Cat brand generators?

[musigenesis]

Anybody have any experience with Cat generators? I'm looking at an RP7500E (7500 watts). Consumer Reports rates it the highest in the class and it's well-rated on Amazon (even with fake reviews factored out). One electrician we talked to about doing our house wiring for it said that Cat and Generac were crap, so I dunno. The biggest negative seems to be noise but I don't much care - when the power goes out in my neighborhood there's such a cacophony of big generators that ours wouldn't even be noticed.

 

[Native-SKO]

Sorry, no experience. However, my experience with a CAT engine is that it has been stellar.

 

[Truthseeker4449]

Anybody have any experience with Cat generators? I'm looking at an RP7500E (7500 watts). Consumer Reports rates it the highest in the class and it's well-rated on Amazon (even with fake reviews factored out). One electrician we talked to about doing our house wiring for it said that Cat and Generac were crap, so I dunno. The biggest negative seems to be noise but I don't much care - when the power goes out in my neighborhood there's such a cacophony of big generators that ours wouldn't even be noticed.

I asked my Cat dealer about the generators they had on display and was told they are not actually Cat engines. I forget what he said they actually are tho.

 

[Booyah45828]

I asked my Cat dealer about the generators they had on display and was told they are not actually Cat engines. I forget what he said they actually are tho.

This.

Cat makes generators, and they're world renowned for it, but they don't make their consumer brand smaller displacement generators. They'll have them sourced and labeled by someone else, and then charge for the name.

https://dieselprogress.com/whats-behind-cats-new-portable-gen-sets-13274/

Per that article. The generators are designed by cat themselves, but built by Rato Power Manufacturing Co in china. In all of the pictures that I've seen of their open framed generators, it looks like they use a standard honda gx series engine, or a clone of that series engine.

Truthfully, for backup power, I'd go with something you can get service and parts for.

Around here, most back up generators sit for months to years on end with no maintenance or afterthought. That is, until they're needed again for use. Then the owners blow off the cobwebs, chase out the mice, and hope for the best at starting them.

I get a lot of calls every power outage of people begging me to fix, wanting quotes to fix or walk them through the process of fixing their crap they neglected. Typically, you can find dozens of them for sale cheap after said outages because they went out and bought new, versus trying to repair the old one, and are now selling the old one.