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The generator stopped working shortly after we launched Rose Lee and I intentionally put off fixing it until the sailing season was behind us, after all we never had a generator on our previous boats so it didn’t seem like a big sacrifice. This fix took quite a bit of research and several trips back and forth on multiple days to identify what the actual problem was. The generator has a safety feature that will automatically shut itself down when there is a problem, so as a result the generator would shut down after about 5 minutes of running. The salty water cooling flow looked fine lots of water shooting out the side. The fresh water coolant was a little low so I topped that up which seemed to help it ran for about 20 minutes before shutting down. The belt seemed a bit lose and there was lots of belt powder around it so I decided to change the belt and again it was back to running for about 5 minutes before shutting downs. I was pretty sure that the problem was in the heat exchanger and had a buildup reducing my water flow, resulting in overheating. I found out from other owners that the exchanger likely needed to be descaled which is a normal maintenance item. I bought some rdylime de-scaler and set up a method to reverse flush the heat exchanger. I did get some nasty looking stuff out of the exchanger and flushed it for about 4 hours to ensure that it was perfectly clean. I was pretty confident that I had found the problem and was looking forward to proving it. The following day I was back on the boat and started the generator that fired right up and sounded great with excellent water flow…until 5 minutes later it shut down %$#@^&. Ok on the advice of a mechanic who had checked the generator out at the 1st of the season and suggested that I should pull it to have a more in depth look, I decided that maybe this would be the next step. Pulling a permanently mounted fischer Panda genset from underneath the forward birth was a big job so I wanted to be absolutely sure. I got in and around that generator with a light a magnifying glass looking for anything that looked odd. I noticed on the back side of the generator beneath the heat exchanger on one end I could see about a quarter of an inch of hose that looked like it wasn’t really seated properly, but it was hard to see. I looked at diagrams of the generator and determined that the hidden hose was connecting the bottom side of the heat exchanger to the fresh water cooling pump. After some disassembly I was able to get the hose disconnected for the fresh water pump. I had a curved set of pliers and after loosening the hose clamp from the heat exchanger I was able to get the hose out for a closer inspection. The 10” hose looked pretty bad but I wanted to test it to ensure that this was the case. I rigged up a fitting to one end with a plug and on the other end I put on a female water hose connector that would screw onto a water hose. Once I had everything hooked up I turned on the water and was very pleased to see the hose leaking like a siv. Your gear is only as good as its weakest link. I bought and insatlled a new hose. I then topped up the coolant and ran the generator for 4 hrs before winterizing it, problem solved:)
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