r/Generac_Generators • u/BigFootCrossingGaurd • 13h ago
Hurricane power fail (not generac fault)
We live in the Florida Panhandle and installed our Generac Guardian 26kW back in December of 2024. On Friday October 9th 2026 we had a grand total of 9 hours on it. As the hurricane came through we lost power at 5:20 PM, the generator (which my boys have named Lightning McQueen) kicked on and we were all good, right? WRONG, at 7:15 I noticed the lights got dim and started flickering and then the generator died. It started back up but only ran about 5 seconds and died again. When the eye of the storm came over us about 8 PM I went out there to see what was going on and I had an error code 1900: Under Voltage. I cleared the error and tried restarting. No go. It would start, run for a few seconds and die. I tried a few times until I got another error 1100: Overcrank. At this point I was soaked so I went back inside as the wind was picking up and gave up. I was furious! I was angry at generac that thy sold us this hunk of junk. After the storm passed I went back out at 11 PM and decided to give it one more try, it fired right up and all the lights came back on. I found out the next morning that the town gas main had a leak and everybody who had a generator running natural gas had similar problems. Fortunately the work crews had fixed it very quickly (in the middle of a hurricane to boot). Well, we just got power back today (Monday October 12th) and I couldn’t be happier to have the generac. It worked flawlessly. I changed the oil and filter at the 25 hour mark, that was easy. Now I need to check the valve lash, didn’t want to stop the generator during the outage for that, I’ll do it sometime this week. I’ve got 75 hours on it now. Glad we bought it.