- 785 Westney Road South, Unit #4, Ajax, Ontario L1S 7G1
- info@genworx.ca
All makes serviced · Ontario-wide · Based in Ajax
A generator that starts is not a generator that works. Those are two different things.
Every month, in thousands of buildings across Ontario, a standby generator starts up, runs for fifteen or twenty minutes with almost nothing connected to it, and shuts down again. Everybody involved treats that as proof the generator works.
It is not. It is proof the generator starts.
A load bank is equipment that creates an artificial electrical load. We connect it to the generator’s output and use it to make the machine work exactly as hard as it would during a genuine power failure — without your building having to lose power for the test.
The load is applied in stages: typically twenty-five per cent, then fifty, then seventy-five, then full. At each stage a technician monitors how the generator responds — voltage and frequency stability, engine temperature, oil pressure, fuel pressure, exhaust colour, and whether the cooling system can keep up.
A lightly loaded exercise run puts almost no stress on the machine. All of these are the kind of fault that leaves a building in the dark during an actual outage.
There is a second reason load testing matters, and it applies to almost every standby diesel.
Diesel engines are built to run hot and loaded. When one is only ever started briefly and run with little or no load, the combustion chamber never gets up to proper operating temperature, and the fuel does not burn completely. Unburned fuel and soot build up in the cylinders, the exhaust and the turbocharger.
That is wet stacking. You can often see it — a wet, oily residue around the exhaust, and heavy black smoke when the engine runs. Left alone it causes loss of power, rising fuel consumption, damage to the exhaust system and shortened engine life.
The monthly light-load exercise run is part of what causes the problem, and the annual load test is part of the cure.
For most standby and emergency generators, annually. More often for critical installations, and again after any major repair or engine overhaul. Insurers and inspectors will normally want to see the records.
A written report. It should show the readings taken at each load stage, not just a pass or fail, along with anything the technician noticed and what should be done about it.
If your current provider hands you a one-line certificate, ask for the data behind it. A load test without the readings is not really a load test result — it is a receipt.
GenWorx carries out load bank testing on all makes of standby generator across Ontario.
Weekly, monthly, semi-annual and annual — and who is responsible.
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