Generator fried my fan and charger. Why?

[R_B]

I have a Coleman Powermate 2500 that I use with my fish house. It was running fine then it picked up in rpms and the ceiling fan started smoking. I had AC lights on at the time. My battery charger also started smoking in a separate incident. That time it didn't seem to surge. The generator has a surge protector on it but it didn't trip. What can I do to prevent this? Will a standard surge protector work?

[Jim Almquist]

If you can get your hands on a multimeter the first thing I would check is just what is being output as far as volts. It sounds like it kicked up the RPMs which should have increased your amps which would not cause a problem but if your voltage went up or down instead and that is not a good thing. If it caused your voltage to drop your surge protection would do you no good. I just wonder if your voltage regulator is going bad or is now bad.

[John Mickish]

I'm going to make an educated guess and say that the generator you have was inexpensive and the generator it has puts out "dirty" power. By dirty I mean that the AC sine wave is not consistant and linear. With the dirty power provided to the things you where running, things got hot and smoked. Generators like the Honda and Yamaha are built to run electronic equipment and don't have such problems, but they cost much more.

The problem you have is not uncommon. Some equipment will run for years with these generators and some gets burnt up quickly.

[pikechaser]

I 2nd mnfishguy...common problem with cheaper generators..