Gensets 240V AC at 50Hz or 60Hz?

[Alicatt]

Many small mechanical generators will have a significant 'droop' which means as the load is applied the governor will allow the speed and hence frequency to reduce. Without droop the generator would not be able to take a load. So as long as your output is within the tolerance band of 230 +10% - 6% all should be fine, but do expect to see a loss of several hz as the load increases.

An inverter generator may have zero droop, but often the output is close to a square wave and this upsets plenty of electronic kit, especially microwaves.

Finding a pure sinewave rather than a stepped sinewave or even worse a square wave is possible but the do cost magnitudes more, I had a pure sinewave 1kw UPS in the back of my Landcruiser to power the electronics, I did try a cheap UPS but the equipment did not like it at all, so had to bite the bullet and get the pure sinewave one, difference was more than £1000 back in the 1990s
It was a "few" Hz to high that was the problem, it can break the signal lock and make the tapes I made unplayable in any other machine.

This was the last one I was involved in building, I took it to Le Mans as part of a marketing exercise with Audi who the company I worked for were sponsoring that year.

This one did not have the PTO driven alternator, but a split charging system and a battery bank under the floor with a genset to sinewave inverter/UPS to power the equipment as well as a cable you could plug into the mains.

 

[JOHNPEET]

Many small mechanical generators will have a significant 'droop' which means as the load is applied the governor will allow the speed and hence frequency to reduce. Without droop the generator would not be able to take a load. So as long as your output is within the tolerance band of 230 +10% - 6% all should be fine, but do expect to see a loss of several hz as the load increases.

An inverter generator may have zero droop, but often the output is close to a square wave and this upsets plenty of electronic kit, especially microwaves.

Agreed. My Kohler spec states 53Hz off load dropping to 47Hz at full load. This was a surprise to me at the time, as my previous experience with much larger emergency generators in hospitals was that they have really good tight frequency control.

 

[Alicatt]

Agreed. My Kohler spec states 53Hz off load dropping to 47Hz at full load. This was a surprise to me at the time, as my previous experience with much larger emergency generators in hospitals was that they have really good tight frequency control.

I was in a US Naval base, their back-up system was quite impressive. The base is gone now for a few years, but when I was there in 1980 they had two separate mains feeds into the base, if those failed then they had two V12 Alison petrol engines (think US built RR Merlin here) powering alternators, then if both those failed then there was a battery back-up, banks and banks of lead-acid batteries running through inverters, and this was for a small base. each system was capable of delivering more than double the maximum load that the base could draw.