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Redstone Off Grid Test Site It's a hundred acres of paradise far off the beaten path, this time of year, it's best you have a snowmobile to get in. The owners of this high mountain retreat enjoy their privacy, they make it to work via the Satellite dish, and use solar and a diesel powered generator to charge batteries, run the house hold appliances and more. The site has been powered for a number of years via a 12/2 Listeriod using an Utterpower serpentine drive pulley and the ST head with utterpower mods, according to the owner this has provided many thousands of hours of service, there have been few problems, but the Woman of the house hold, (as fit as she is) finds the 12/2 a bit more than she wants to crank over, I think most women would agree :-) Another comment made by the man in the house, "we're not likely to move off our mountain spot anytime soon, and we don't plan on getting younger either." So this electric start option is nice, and will allow Kristina some independence to start and run the generator when I'm off doing other chores. The Redstone sits on a six inch "I" beam frame 50 inches long, and fairly wide, the Gen head is currently the ST10 pulled off the 12/2 Generator frame. There's more left to do, but the plan is to wait for the snow to burn off, and do the permanent install in better weather. We are a bit shy of two months, and we've learned one interesting thing. The Redstone is running off the flywheel, and the head is fitted with the Utterpower 11.25 inch serp pulley, this gives us around 964 RPMs, and the engine is carrying the same loads as the 12/2 and burning very close to one gallon less fuel in an eight hour run over what the 12/2 was doing. It's cold up there, so it's likely a gallon of fuel at 70F. Now I know this is not very useful information, as we don't know how well tuned the 12/2 was, or what our actual fuel usage was. There will be better data when it's a little more enjoyable to be outdoors. There is a little bit of a governor problem with the stock spring at this lower speed, works but no where near ideal. The softer spring should correct the problem. Keeping the wood box full, and out of the weather is the higher priority, a few weeks from now, the snow should recede, and we'll get more useful data on this page.
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