Friday night was windy and a tree blew down on the power lines causing a 12 hour outage. Our Gillette generator, which gets exercised weekly, just wouldn't start. Battery was fine so I had to do some troubleshooting and traced it to a bad fuseholder in the starter wiring. Well, bad isn't exactly the right word - unbelievably cheap is. The fuseholder consists of two yellow sleeves and a fuse that are simply pushed together. No spring, no twist lock, only pushed together. What a cheesy thing to install on an EMERGENCY generator. If anyone has a Gillette generator you might inspect your fuseholders and replace any that are this type. They are apt to fail when you need them most. In my case just pulling it apart and pushing it back together got the genset running again. I've also had troubles with bad connections in the transfer switch - the spade connectors had a tendency to just fall off when you look at them. Very loose - I had to replace a half dozen of them to fix an erratic starting problem so this is something to keep an eye on as well.

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