Hi folks I have recently had a generator repaired. It's a Honda engine driving a 5.5KVa Meccalte alternator. The fuel tank was RS, as was the carby, so they were replaced by my local small engines shop, and I was quite happy with the job, EXCEPT: it appears they didn't calibrate anything.

The genset is used as backup power for my off-grid PV + lead-acid system, and it's been working fine for many years. When I got the genny back from repairs, it worked fine except that it didn't seem to work as well as it had before - it was taking longer to charge the batteries. I thought there must have been something wrong with the battery charger.

So, when my solar guy was here last month replacing some old panels, I asked him to check it out. We put a multimeter across the input terminals of the charger and it was only reading ~180 volts! (His multimeter is a "proper" RMS meter). So I went and adjusted the genset (a screw adjuster on the carby) until it was giving us ~240 volts. He was going to check it to make sure we were getting 50Hz, but his frequency meter wasn't working.

Now, as far as I'm aware, these gensets are supposed to supply 240 VAC @ 50Hz, so if if I'm reading 240 VAC, it should be pretty close to 50Hz. This genset only runs the battery charger which states that it can cope with 40 - 70Hz, and the tumble dryer. What sort of damage will it do to the dryer (or any other appliance) if the frequency is way out of spec? The weather here in SE Qld over the last few months means I've been using the genset a lot to charge the batteries and dry clothes, so if there's going to be a slow degradation of something because of out-of-spec frequency, I'd like to know about it.

cheers