I was outside a few days ago tending to my yard when I noticed my Generac generator making a buzzing noise. I’ve been in my yard almost every day this past week, so I know it was new. Also, this was the day before the weekly test, so it wasn’t an issue related to the test. The service light was green, so nothing wrong there.
I’m not an electrician, but hearing a buzzing noise from a generator had me nervous. I called my installer and fortunately he answered even though it was early evening time. He set up a service ticket to have someone come out the next morning.
The service guy came out the next morning and said the buzzing was coming from the step motor. When he ran the system manually, everything worked fine and then the buzzing went away. He said that if the problem comes back, he may need to replace the step motor.
As I tend to do, I went ahead and Googled some of the relevant terms and found a recent discussion about the same issue.
People determined the problem occurred when there were very short outages. Basically the stepper motor was activated but then the generator did it have to get turned on, leaving the step motor buzzing. Initially people found the frequency of the buzzing occuring could be decreased by raising the delay time before the generator is to be activated. The last few posts (as of today) say the problem has now been fixed with firmware update 1.15.
I have forwarded the information to my installer to see if that was the problem with my unit. Hopefully it is something simple like that.
Very glad I found this post. Sounds logical to me. I had the buzzing sound and turned the generator off and back on and it went away. After reading the post I realized that yesterday apparently there was a short outage and I think this caused the problem. Thank you.