Hello everyone! First time post here. Hoping someone can help me with an issue im having with a hotsy hot water pressure washer… model 921SS serial H0204-74998
The issue is:
Unit originally came with a honda gx390 engine (pretty sure), i guess that motor blew and previous owner installed a kohler ch395-3146 engine with 18amp stator. The unit has a rather large regulator/rectifier on it with part #’s 6-0615 and 860273 on it (this was installed from factory). It was sold from factory without a battery and is designed to run without one, however someone installed a battery at some point anyways. I bought it not running, and previous owner said he never really got to work with it because he had well water and couldn’t provide enough water to run it. I brought it home and got it to run, put a new battery in it and everything seemed to work great until it didnt… found out the battery ran down and was not being recharged by the engine output. So heres where my issues come in… from my testing, the regulator rectifier seems to be no good. I have tested the stator on the engine and it seems to be working well and produces about 47 volts AC at full throttle when connected to regulator rectifier, and does not show any resistance but when connected back to the reg/rec the voltage between both yellow wires from stator drops and only reads about 1.2-1.4v AC. The voltage coming from the dc ports on the reg/rec is only about .54v DC which would more than likely indicate a bad reg/rec. but heres the thing… i found the original honda engine with 18 amp stator is rated to put out 26-30v AC vs the 47v ac im getting with the kohler. Did or will this higher voltage fry the hotsy regulator/rectifier? Is this regulator/rectifier not designed or not able to charge a battery and/or run the heater components? And if i were to switch and use the voltage regulator/rectifier specified for this engine from Kohler (part #17 403 07-S) instead of the hotsy reg/rec, would i run into any issues or reliability concerns? The kohler unit is about $125, and the hotsy unit is about $320.
And further, i talked to tech at hotsy in stratford and he said the battery is not necessary but shouldn’t hurt it, and those reg/recs are a fairly common failure item… he was going thru what to check and thats when i told him kohler was putting out 47v at the stator. Hes like nah no way… the honda motors run only about 25… sure enough i looked it up and 26-30 is spec for honda, but kohlers spec only says that voltage should be over 20…. Then i called hotsy themselves and spoke to tech there and he said he couldnt give any advice because theres no specs on their reg/rec except that its rated for 25amps. He couldnt advise of input voltage variances and basically told me they reccomend against modifications and running different engines… he also confirmed that their reg/recs were fairly common failure item.
So with that book i just wrote lol, what should i do? Try another hotsy reg/rec, or go with a kohler unit? And should i keep or ditch the battery with either one?
