SaferProducts incident

Failure type

Fire / ignition

Incident narrative

SaferProducts.gov consumer incident report 20210204-D8FAA-2147366067. Severity: Incident, No Injury. Product: Generac 22kw model G0070432 (Generac Residential whole house standby generator 22kw model G0070432). Incident: Our new Generac whole house standby generator was professionally installed in June of 2020 and was serviced on two occasions by an authorized Generac service company since that time. In our winter storms we experienced a few short power outages and 36 hours of run time accumulated. Recently we had a severe series of storms where power outages caused the generator to automatically start as designed and it ran continuously for over 24 hours. When power was restored, it automatically turned off but a strong odor of burnt oul was coming from the generator enclosure. When I opened the enclosure, the entire interior was dripping with oil that had obviously come from the engine. This motor oil had been atomized by the strong cooling fan of this air cooled unit and the oil had been burnt onto the hot exhaust manifold and muffler while running automatically at 3800 rpm. This could easily have resulted in a fire that would have consumed the plastic enclosure and spread to the residence structure only four feet away where we were sleeping. That loss of oil was over 50% of the engine capacity and a catastrophic failure could have ruptured natural gas lines causing a major explosion and fire. The Generac factory authorized service company showed me how the plastic oil filler cap was defectively designed whereby only one thread of the cap has purchase of the filler hole. During normal operation, vibration routinely causes these caps to fall out unnoticed and resulting in the condition that I experienced. There is no labeling on the unit of this situation and the oil filler cap is actuall