Transcript:

Hi, everyone.

Today we're going to go over how to troubleshoot a generator voltage regulator with a 9-volt battery and a screwdriver to get into the control panel. So we're coming up on summertime.

Summer is a time where you typically see a lot of issues with generator ends not getting voltage.

So a lot of the time it boils down to the voltage regulator and it's typically not something with the generator.

This trick will help you determine if it is the voltage regulator or if it's something else major with it. We'll go over that here in a few minutes.

Okay, we're at the generator now and step one would be to check the voltage of the main stator of the generator set to see what voltage we're getting out. So I'm going to go ahead and fire it up, see what our voltage.

We have the multimeter leads hooked up the main phase on the generator, which is wired for 240v.

While voltage setting, we should be reaching 240v.

Here you can see we're reading 30v.

This would be a residual voltage.

This is obviously not what we want, but this is better than 0 volts.

So a couple of things to point out here.

30 volts is typically the residual voltage left in the generator end, which means your voltage regulator, your exciter, is not working to produce an additional voltage in the generator.

So if this is zero, that's a different problem.

That means you don't have residual voltage in your generator end, which could mean a myriad of things, but you would want to.

At that point, you'd have to flash it to get your voltage back in it or follow a different process.

So for now, if you're reading anything less than your nominal voltage and your set voltage for it, then we'll use this trick using the 9-volt battery to see if it's our voltage regulator or something more major.

So move up to the.

So step two would be to find the voltage regulator in the generator set.

This particular generator set Caterpillar xcube product that we replaced the generator end with the Morelli generator end.

And with the Morelli generator end, we replaced it with this MEC20 digital voltage regulator.

That's our regulator on the machine.

This is where you're going to locate your field.

The wires going from the voltage regulator to your exciter field.

On most of them, they're labeled positive and negative.

Some are labeled F1 and F2, some are labeled F positive and F5.

So what we're going to do is we're going to remove those wires.

F1, F2 positive and negative.

We're going to remove them from the voltage regulator and we're going to put them on a 9-volt battery.

What this is going to do is this is going to send voltage from this 9-volt battery to your exciter and we should see our voltage jump up in the main state. This will tell us that the exciter is working and it's not damaged and it's doing its job.

We're ready to put up the 9-volt battery.

We should see the voltage jump up, the rated voltage.

So you should see it go up to 240 volts there.

It's the rated moment when you remove it.

You see it drop back down.

What that's telling us is we've got a problem here at the voltage regulator.

Something with the voltage regulator.

The rest of your generator set is working as it does hopefully.

To note I'm actually going to eat the troubleshoot with this summer.

You have any questions, let us know.

Thank you.