After doing weeks of research on which generator to purchase for living off the grid, we ended up buying a Honda EU3000i Handi. We have been loving this generator to bits and pieces (check out our Honda EU3000i Handi Review) but just today we ran into our first problem: Honda generators don’t really enjoy the cold weather! Not a good thing to find out this late in our journey when we live in the Pacific Northwest where winters can be chilly! Luckily, we’ve figured out a couple of “Honda generator hacks” to get it to run properly and we thought we’d share them with you.
Just a couple of weeks ago we had our first cold snap of the season. We’ve had snow on the ground for over a week and a couple nights have gotten into the high, single-digits (Fahrenheit). We had no idea that single-digit or even teen-digits would affect our Honda 3000 generator! There certainly wasn’t anything in the manual about it! Our portable generator is one of our most-important homesteading tools and we simply cannot go more than a day without it!
We did some playing around and found a couple of solutions. They are not perfect solutions, but a solution or something you can try nonetheless.
How to Get Honda Generator to Run in Cold Weather
The biggest problem with the Honda EU3000i Handi generator is that it has an “all in one” switch and valve. The switch/valve has three settings: off, on and choke. In freezing temperatures, if the generator won’t run in the “on” position or the “choke” position, what’s a man to do?
I started playing around and found that if you turn the generator to the “on” position, and then turn it slightly towards “choke”, it runs a little more smoothly in the cold and doesn’t “hiccup” so much. By turning the switch slightly towards the “choke” position, you are giving the generator more fuel for the same amount of air.
As the generator warms up, you should be able to back off from the “choke” side a bit.
How to Keep a Honda Generator from Freezing
The other problem that we had with our Honda EU3000i Handi is that the carburetor breather hose builds ice in extremely cold temperatures, which means that it doesn’t breath very well, run very well, and sometimes won’t even turn on! We found this out because we left it in the car overnight.
The best solution we’ve found to this is to simply not let your generator get too cold in the first place. We leave ours somewhat close to the wood stove in extremely cold temperatures… and we keep the stove burning all night long. We don’t keep the stove burning simply to keep the generator warm, but to keep components of our RV from freezing as well since we’re living in a travel trailer while we build our off grid home.
The other possible solution is to take your generator to a Honda dealer to see if they can install a crank case heater kit. We’re not sure how well those work but if we have any more problems with the cold (with the two solutions above we’re doing okay so far) then we will run into our dealer to see if this is something we should have done.
And that’s all, folks! If you want to learn more about our generator and how we are building an off grid homestead 100% from scratch, be sure to subscribe to our blog to not miss out on any of the goods!
