idea how my batteries do when i'm out dry camping and basically uh that was only about 30 dollars i'll put a link in the description a little video link up there too and so now we'll go up here and uh check it out real quick nice cold air great so we're going to use the microwave real quick put this on six minutes and so this guy should be about another 10 amps we'll kind of let that guy start running for a little bit and just kind of equal out a little so now we have the ec running microwave is going and so we're at about 75 power we'll use this guy down here that's a 1500 watt heater and it does have three steps that we can use to kind of gradually increase the power and so what we're going to do is we'll turn this guy on to basically the first setting and now with this on the first setting this pretty much takes up with the heater going in ac going in the microwave we're at about 31 amps so we're basically 100 power and so now we're gonna do a sound check as well while this thing isn't fully loaded just to kind of give you an idea how loud it is now i know we're in a different location but i always try to do the sound check in pretty much the same location where the generator sits where my sound meters kind of sits and when i had the predator back here again for reference it was running about 72 and a half to 73 and a half and that caterpillar was running about 73 and a half to 74 and a half and so this one's running just a little bit louder where other generators have ran which is 74 or 75 so when they're all kind of running fully loaded that's pretty much what they all run is is 74 75 db back there so it's just kind of a good reference it you know they're all loud when you're running full power so so we'll turn this up to about 950 watts now and you can see now we're at 32 uh amps and we're running 37.50 as far as our watts go we're pretty much 100 loaded but no overload light yet so doing fine so i think what we'll do is we'll just go ahead and turn this up the rest of the way now we should be at 1500 watts and now we can see the overload light comes on and now we're above 4 000 watts the voltage still looks pretty good holding at 110 and above which is great so other than that generator's doing fine at the moment i'm assuming it should shut down here in probably a few more seconds we'll just kind of watch it and see what happens normally about 30 seconds is about when a lot of these shut off and so it still kind of ran for a little bit so i let it run for about another 45 seconds to a minute so maybe i'll go back here and decide to fire up something like i do have a fridge inside here but actually what i'm going to do is go inside this door and turn on that well actually the generator shut off so don't need to use a little heater so overall the generator did really good i don't know if this is one you guys would like to buy but it's not a bad generator besides a little choke problem but for the price and everything you know it's not bad you get a lot for 950 dollars and just depends if if you guys like or not

Channel: JOHNNY'S WEEKENDS

Views: 8,343

Rating: 4.9589043 out of 5

Keywords: Westinghouse, Westinghousegenerator, Best generator, rvgenerator, homegenerator, igen4500, Boondocking, drycamping, generator, invertergenerator, westinghouseigen4500, onan4500, onangenerator

Id: pVE_FdTGy_E

Length: 15min 42sec (942 seconds)

Published: Thu May 27 2021