Thanks for that Garry.
This is what I’ve been experiencing this week with my generator. Instead of charging my batteries fully everyday, I try and run my generator 3 times per day to keep the oil on the thinner side.
We woke up to -47 this morning and inside my generator shed was -3F. I found out by waiting until it’s 10F, the generator will run and stay running rather than shutting down. I’ve always run 15-40 in my diesel generator, well, because that’s what they recommend. I just bought some 5-40 and will do an oil change tomorrow to curb this problem. From now on, I will do an oil change in the Spring and the Fall using the two different weights of oil.
My Son came up this past week to try and get some pictures of some ‘smoke on the water’ but by the time he got up here, most of the smoke was gone because it warmed up to about -10F. He took some nice pictures though.
This is me walking walking on the heaved up ice on the largest lake in the world.
Two points there. The synthetic claims and I think rightly so that they leave a layer of film on the surfaces in the engine. I remember a test when mobile 1 first came out where they drained the oil out of two motors side by side and the mobile 1 motor started and ran a crazy time before dieing. I have some faith in that because I am sure my first truck took some serious abuse. I bought that truck at 30k I think abused it every way you could until it had 80k running mobile 1 the entire time. My brother was a mechanic at the time and we pulled the head and replace the gaskets to stop the leaks when we changed the timing chain. He was shocked that it still had deep cross hatches in the cylinder walls. Turned out my oil leaks was just synthetic oil seeping past the old gaskets. Unfortunately shortly after that maybe 120k on the truck bad gas killed the carburetor.
My second thought is you need an oil heater to go with the block heater. It doesn’t get cold enough here to justify them but the loggers use oil heaters all the time above the notches in the winter. Northern NH and Maine being above the notches.
I grew up with those sliding scopes. Well to be honest my neighbor had one and a driveway not much longer then her car. I would clean her driveway simply to get the use of it for our driveway that was probably 100 feet long and 2 cars wide. It was much faster to clean both driveways then to use a shovel for ours. That is how poor people help each other I guess.
I believe in synthetic, primarily mobil 1. I figure oil is the cheapest and most critical maintenance a person can do on an engine. Minus 40 is a very exceptional temperature for here, maybe one night every other winter. (Not to be confused with windchill, a meaningless figure for machinery)…
But if synthetic pours like that at minus 40, it’s not going to flow right, and probably risks twisting the shaft right off your oil pump. The chain oil was even more pronounced, I’ll bet I could stand a screwdriver up in the standard weight chain oil. It was like wax. The thinned stuff would not do the job either, so heads up, winter grade means maybe minus 10 or 15C, or keep your chainsaw indoors, my preference.
My preference is to stay indoors without the chainsaw when it is not even that cold. Lol
My pasquali at about 10F today would hardly pump the hydraulic oil that stuff is what about 20 weight I think. It was a nightmare getting it to warm up enough to clean out for my hay customer. Normally the hydraulics on a tractor pick up enough heat from the motor not so on that tractor apparently.
Haapio you need to decrease the resolution size of your individual pictures.
Above I did six pictures with a total of 1,288 kb.
Modern cameras, Iphones, and computers make multiple mega-bite too dense of pictures. Overloading downloads.
Regards
Steve Unruh
I run the generator until it’s 70-80F in the building. It’s a 3 cyl diesel with a 10kW generator. Plus I have eight 6V batteries that weigh about 100 pounds each. I would hope that’s enough mass but it isn’t. I built the building with 2x6 construction with r21 insulation. All that still isn’t enough.
Hey KristijanL,
and I thought you were joking about only-at-best 40% efficient IC engine/electrical generator technology. With lots of heat and noise.
Not 72% efficient quiet, smooth woodgas technology.
S.U.
I have a question for you human pop cycles. Does it bother anyone else that it’s not the winter of 2020 any longer. Personally I’d like to put this year in the rear view mirror.
Winter 2021 won’t start until October ish. Summer 2021 is just around the corner. Somebody must have prayed for patience so the big guy figured we all needed a big dose this last year or so.
Personally, on the farm I have little concern for the covid situation. Retail situations concern me, especially with the upcoming prevalence of the far stronger variants. But that isn’t very much of my time. I also have an uneasy feeling about how this will affect the rest of society, and I fear we’re about to find out. And the economic effects of the massive stock market meltdown and bailout haven’t been seen yet, or the personal and business bankruptcies that will surely come.
Depending on your cellphone messaging app, if you send the pics to someone, they get automatically resized. Then you can click on the sent images and save them, they should go to your downloads folder. Those pics will upload easily.
No concerns for you Gary. Your government has proposed absolving all your debts and in exchange all you have to do is give up your rights to personally own anything, ever. However they will then let you work their land and raise their cattle and pay you something for your efforts. I’m sure they will be making those of us south of the border the same offer soon.
I don’t know where you’re getting information like that from.
We’re in largely the same boat as you guys.
The major differences are that we have a nationally funded Medicare system where in broadest strokes, nobody has to worry about going bankrupt over a medical emergency. So that’s a huge boost and support in this pandemic.
The feds here did roll out a 2G monthly emergency living support for those who lost their jobs due to the pandemic. It’s a temporary thing, but the pandemic isn’t ending either. We’ll see if it lasts the year. Sooner or later the feds are going to pull that and there’s going to be a real estate and credit meltdown I fear.
The provinces and feds have rolled out a patchwork of subsidies for businesses, assistance to pay rent while shut down, and low interest loans which will have to be paid back.
And that’s basically it. Small businesses will be filing for bankruptcy in droves by mid year, I expect, especially after the 3rd wave lockdowns.
I’m more than surprised by what you think are factual statements. I think this illustrates the dangers of echo chambers and fake news sources.
