96 Year Young Pop Overhauls Generator

While I was living it up in Las Vegas during Affiliate Summit, Pop was home alone. Everything would have been fine if the electricity hadn’t gone off – and stayed off for three days.

Pop is quite self-sufficient and I knew our neighbour would look in on him, various family members would phone him and that he had the number of someone who offered to help if need be, so I wasn’t worried about leaving him for 13 days. Unfortunately a surprise storm whipped up and knocked down a huge number of trees right across the power lines – and phone lines.

After living in this area for 96 plus years, Pop knows how to survive even without electricity. He has a backup water supply to use when the pump won`t run, a wood heater for cooking and heat, and a 12 volt light system. Unfortunately he forgot to put the battery charger on the 12 volt battery so after 2 nights of using the 12 volt lights, the battery died. He was sitting here in the dark when the neighbour came over with candles.

We managed to get the Honda generator running about a month ago and it seemed to work very well. Unfortunately we didn`t test it to see how much it would run. Pop found out very quickly… He shut off the main breaker in the house, hooked up the double ended plug and was able to run 1/2 the house circuits, but the generator kept shutting off after a few minutes. The generator weighs too much for Pop to lift alone so he couldn’t work it over to try to fix it.

I dragged it out onto the deck and together we lifted it to a height where he could see drain the oil and remove the carburetor. His hands were too weak, so I used the wrench accordidng to his instructions to loosen the bolts. We first drained out an excess 1/2 liter of oil, which the troubleshooting manual suggested could be a problem. Next we drained the carburetor then ran the gas through to be sure there was no airlock.

I started it to be sure it would run, then stopped it, shut off the main breaker, hooked the cord up then re-started it. I also turned off the electric heater and unplugged the extra fridge that was on the circuit – and – SUCCESS! The generator ran beautifully, and powered the TV which makes Pop very happy and my satellite receiver and modem and computer – which made ME very happy

Now, we are prepared for the next wind storm – hopefully it doesn’t happen in the near future but we will thumb our noses at mother nature if she throws us another power outtage.