What Real People Say

Billy T. Lincoln, NB

My Westinghouse wgen9500df Dual Fuel Story

You already get your power from a Westinghouse generator! Their giant 440 megawatt generators power the grid, so I asked for one of their steam turbine babies and to my surprise, they said “no” but they did send me this dual fuel portable generator! It was not as noisy as I had expected.

Check this thing out man! This is exciting! I got this portable generator today, it’s the Westinghouse WGN9500df portable generator. This is a dual fuel generator that runs on gasoline or propane. It cranks out 9,500 continuous watts and 12,500 peak. Man this thing is a beast with a good-sized gas tank! It’s got a bunch of features we’ll get into. Look at all the stuff that can run on here: microwaves, sump pumps, air compressors, and more. So I’m gonna hook it up to a bunch of stuff show you all the things it can do.

We’re gonna push it pretty hard. I am going to hook it up to my well pump which takes a lot of startup current,see if it can handle that. I think it will but we’ll find out. We’re also going to show you three different ways to hook this up to your house! Like the good, the better, and the ultimate portable generator.

All right, we’ll get this machine out of the box, and let’s get some! Okay guys so here’s everything it comes with: you got the oil funnel, key fob, user manual and got a few parts, got some oil we’re going to pour in right behind the gas tank. They even give you a nice little funnel to go with it, plus tools like a spark plug wrench and a key fob.

These are the axles. They need a couple of washers for the never-flat wheels which makes it conveniently portable. Here’s the front feet with vibration isolators. Nice! There are the wheels and they even give you a little charger so this should only take about 10 minutes with my tool kit to get this portable generator going.

So, let’s get it together, it looks like a minimal assembly-required job. Take the washer, then put it through, then we’re just going to slide the wheel over the axle, then install the cotter pin in there. Beautiful! All right, so I have one more little step to do. We got to hook up the battery so they put the terminal ends on and they gave us this little connector. They’re just trying to make it super easy for us to do this right so there can’t be any mess-ups. Well there you go, it’s the charger plugs in you don’t even have battery terminals they’ve made this super easy, no need for a lift bracket.

Let’s take a little closer look at the remote start. First of all, it is dual fuel with a propane hose. We have gasoline and we have propane. This is how you switch back and forth. You got the start button, built in fuel gauge, the run stop switch, and battery indicator. This is where you plug in a smart switch that can auto start the portable generator like on a transfer switch. This is your main breaker. We aldo have a data center that provides information like the run hours stuff like that. Over here we’ve got four outputs: we’ve got two on two of the 120 volt 20 amp circuits, and we’ve got a 30 amp 120/240 volt circuit and we’ve got a 50 amp 120/240 circuit and gfci outlets. They all have these nice covers that seal up. I like those because they keep the dust, dirt and bugs out of the st switch and they’re all individually fused. Very nice!

So yeah, I’m impressed with this. I think it’s got everything you need in a portable generator including automatic low oil shutdown and it’s very well laid out, including remote start. Here moving around we’ve got the battery. It has a disconnect here if you need to switch it off. The oil fill, then the propane regulator coming around the side. Here’s the pull start in case your battery’s dead then you can still start it up. We have a fuel shut off so you turn it on for dual fuel operation with the remote start.

I always turn this valve off to shut the fuel off before I turn the portable generator off and that’ll run the gas out of the carburetor and keep it from gumming up the remote start. Here’s your air filter and the choke. Look at that, there is a nice box around the exhaust to protect it and protect you from burns, and a built in fuel gauge. Very nice and well done!

It’s got this handle which doesn’t require you to unbolt it to have it down which is going to make this generator store very nicely. Considering how much power you’re getting out of this, it’s in a pretty small package which includes remote start and an st switch . Now let’s take a closer look at our connections. First of all, you could just come right up to your 20 amp circuit plug in your basic extension cords and just plug in whatever you want up to 20 amps each right that’s pretty simple. Next up you got the 30 amp connector four prong this guy goes right in here, it has a good connection twist. It’s held in there nicely. That’s your 30
The last thing I want to show you is the smart switch transfer switch. This will auto start the generator. It has two connections: first the data connection control that plugs in right here twist on like so and it also comes with its own 30 amp cable. These cables are pretty long so you can get the generator far away from the house. There you go, that’s the basic hookup for it we’ll talk more about that later.

For now let’s go ahead and get this thing cranked up and see what it’ll do. First, we want it on gasoline okay? I am ready to crank it up as soon as I find the key fob. I am just gonna turn the fuel on. We’ve got it switched to gasoline. I got her all hooked up. Let’s see if it can run some major appliances after we use the push button electric start which st switch ready.

It sounds like about as loud as a lawn mower. Machines in this class are all loud. So next since we’re out by the shop we’ll plug in a few shop toys and see what it can do. Let’s start with the shop vac. I got all this stuff plugged into the regular 20 amp outlet. There’s the drill press and I’ll leave the bandsaw on and hit the drill press. Running it hard is ok because of the automatic low oil shutdown.

So now for the big dog! This compressor is 15.1 amps so it should be okay with the remote start. I have a 20 amp circuit, let’s see we get. Next I’m gonna tell you three ways you can use this generator to power your house: the good, the better, and the best but first, we want to set this generator far away from the house not in a garage not anywhere where the fumes can get into your house. It can be deadly, alright? e’ve got it set up in a well ventilated area and the first way we’ll talk about is the easy one. You just get a couple of extension cords run them right into these two 20 amp circuits and then we’ll run these right into the house and power our stuff through its voltage output.

Then you just take the other ends pop them through an open window close it down a little bit, maybe run a little duct tape along there and you’re good to go. Let’s crank this up and then we can start plugging stuff in. I’m gonna plug in the refrigerator then some light bulbs then maybe a couple of window units, a remote start, a flat screen TV and maybe a chest freezer.

A better way to make use of this generator during a storm or power outage is to use a transfer switch. Instead of using these little 20 amp plugs and going through windows with extension cords and plugging everything in we’re going to go to the 30 amp or the 50 amp and run it to a transfer switch right into our home’s electrical system. This makes it much easier to run major appliances. Let’s take a closer look at that. This is how the power gets into the house on these two transfer switches. Now you could just run one big transfer switch and be all on utility or all on generator but by having the flexibility of the individual circuits we can run big loads like a water heater and the well pump separately. You wouldn’t want to run them both at the same time. You run your water heater, heat up all your water and then turn it off. Next, put your well pump on with the key fob, then take your showers and then turn that off, then maybe do the dryer. Be careful not to leave the key fob in there near the rubber outlet.

With the big generator here it will power most of this house all at the same time. We just got to be careful about the bigger loads so let’s switch on some of these circuits and see what this generator can do. We’ve powered up generators on our transfer switches are hot everything is turned off and we’re going to switch one thing out at a time so we can measure the watts being pulled by each thing we turn on.

Let’s start with the air conditioner in the bedroom. So, I just got that one switched so you may see 10 or 20 watts. That’s the bedroom light and now we’re going to turn on a window unit then switch it to cool, it’s just the fan. The compressor kicked in let’s see the corresponding watts.

I’m gonna switch that off then turn on the pool pump. We should see some watts coming up on that. Let’s switch the pool pump back to low, then to off. Now we’re going to turn our pool pump off switch and now we’re going to try something harder. This is the water heater so this guy will be about 3 500 watts. We hear the westinghouse wgen9500df dual fuel kick in and that’s about 3500 watts. That’s the water heater running on the generator.

I’m gonna go ahead and switch that water heater off and now we’re gonna try a real tough one, a sump pump. We’re going to do the well pump there’s a big startup current on this. To get the well to kick on I need to open up the water, that’ll force it to kick on. This will be a good test. Whoa, that did it no problem! Actually that’s 2o watts continuous, I am not sure we’ll be able to capture the peak wattage. I’ll let it run till the well is pumped up. The pump filled up the tank, topped it off nice then has shut itself off. Great,so that worked!

Now here’s another big test. This is the dryer. The startup current might not be so bad but this does run a little over 6,000 watts I believe so let’s see what we got here. Well it’s handling it all right so the generator is handling the dryer which uses about 6 000 watts. I think the 30 amp circuit can handle up to 7,200 watts so we’re pretty close to the limit of the durable cast iron sleeve.

Now I’m going to tell you about the best way to use this generator to power your house for the long term. I have to say that for this to work, you must have battery-backed off-grid solar. Most people don’t have that of course but this is just something to keep in mind as you’re making plans for the future.

I am going to hook this up the same way as the transfer switch except it’s going to come into this transfer switch with a single cord hookup instead and that drives into the solar and all that power goes into this battery bank. So why is this better than just using a transfer switch? Because let’s say you’re going to be out of power for two weeks we’re going to run that generator 24 hours a day, 7 days per week. It’s going to burn up a lot of gas, right? Most of the time you’re only going to be pulling 500 to maybe 2,000 watts off of it, so much of that energy is being wasted. This way i can run the generator at 7,000 watts into this battery bank to charge it for two hours straight. That’s 14 kilowatt hours which gives me enough power to run our house and air conditioner for a full day. Now I only have to run my generator for two hours instead of 24 hours. That saves a ton of gas or makes your gas last a lot longer.

will be a really good test of our westinghouse wgen9500df dual fuel because this system has 260 amp battery chargers and we can dump about six or seven thousand watts into this battery bank for the next couple of hours. Let’s hook this thing up and see what it can really do. It should be able to handle it since it’s got 9,500 watts so we’re still not getting to close. Next I’m going to see how much power it can actually take in. 30 amps is close to ten percent of its lifetime hours. We’re going to start low and we’ll ramp it up. Now we’re going to switch on our generator that should give us power up to here. Our chargers are turned on it’s going to check that power quality to make sure it’s a good clean power. If it likes it, then it will charge the battery and backup power supply. There you go, it likes it. Atta boy, westinghouse wgen9500df dual fuel!

It is not pulling any real current yet. There it goes, that’s 10 amps at 50 volts. Let’s go to 40 percent, see the amps climbing 16, 17, 18. Oh wow, 51 amps! You can hear the generator struggling a lot! Wow, 90 amps! That’s still very much in line with what this generator can do. We’ve been putting about 5,100 watts into it for a while. It’s cranking 91 amps, that’s 80 percent of our 30 amp circuit capacity so we can turn that up just a little bit more. I mean theoretically, we’re not even close to what this carb compliant generator can do, so we’ll go to 90 percent put that up to 100 amps. That’s a lot of power for DuroMax XP10000EH vs Westinghouse WGen9500DF! With the losses that’s probably 7,000 watts coming out of that generator right now. Let’s see how it likes the durable cast iron sleeve, should be able to put some serious heavy duty lifetime hours on it.

That’s almost to the capacity of my charging system. Right now the westinghouse wgen9500df dual fuel is running just about everything in this house except for the big loads, but it’s got all the lights, air conditioners, sump pump, water heater, pool pump, TVs, vft data center, entertainment centers and computers. The low automatic oil shutdown feature takes the worry out of running it for an extended time period. It’s about everything and it’s doing a great job with regular maintenance! I am real happy with it knowing it is lifetime technical support backed. We’ll see how it does over the years then provide an update maybe in a year or two, but for now that’s it. Next, we look at Westinghouse portable generators.