Kohler 8.5RES - 8.5 kW Home Standby Generator

Bottom line: It appears to be running after an early failure. We won't know for sure until we run it hard in the spring at our camp.

Our 12-year-old Kohler 8500 watt generator packed it in August 2012 at 4800 hours. We considered Generac ($1400 cheaper) but since this for an off-grid solar + storage batteries + generator use, we wanted best possible reliability and went with Kohler. It arrived in 4-5 days, a day longer than we hoped for but everything delivered to the Adirondack is like that.

Our electrician, who handles 200,000 KW generators and down, got it installed, fired it up, and the new Kohler promptly died after about an hour. They were pretty sure it was a bad actuator board or actuator. We got pretty good (not great) help from the Albany / Adirondacks / NYS Kohler distributor but they gave us some pushback on actually ordering and putting on the service truck the two parts most likely to be at fault. (What if it's not the right parts, they said. Not our problem, we said life is full of uncertainties, we said, and you can ship it back.) The Kohler tech came a day or two later, spent an hour poking and prodding, and found it was actually a manufacturing screw-up: a component had come loose or unscrewed, something that was hidden from view. We're up to 50 hours and it runs properly, we believe.

We're annoyed that a defect cost us a couple hundred dollars. Kohler handled the warranty work but we had to pay for repeat visits from the electrician and our caretaker had to come on site to let the electrician in. I don't think we're getting that money back.

We're about to put in a same-size or bigger generator for our house in NJ. The Kohler defect was probably a statistical anomaly (we hope, else we paid 40% more for the Kohler name). But it has us thinking about Generac as well as Kohler. We also will shop around for an installer, not necessarily a Kohler dealer, and we will separate out the generator-buy (Electric Generators Direct again, most likely) from the generator install. We found both dealers and third-party electricians were charging us $750-$1000 more for the same generator one bidder said even his wholesale price was was higher than what EGD charged us.

Bottom line: All seems to work well now but it was a frustrating several weeks. I wish our Kohler was built a bit better.

For camp/seasonal use, note that the current crop of generators have more complex printed circuit boards that draw down additional energy, so we also had to rig a trickle charger to keep the starter battery from draining in case the generator wasn't used for a week or so, such as sunny periods when solar kept the batteries charged.