It was celebration time a few days ago at Kim and mauzi's as the Listeroid finally fired up in its final resting place in the new power shed. It is a single cylinder 6HP unit. It is driving 2 alternators, one on each wheel. A 12 volt 120 amp alternator on one wheel and a 5KW 240 volt unit on the other wheel. When we fired it up, she started first go and I happened to be watching the 12 volt alternator output. I was shocked when I saw the current race straight up to 120 amps. The motor did not miss a beat and handled it beautifully. I have tested this same alternator on my little Briggs and Straton 6.5HP engine and when we fired up a test run with these same batteries several weeks ago, the current meter also raced up to 120amps, but the poor old motor stalled. Just goes to show that the power of these old Lister designed motors is far above these high reving “little” modern engines.

I did some preliminary load testing on this unit, and it started blowing black smoke at about 3.6KW. This is not bad for a 6Hp engine. The 240 volt alternator is a Chinese made ST5, this is s 5kva self regulating unit.The frequency of the 240 volts was adjusted to 52 Hz at no load and dropped to about 48 Hz at full power. The output voltage was about 225 at no load and dropped to about 210 at full load. Some more accurate load testing will be done in the future so stay tuned. I also believe the output of these Chinese made ST alternators can be adjusted, I will also look at this in the future.

The Listeroid is hooked up to a 200 litre water tank (an old 44 gallon drum) and the cooling worked perfectly. After about 3 hours the temperature at the top of the water tank was 55 deg C and the bottom was about 35 deg C, more on this later. These units may work better with a thermostat, which will rise the temperature inside the motor much quicker. When we first fired the engine up, the water out of the engine at the top was 44 C and the inlet was at 22 C. This is summer, imagine in winter, the outlet would be at 44 C and the inlet at around 0 C or even less. This must not be good for the engine while it is heating up the water tank, which takes several hours at least.

When Kim came out and looked at the diesel the next day he discovered a lot of “black oil” had drained out of the exhaust pipe. So the engine was “slobbering” oil a bit. This can be expected with a new engine, we will give the engine another good run at 50% load as soon as we permanently mount the exhaust pipe. The oil is now mid way between the low and high mark on the dip stick, this is probably too high and could be the cause of the slobbering. When I was adjusting the oil dipper on the crank shaft I noticed that the oil dipper was dipping into the oil about 12 mm, the recommended distance is 6mm. So we will run the engine and let it find its own level and then mark the dipstick.

During the first run Kim measured the amount of fuel used and it was about 5 litres over a 5 hour period with an average load of about 1KW. So we can say about 1 litre of fuel per hour. This is excellent and far superior to our old petrol engines. So all in all every body is very happy at the moment.

Stay tuned for more updates......