Kohler 20RES acting strange lately

jdanner88

Hi all- New guy here with a bit of an issue currently going on. I had the Kohler 20RES stand-by home generator installed about 10 years ago. It runs once weekly for about 30 minutes like it should and has never skipped a beat. Has always powered right up during outtages in my area and has received all routine maintenance throughout the entire time. I recently had a guy out for it's bi-yearly tune up service(same guy who's been coming for the past 5-6 years). When he finished he said everything looks and sounds great, no issues whatsoever to report. Later on that same day around 10pm it powered on and immediately powered off. Every day since he came to service it, it's been doing the same thing. For the first week it was doing it 1-2 times daily. The 2nd week it got more frequent, 2-3 times daily. The 3rd week 3-4 times daily and now for about the past week or so it does it 4-5 times daily. It starts firing and as soon as it fires up it powers down so it's turning on and off in about 1.5 seconds  total. We'll, earlier this afternoon it powered on for approximately 10 seconds and just recently it powered on and stayed on for 20 minutes with throttling at around the 10 minute mark. I called the guy back out 2 weeks after the service, told him whats going on and he said he reset it, bit that was all he could do because he only knows Generacs and not Kohlers. I can't imagine this is due to something the service tech did to cause this but I can't think of anything else. Has anyone else ever come across this issue before or something similar? I'm trying to diagnose this myself if possible because honestly I can't afford to foot a sizeable repair on it at the moment. I just powered it down for the time being until I figure something out because I'm sure it's not good for the unit to power on/off this many times daily. Any and all help would be appreciated! Thanks

BB.

Sorry to read about your generator problems. Automatic gensets have lots of safety circuits that can cause the genset to shutdown (temperatures, oil, genset output voltage/frequency, etc.).

Is this your manual?

https://resources.kohler.com/power/kohler/residential/pdf/tp6804.pdf

Have you been able to see any faults from the genset controller(s)?

-Bill

jdanner88

Hi Bill,

Thanks for responding. Sorry I didn't reply sooner, I didn't get a notification you responded. The manual you referenced isn't the exact same as I have but it is very similar. I'm attaching a picture of my manual as well as a picture of the display screen on the unit. It has not thrown a code that I'm aware of. The OSD reads 312.9 at the time of writing this. I powered the generator off 4 days ago and turned it back on yesterday evening. It started and ran for 25 minutes agaon today and was throttling at around the 10-15 minute mark like before. Please let me know if there is anything else I can check or do.