We recently had a power outage that lasted several days and the house was down to 41 degrees and expected power restore was several days in the future.
I purchased a 3500 watt (5250 starting watts) generator with the hopes to heat my house.
I only wanted to power the furnace and did not want to worry about having it connected to the house at all. I purchased a single outlet and a plug and added them into the furnace line. So when I want to plug in the furnace I first have to unplug it from the houses power and then hopefully plug it into my generator.
The Inducer fan kicks on, the ignition element heats up and the flames start. Just before the blower fan kicks on the flames go out and the cycle starts over.
I am assuming I have 1 or 2 problems.
1) Grounding issue. 2) Dirty power
I would like to explore the grounding issue but am unable to find much on the internet that matches my symptoms (actually I am finding too much, but nothing that seems to fit exactly). I do have a ground lead on my generator, where do I connect it to? My house does have a few poles outside where things come in. I do see a few green wires connected to a pole with a clamp. can I connect my ground to that? is there an easier way to test if this is it the problem first? I've seen things about creating a neutral bonded ground plug and plugging it into a spare outlet on the generator but some reason shorting the neutral and ground didn't seem safe, but I am new to this.
If my issue is dirty power due to a cheap generator, am I out of luck? Should I just sell the generator?
edit: Furnace is about 20 years old. Generator is not an inverter. Furnace does not seem to have a method of delivering error codes. Furnace works fine when I plug it back into the single outlet I added.