Cummins Onan Quiet Series Onboard RV Generator - 10,000 Watts - Diesel

Video Transcript for Cummins Onan Quiet Series Onboard RV Generator Reviewed - Quiet Power on the Road

Hey there, neighbors, Kevin here with etrailer, and today, we're gonna be taking a look at Onan Cummins line of RV generators. And I have a couple of different options out here for you today that we're gonna be taking a look at. But for the most part, a lot of this is gonna be mostly just a replacement of one that you already currently have in your motor home or your trailer. Now, in some cases, there are gonna be trailers that are prepped for it, but just didn't have it just because the manufacturer didn't add that in. So in those cases, this would also be a great option for you. Now if this is a replacement, it's gonna be pretty simple to just pick out an exact match for the generator that you currently have.

If you are wanting to upgrade and go with a larger wattage, then that's where you're gonna probably have a little bit more involvement in figuring out what's actually going to fit, so size-wise. And then also just making sure that those connections are gonna be in the same spot so that way you're not having to run new lines or add your exhaust into a different spot, and maybe make a bunch of different modifications to your trailer or motor home. Now if you are adding this in in one that's just prepped or you are getting the full install, there are a lot of considerations to take into account, and the first one being your fuel type. So if this is going into a trailer, you most likely are only gonna have propane on there. You typically aren't gonna have a gasoline or diesel tank already installed on your trailer unless you possibly have a toy hauler, which in some cases, those will have a gas tank in the back toy hauler section so that way you can fill up your toys when you're out and about.

Now if you have a motor home, that's where you're probably looking at either the gasoline or the diesel, and these are gonna tie into your motor home's gasoline or diesel tanks. So you'll be pulling directly from that. Now there is a safety feature in there so that way it's not gonna overdo it and drain your tank so then you're not stranded when you're out in your remote location. Now once you figure out what your fuel source is going to be, the next step is going to be figuring out how much wattage you need. And the sizing on that wattage is also gonna determine what amperage circuit breakers you're gonna have and just how many you will.

So as you start increasing in that wattage, you're now gonna have a larger amperage circuit breakers and you can have more than one. So if you're under 5,500 running watts, then you will only have one circuit breaker, and that's pretty much gonna be a 30 amp circuit breaker. Once you start getting into those higher levels, that's where you're gonna start running into models that'll have either 230 amp circuit breakers or 130 and 120 amp. And that's super important because that's how much power we're gonna have to actually run all of our equipment in our motor home or our trailer. So you wanna make sure that you're actually getting exactly what you need and not gonna be having an issue where now I have to turn off certain appliances just to make sure that I don't overload the circuit and I can actually power everything I need to.

So taking a closer look, right next to our Start and Prime button, we have our circuit breakers. So you can see it's set for 30 amps on this, and we have two of them right here. So we know that we can easily power two AC units on our RV. Now one other factor that might be important for you is whether or not your generator has a built-in inverter and there are a few of the options that are gonna come with that included in it. And what that's gonna do is provide a nice, stable power source for your sensitive electronics, which is gonna be your cell phones, your laptops, and your TVs. Typically when you're camping, you just leave that TV plugged right into the outlet, so you might not have the best surge protection for it. So making sure that your power source, which in our case, would be the generator, is going to provide that stable power so that we don't potentially damage our electronics. Now one of the biggest features with Onan and Cummins line of generators is that they have a lot of sound deadening built into it so that you're not disturbing others around you and you're not losing sleep when you have your generator running overnight. If we look at the backside of our panel, you can see how thick that sound deadening is on there and that the heat shield that it has on here to kind of prevent that heat from causing any other issues with anything that's in the compartment it's stored in. Now the muffler is also going to have that same sound deadening so that way it's a much quieter and it's gonna be within the National Park Services requirement of 60 decibels at 50 feet. So that way, like I said, you're not disturbing anyone else and you can still have a nice conversation without having to yell. Now in most of these setups, you are gonna have a remote start. So you will have some wiring that's ran into typically a panel somewhere inside your trailer with the same kind of Primer and Start button on it so that way you can run the generator while you're still inside. But if for some reason you have some kind of issue with that panel or maybe you just didn't have that ran for you and you're maybe doing a new setup, you can still come right out to the unit and pop off the door and you can get right to this and start it up and be ready to go. Now as with any other kind of engine, there's gonna be some maintenance required so that you can make sure that you're getting the full life out of the product, and Onan does a really great job of giving you the support that you need to make sure that you know exactly what you should be doing. If you look in your instruction manual, there's a really big chart that lists out every single model and it has each thing that you should do at each amount of hours used. And they also got a little portion of that as well right here in the Service Information section on our actual generator. And if we look at that, that's gonna tell us when we should be checking our oil level, when we should be replacing our oil filter and our air filter. And then it also tells us the part numbers for those so that way we're not looking for anything. We know exactly what we need to get and we can purchase it and make sure that we're all ready to go here. Now there will be oil that needs to be changed in this, especially after a little bit of use. So you'll use this and then need to replace the oil. And then from there, it'd be more of a routine maintenance based on the amount of hours you're using. But when it comes to engines, especially a diesel one, you should definitely run it routinely. Even if you're not really using it, to use it, at least just turn it on and run it for a little bit. That way it can kind of work through some of that fluid and there's nothing that's gonna get stagnant inside of it. If you are putting away your motor home or trailer for storage, you are gonna make sure that you either drain out the fuel or put in some stabilizers so that way you don't have that sit there, like I said, and get stagnant and then potentially damage the engine and then now you're looking at a much larger repair. Now one other thing you should take into consideration is going to be your elevation. So with any engine, it's burning a sort of fuel, and the amount of air to fuel ratio, it can kind of change as you start getting higher and higher above the sea level. So for every a thousand feet above sea level, you're looking at a 3.5% drop in efficiency. So you will want to take that into account if you are going higher and higher. Maybe you're going to Denver and you're gonna be really high up in that elevation. Now your generator's not gonna perform as well as it would if you were, you know, down at sea level. So just one little piece of food for thought just to make sure that you really understand exactly what you're getting with your generator. But now that we've kind of gone over some of the finer details here, why don't we actually go see one in use Now we have our motor home lifted up so you guys can get a better picture of what is going on under our generator. So first thing you can really see here is our exhaust. So our exhaust is running down and just shooting to the back of the motor home. It's a good idea to get under here every once in a while and check just to make sure that you don't have any kind of exhaust leak or any kind of fuel leak. And right next to our exhaust here is going to be a couple other attachment points. So we have our power and our ground right next to it. And then further up towards the front, we have our fuel supply and our fuel return. And that's where you're really gonna be looking for those leaks, making sure that there's no fuel leaking out anywhere 'cause you don't want to start the generator and obviously have any kind of issue or just have fuel leaking out because this is tied into the gas tank for your motor home. So you don't wanna just continuously be losing fuel. On this little hatch right here, we'll pinch these two together and drop that down. And then inside of there, you can see our fuel filters. Looks like we have two of them right here: one for the supply and one for the return. And then further up, you can see this gray oil filter. So that's where you'd have to get into there and pop out your oil filter, get that replaced. And then our drain plug for our oil pan is right over here. So you can see the bolt tied right in. So we'd wanna pop that out, drain out all of our old used up oil. And then the actual fill port is further up. So we can get back out from under here and take a look at that. But before we do, you wanna point out one other thing, and that's gonna be our air filter. So over on this side, it's kind of set up just like you would see on your lawnmower. You got a wing nut here and we'll just pop that off. Pop that cover out. You can see our air filter. So it's super easy design to get to it and then you can clean it out or replace it as needed. So up top, I closed our controls, you're gonna have your inlet for your oil and for your coolant. And they even have a tag here telling you exactly which specific oil you should be using. Now that can differ depending on if it's colder or if it's warmer. So they do have a little bit of info on that in the owner's manual to tell you which type you should be using so you have the right viscosity for that temperature. And like I said, right behind the oil one, we have our coolant. And you can kind of see too, 'cause the coolant reservoir is right here too, it's a clear plastic, and they've got a minimum and a maximum. We're just barely over the minimum here. So as you can see, they only have 18 hours and 7/10 of an hour actually ran on this motor. So they're just almost to that threshold at that 20-hour mark where they need to replace their oil, replace the oil filters, and do a little bit more pre-maintenance here just to get past the initial set up from the factory and make sure everything's gonna be running properly. So probably the next trip that they go out, this is gonna be one where they're gonna wanna run it probably a little bit beforehand to get all that maintenance done so that way when they're out at their campsite, they're not having to do all this extra work or try and clean up an oil spill if they end up having a little bit drip out, 'cause obviously you don't wanna have that at your campground. All right, so we're outside now. We're gonna go through our pre-check list and we're actually gonna turn on our generator. Now in each one of these, you're gonna have that quick start guide and on page two, it's gonna have your pre-check list of every single thing you need to check. And it's even got a little box there for you. With how this is laminated, you could even throw this in somewhere. Maybe you put a hole punch through it right on the corner and then zip tie it up somewhere inside here so that you always have it right next to it, so you can double check everything beforehand. And then you could use a dry erase marker to check off each one of those boxes to know that you did it every single time. So first step is going to be just double checking, making sure that our carbon monoxide detectors are actually functioning inside of our motor home. We wouldn't want to have any exhaust leaking up into there and not have some way to detect it to make sure that we're staying safe. From there, we're gonna be looking for any kind of fuel or exhaust leak. So that's where you kind of look under, see if there's any kind of dark spots under your generator. Maybe you have a little bit of a fuel leak. Maybe you have some oil that's leaking out or you have a leak through your exhaust. Just a real quick once over would help you determine that. And then from there, we're gonna be looking at how much clearance do we have. So this is like before when I was talking about don't put skirting under your motor home or RV where it's gonna block the airflow for our generator. So we have all this space right here. This all needs to be wide open with some easy access for airflow to go through so that our generator can actually breathe. After that, we wanna make sure that we're turning off every large load that's inside of our RV. And that's gonna be anything running on 110. So that's gonna be your AC units. You don't wanna have those running. You don't wanna have your microwave running or any other thing that's gonna have a pretty big power draw because we don't wanna put a huge load on our generator until it is actually fully running. When it first starts up, it's gonna need a little bit of time and you're gonna hear it kind of drop down to where it idles normally and that is where you wanna be at before you start turning on those heavy loads. So maybe it's a hot day like it is right now and you had both of your AC units running or turned on at least on the inside and then now you come out to start the generator up so you can actually run them. You don't want those both kicking on and trying to draw power from here at the same time. Especially, with the specific model that we have, all it has is one circuit breaker on it rated for 35 amps. So if you have two AC units, you might want to cut it down to just one. If your two AC units can actually communicate with each other, then that would be the better of the two because then it would tell one of them not to kick on at the same time that the other one was. So it wouldn't have as huge of a power draw all at once. But that gets real specific to your specific setup. So there's a lot more to that that you'd have to check. From there, we're gonna be checking our fluid levels. So obviously your fuel, but this is pulling from your actual fuel tank for your motor home. If this was on an RV, you definitely wanna make sure that you're checking your fuel tank, making sure that you have enough in there 'cause this will have a cutoff so that it doesn't completely drain your tank. From there, we also have our oil, our coolant. We wanna double check those. Make sure those are topped off to where they need to be. We don't want our generator to be too low or too high on that and then have some issues. And then from there, we are going to just check and fill the hydraulic pump. Depending on if your model has that or not, there'll be an oil reservoir for that as well. So once all that's good, then we'll come over to our Prime and Start button here. So on the bottom of this button, it's gotta stop and we're gonna sit there and we're gonna hold that. You'll hear a pump running and that's just providing fuel into the carburetor. Once that is full enough and it's primed up, that's when we can go to actually start it. So I'm gonna sit here, we'll hold this, the light is gonna come on on our button here for our switch. We'll run that for about 30 seconds. On diesel models, they say to run it for a full minute while you're starting to prime it. This has already ran a couple of times so. (generator revving) Started right up. So now that it's running, we're gonna let it just run for three to five minutes and you'll hear it start to drop back down. It'll idle a lot lower and that's when you know that it is fully ready to go and you can go and turn on those loads inside of your trailer or your motor home. All right, so we've let this run for a couple minutes. It's idle down to where it needs to be. We know that we're getting nice steady current through here. Big thing I wanna talk about now is just sound, so a little bit louder. If I was at a campsite with a bunch of other campers running, you probably hear a lot more noise from everyone's ACs kicking on and running. So this wouldn't be too above normal, but it is a little bit louder. Now there is a muffler built into it, so it is a lot quieter. It does meet the USDA standards for 60 decibels of 50 feet. But let's go inside too. Let's get a idea of how loud it's gonna sound because typically you're not gonna be standing right next to the generator. So once we're over on the other side of the motor home, it is a lot quieter. But let's see how it actually sounds when we're inside of our camper and see this is gonna be too disturbing to where you're not gonna be able to sleep. So right now, we're inside of our RV and the generator's actually mounted up just below the bed here just a little bit off to the back. And honestly, it is rumbling. You can definitely feel the vibration through the frame rails coming up throughout the motor home here. But at the same time, it's quiet enough that you can hear me talk and I'm not really talking super loud here. I mean I'm having a normal conversation. All right, so I just turned the AC on, completely drowned out the noise from our generator. Now obviously you can still, through your feet, feel the vibration through the floor, but like I said, just the air rush through all of our duct work is going to drown that out. So be a lot more enjoyable. Now typically when you have a generator installed on your RV, there's already gonna be some sort of remote switch so that way you're not having to get out of your RV every single time you wanna go and start and stop it. Typically, it's usually right in the walkway when you first come in on motor homes. On a fifth wheel or travel trailer where there's an onboard generator, typically that's going to be up a little bit more. Usually you'll have some sort of control panel that's gonna have your black tank, your water heater, your gray tanks, all of that stuff, all kind of combined into one single panel. And that's usually where they're gonna mount that button. And you'll usually see something kind of like this switch right here where you can kind of press it back or forth just like it is on the generator itself. Now this one I hear specifically is a battery disconnect, so it's not exactly it, but just a little bit of a reference so that you can actually look for that when you are. All right, so here is our generator layout here on our control panel. Obviously, if your control panel's different, this is gonna be a little bit different of a setup, but for the most part, it's pretty simple. Just sit there and hold Start. It says, "Starting." (generator rumbles) And then this is the part where we'd wanna wait just a little bit, let it fully kick on, get up to a safe and constant running speed, and then we could turn on our loads. So with this display, it also gives us a little bit more, showing us exactly how powers ran. So one of the things is, you know, am I gonna have to actually go into my panel and physically turn off circuit breakers so that I make sure I don't accidentally overload it With this one, they probably have it all kind of set since they have a transfer switch too, to only do a certain amount so that you're not overdoing it on there. That would be something I'd definitely wanna check with the manufacturer first though, just to make sure I'm not potentially gonna run into an issue where I overload that circuit and it pops the breaker on our unit. But here, you can see it's running up. It's hitting our transfer switch, so now it's not taking any power from shore power. It comes over to our breaker box and then is running out. So it looks like they have also charging the house battery as well. So that way if your house battery was dead, you could run the generator and power. Maybe you have a electric jack system on your RV and you just are at too low of a voltage. Typically, especially if you have like the Lippert Ground Control, you need to have 12.73 volts. And a lot of the time, we run into issues where we're just barely under that at like 12.4 volts and then it doesn't wanna work. So you can easily just turn on your generator, power up the house battery enough to where it's ready to go, and then activate your landing gears. All right, now that we've kind of gone over some stuff though, we can just simply hit the Stop button. It immediately stops off and we're all good to go. Well, that's gonna do it for our look at the line of Onan Cummins RV generators. My name's Kevin, and I hope this helped you answer any questions you might have or help you kind of decide which one is going to be the right fit for your setup. If you still have any other questions or you still need help picking out the right one, please feel free to reach out to us via ask the experts link, a comment on this video, or a phone call to our customer service department. We'd be happy to help you out in your journey.