Get Ready to Power Your Projects: A Chat with Champion’s Todd Welzbacher

Foreign.

Welcome to around the House with Eric G. Your trusted source for all things home improvement.

Whether you're tackling a DIY project, hiring it out, or just trying to keep your home running smoothly, you're in the right place.

With over 30 years of remodeling experience, certified kitchen designer Eric G. Takes you behind the scenes with expert advice, industry trends, and the latest innovations for your home.

Home.

It's everything you need to know without the fluff.

Now let's get this show started with our host, Eric G. Welcome to the around the House show, your trusted source for home improvement information.

It doesn't matter if you're a homeowner out there or one of our trusted contractors that tune into the show.

We are here to help you out every single week.

And we have got a great guest today.

We're gonna power things up a little bit with Todd Weltzbacher, VP of sales for Champion Power Equipment.

I these guys and what they build.

Todd, welcome to around the House, my friend.

Thank you so much.

Looking forward to it.

Man, this is going to be great because I tell you what, I upgraded to one of your generators this last year, and oh, my gosh, talk about a beautiful piece of equipment.

And I'm not just saying that.

I.

This is something.

And here's my problem.

Living in the Pacific Northwest where I live and in the Lake Oswego area where my house was here every year because of all the tall, beautiful fir trees, when we would get an ice storm, that usually meant that there was four or five days each winter I had no power and I'm in the city limits.

That's just how it worked.

Yeah.

And having a single, older single stage, actually dual stage, another brand, gasoline only, fuel injected.

Dude.

I went through 35 or 40 gallons of gas.

That was a pain.

Yeah.

I will never do gas again unless I'm out tailgating or something like that.

There's a lot of.

There's a lot of new fuel options out there for people that want to use portable generators.

So we can certainly talk about that.

But, yeah, they're a lot more versatile than they used to be.

That's for sure, man.

And I love it.

And it's so funny because people think of, oh, it's generators, but now you're talking.

Generators, inverters, power stations, home standby.

There's a lot to this.

This is not the.

Which one of the three models do you want?

That's true.

The industry has come a long way with the addition of, you know, battery powered power stations.

You know, that Adds a whole new element.

And would certainly love to get into discussing, you know, the differences between a generator and a power station or battery storage, because I think there's a lot of confusion out there in the marketplace.

But, yeah, no, there's power.

Power is king these days.

It is.

And the more power we're using, I mean, it's so funny.

Maybe we're not using more power, we're more energy efficient, but we're powering more things these days.

I mean, with smart light switches and ring cameras and all these things that are going around, you kind of want everything working so you can get around your house.

That's right.

There's always something on at your house.

It's never like, you might think you're turning the light switch off, but you're drawing power somewhere all the time.

It was funny.

I put a.

Probably six or seven years ago, I installed in my house a home energy monitor that went through and told me where I was using power.

That woke me up to what actually was costing me money and what wasn't.

I was worried about the lights because when I was a kid, my mom was like, you're burnt.

You're running us out of house at home.

Moving the light switch on.

Yeah, that was the least of my worries.

It was the.

It was the, you know, the cable box or something that was using more power than the lights were.

That's absolutely true.

And, you know, you get these new light bulbs that are out there and everything, and they're using 9 watts as opposed to 100 watts.

And, you know, lighting.

Lighting's not the big pull anymore.

There's so many other appliances and newfangled stuff out there that you're plugged in with that.

That's really drawn power.

It is.

Well, let's talk about the basics here.

Let's start there first, because there is, like you said, Todd, there's such confusion.

What's a generator?

What's an inverter?

What's a power station?

We all kind of know what home standby is, probably.

But those other three get confused together and used kind of universally.

Like people say Kleenex and facial tissue.

True.

And there's definitely a difference between the three, so we can certainly dig into that.

Yeah.

You know, I like.

Personally, I love the inverter generators for clean power.

That's the thing that I like because I got a radio show and podcast to put out, and when I'm down for five to 10 days, I'm running on backup power at some point once a year.

Yeah, let's Just talk about the difference between a regular portable generator and an inverter generator.

Basically, construction wise, they're very similar.

They all have engines.

They're all turning, you know, a stator and a rotor or basically an alternator strapped to it that's creating electricity.

That pretty much makes them the same.

What really changes things is in an inverter generator, we incorporate a computer module.

And that module is basically there to allow the engine to vary its speed.

It's running full bore.

It's running full bore.

That's the kind of power the power company is providing your home.

Out of every outlet in your house, you're getting 60 hertz of power.

And we want to maintain that with the generator.

So it's just like the power you get from your power company.

An inverter, because of that computer board, allows you to sit there and vary the speed of the engine depending on the load.

So if you just have a light bulb or TV or whatever plugged in, it's lowering it.

It's running at very low RPMs, a lot lower noise, a lot more fuel efficient, a lot quieter at low noise.

And also it lengthens the engine, the life of the engine, because it's not running at full speed the whole time.

Another added component which you mentioned was because we're running the electricity through that computer, it's actually cleaning the power.

So there's this thing out there called thd.

Total harmonic distortion.

Big word.

It basically kind of means, you know, what's the cleanliness of the power?

What's that sine wave look like?

Is it up and down and all over the place, or is it a very clean sine wave?

So power from your power company is a fairly clean sine wave.

Less than 3% THC, if you will.

An inverter generator, because the computer module is also less than 3% THC.

So it's very clean power.

No worries about any kind of electronics you want to plug into it.

A regular portable generator, because it doesn't have that.

Its THC can be higher, anywhere from 10 to 15%, but that really isn't high enough to do damage to basic appliances.

So, yes, you can run your computer, your laptop, whatever.

The only thing I've run into sometimes these new furnaces with their.

My gosh.

Right, yes.

Computers in those things.

Yeah, yeah.

And I've heard from customers like, you know, I can't seem to get it to work off of your portable generator, but an inverter generator will do that.

So there's very few appliances out there, but there are some.

So if you want absolutely clean power, just like your power company, inverter generator is the way to go.

Yeah.

You know, it's funny, and there's so many great things you can do now with energy efficiency where you kind of need that clean power.

For instance, you know, I put in a heat pump water heater years ago.

And what's awesome was it was great for generator power because when I'm running it on the heat pump, only it's using 500 watts.

So my load was super low.

When I, you know, I, I turn the generator on, turn the breaker on, hit to that, powered up, we're good to go.

And I'm, and I'm still.

I have lights and other things in the house, and I could technically even run the furnace off of it because again, I wasn't running a, you know, it wasn't like I was running a heat pump.

I had a gas furnace.

So at least that 110 could run that circuit and keep everything happy.

And it worked out really well that way was, you know, is it, is it a little undersized to be running my ac?

Yeah, I'm turning stuff up in the house.

You know, do that.

But in the summertime.

But for me, it's not like I'm in hurricane season up here.

It would be different.

When I'm trying to run ac, that's where you step in to me into that whole house solution that you really need to get into.

That's true.

And coming down the pike from a lot of suppliers, including champion, our new 20,000 watt portable generators.

Yep.

I mean, this thing is heavy.

It's a, it's a, it's a monster.

Throw that over your shoulder.

Yeah.

We call it portable, but it's, it's hard to move around because it's heavy.

But when you, when you Start talking about ac, you hit the, the nail on the head.

Pretty much a 7,500 to 10,000 watt generator will power all your emergency needs in your house.

You know, you add up, you start adding up.

Fridge, freezer, sub, pump, lights, phone, computer, wifi, kind of the emergency things.

You're covered.

But you'd have to work at it.

You'd have to sit there and go, hey, I'm gonna plug in these kind of things like the fridge and that.

Oh, I wanna cook.

Well, I'm gonna unplug all that stuff.

And now I'm gonna plug in my electric range so I can cook a little bit.

It's a little bit more.

But once you get over 7,500 watts, you're pretty well covered.

Except for AC.

Once you start talking about central air, you're into the 20,000 watt category.

So really there was no portable that would be AC capable.

And that's why everybody went to home standby units, because they were larger.

And you can get 20kW, 22kW on standby.

These new portables, again, we call them portable at 20 kilowatts will be able to power that central AC.

Yeah, and that's.

And that goes for heat pumps too, guys, because you think about a heat pump, if you've got a heat pump unit, it's just an AC working backwards, so it's using the same amount of power.

So if you went energy efficient on your house and we'll put a heat pump in, awesome.

But you're just going to have to treat that like ac when you're starting to think about your power demand stuff because it's basically the same thing.

Absolutely, absolutely.

You know, and heavy.

When Todd's talking heavy, he's talking about like a full wheelbarrow of sand that you're carrying around.

This is not a, you know, oh, okay, it's £50.

It's.

They move around well when they're big, but they're large.

And that's the other thing about inverters, the technology in there and being able to vary that speed.

Back to talking about inverters, they are lighter.

So that's why a lot of people prefer inverters for, like, recreational use.

If you're just going to do some tailgating or some camping or something like that, you want to bring power.

Yeah, that's enough to run anything around a campsite.

You get into the larger RVs or whatever and especially one with like two ACs or something like that.

And then you need 6,000 watts, 5,500 watts, or you can parallel.

There's a thing called paralleling where you can take two inverters, especially the smaller ones, and you can actually hook two of them together and combine the power out of two.

So a lot of people like that.

For example, you can parallel to 3,000 watts that have just a 30amp outlet on them.

And in the parallel kit there's a big 50amp outlet.

So a lot of those larger RVs and you know, 35 foot RVs or tow behinds, that type of thing, they got two ACs, they're going to need about 6,000 watts that combined power.

So you either buy a larger inverter or you parallel two small inverters together.

Todd, is that something new for you guys?

Because I sure didn't see that early a couple years ago on your website.

Is that something you guys have been doing fairly new or is it something that I just missed?

Yeah, no, it's the ability to parallel inverters has been around since the invention of the inverter.

And again, you need that computer board so that these two things can talk to one another and say, hey, you know, I'm going to send out this much power.

I'm going to send out this much power.

That's what the computer board's all about.

Yeah, that's awesome.

That's awesome.

And the other thing that I think that you guys have done so well is your co shield.

I mean, this is such a huge thing in the industry, guys.

And this is one of the things that I love is you guys went out, went.

Nope, we're going to go out and we're going to create a product that is going to.

If you put yourself in a bad position with this thing, we're going to try to do some safety stuff to help you to be the foolproof method of it.

Because I tell you what, every year I see stupid human tricks with these things and I'm like, I don't understand why somebody thought they could put that in their apartment.

That's not how this works.

That's how you die.

Yeah, but they do, you know, and CO's a large component of the exhaust coming out of that.

Of that gas engine, just like your car and that type of thing.

And CO shield and the industry has really all stepped up.

All suppliers have basically added a form of CO protection to their unit.

And what it really does is it monitors the CO in.

In and around the generator, and if the level gets too high, it'll turn it off.

And that's been kind of set at a range where it'll save lives.

Yeah, and that's important.

And that's important because I'm gonna.

I'm gonna throw a note in there, actually, really quickly.

I'm always supposed to say this.

Yes, but it doesn't stop.

Still say that you can run that generator inside.

There's no.

Some people say that.

Well, it's got CO shield.

It'll be okay.

No, it.

Every generator must be 100% outside, 25ft away from any structure or whatever in open space.

Yep.

Just get it out.

There it is.

Yeah.

Thank you, Todd.

Because I tell you what, that is one of the things that I just.

It drives me nuts.

And I go on the news here all the time when, you know, I'll usually do some news segments here locally when we start to get it towards ice storm season and which we're getting close on, and the ice storm will hit, and they'll go, you want to do something on generators?

And I'm like, all right, I'll have a close.

And I'll go, nope, we're going way out here with this.

And you've made the decision to run a generator.

I know it's probably quieter in the carport, but guess what?

That's a bad idea.

Don't do it.

Bad idea.

Especially when that bedroom might be right upstairs.

So, you know, that's why they.

No, it's.

It's.

And it's.

It's.

It's a thing that's always plagued the industry.

We've done a lot of education on that.

And CO shield is just another step of protection and safety.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's super important.

And I love that you guys are doing that.

One of the things I love that you guys have really come up and done a lot with on your generators and inverters out there is tri fuel.

I think that is so important these days.

Depending on if you're tailgating, if you're using it for backup power or whatever you're doing, you've got options.

Yeah.

I mean, for years and years, up till about 10 years ago, the only real fuel option was gasoline to run your generator.

You know, and every generator came with a gas tank.

And you know, the cool thing about that, unlike a power station, which we may talk about later, is in order to keep it running, you just put more fuel into it and it's instantaneous.

You fire it back up and away you go.

And, and gasoline used to be it.

Then along came dual fuel which was basically adding propane and the ability to use propane.

So what we do with all of our dual fuel generators is we include a three foot regulator that hooks up to your propane tank right off your grill.

So your 5 gallon, 20 pound propane tank, hook that up and now you're running off of propane.

And you can also switch between both fuels.

Like I get gasoline, I'll run off of propane.

Really gives you the versatility to, to, you know, sometimes you run up.

You know, a lot of people don't realize when the power is out in the community, so is the power that powers gas pumps.

You can't get gas because they don't have any power.

But a lot of them still sell those propane tanks right out in front of the store and you can swap one out and there's your fuel supply.

So just a couple little things.

The you lose about 10% of power when you move from gas to propane.

4500 watts when running on propane.

You lose a little bit of power 10% when you run on propane.

But it's a great feature, especially for recreational use because a lot of those RVs and campers have propane tanks right on them.

You're bringing your fuel supply with you and now you can fire up the generator and away you go.

I think the same thing goes for mountain cabins, right.

You got that pro big propane tank up at your cabin.

You roll it up there with roll it out, you hook it up into that or you got it set up, just hook it up quickly into that system and off you go.

And you're running off the cabin's propane system and you got power all the time.

Absolutely.

And the other area that where we sell a lot is rural communities.

You're driving along there and you see that farmhouse out there and their 200 gallon big tank is still sitting there.

And that's the kind they want.

They want a dual fuel propane unit for sure.

Then about five years ago or less, Trifuel came Along which is basically now adding natural gas as a kind of fuel type to, to run this generator office.

So now you get gasoline, you get propane and you get natural gas.

Interesting enough, about 80% of U.S. households have natural gas supply.

Two of them, not all of them are using it, but they can, they do have access to natural gas.

And 80% of U.S. households.

And so you think about a permanent supply of fuel that's natural gas.

When they pipe it in your house, it's flowing all the time.

You don't have to run down to the gas station, you don't have to swap out propane tanks.

You've got natural gas being fed constantly for that element of emergency home standby power.

Natural gas is the way to go if you've got it.

And champion as a Rule always includes about 25 of natural gas line so that you can again run the generator 25ft away from the house and hook up that natural gas line and hook it into the outside port that you may have there.

If not, you'd have to get an outside port put in to, to let natural gas and then hook this directly to it.

But uninterrupted fuel means uninterrupted power supply.

There you go.

And I'm not out driving around for 20 minutes trying to find a gas station that's open and hauling around all these five gallon jugs of gasoline just so I could have power.

Because I'd go to sleep, what would.

The first thing I'd do is get up in the morning, go out there, turn everything off, fill up the gas, you know, and go through that whole thing in the dark.

And it's like, yeah, I'm not doing that anymore.

I got tired of that.

No.

You know, and interestingly enough, we design generators and when we think about gasoline, you know, we, we can get different size gas tanks on these things, just depending on what size the frame is.

But we always try to design around giving you at least 8 hours of runtime at 50% load so that you can get through the night without having to wake up and refuel in the middle of the night.

But that's usually the, about the average runtime on one of our gas tank units.

When you fill up that gas tank about 8 hours of runtime at 50% load.

Nice.

And overnight you're not using that much generally anyway.

If anything, you're running the heat in the place, whatever you're doing for that and that's, that's the big part of it.

And maybe the fridge or something that's Running, but pretty decent load as far as low on that.

That's right.

That's right.

Well, I want to talk about power stations because I tell you what, this is where it gets really fun, because I didn't realize how much I would use a power station until I got one.

And then it was like, okay, every apartment owner out there or renter out there should have one of these for when they lose power.

Because I guarantee you no one in the HOA for the condo association or the apartment's gonna like you taking your generator and running it out in the parking lot.

Someone's gonna probably try to steal it.

I've seen people do this.

I've seen them chain it off to the bumper of their truck and there's cords running in.

And I'm like, wait till management sees that they're gonna lose it.

Yeah, no power stations.

And, you know, the technology is probably developing even faster over there than in.

In generators because it's all.

It's all battery technology and going through the same things as you see with your cell phones and, you know, size and type of battery and, you know, nicad, you know, now lithium ion batteries, which is pretty much what they all run off of.

And that's basically what it is.

It's just a power storage device using a battery.

And then, of course, these things are based on watt wattage output, but they're also based on, and this is the most important thing, watt hour.

WH watt hour.

And always when you're purchasing a power station, which they're calling generators, you know, or solar generators or anything, but they really don't generate power.

They store power.

But always look at the WH thing, watt hours.

For example, a really small one of these might be a little 300 watt watt hour thing, which is great for, you know, hey, power goes out and I want to keep my laptop going, my WI fi going, and, and a couple things like that, you've got 300 watt hours.

So if you're only using 30 watts of power, which is, you know, a laptop doesn't even pull that much.

You've got 10 hours of use before that battery dies down and it has to be recharged.

What a lot of people run into, though, is they.

They sit there and go, well, you know, I want to be able to run a lot of appliances or, or something.

This should be good.

So if you sat there and plugged in the fridge, pulling 700 watts and your laptop and TV and all that, pulling a total of 150 and you know, then you try to plug in a sump pump or a deep freeze or whatever and you start to add all those things up.

If you're pulling 3,500 watts or whatever, you're going to be out of power in an hour.

3,500 watt hours.

If you're pulling 3, 500 watts out, you've got one hour of runtime.

And if your power is truly out and you can't plug it back in to recharge it, which it takes about two and a half to four hours to recharge a unit that large by plugging into the wall, you're out of luck till the power comes back on.

Now they do recharge via solar panels, but it does, it does.

And that's.

The technology will come where they'll have enough watt hours behind one of these, where truly will be an emergency standby for your home situation.

But right now I would look at it like, hey, for my home office or my.

But not if you're going to be without power two or three days like you were talking about up in the Pacific Northwest.

A power station, portable power station is not a solution for emergency power for that duration of time.

You can't refuel it, you have to recharge it.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I tell you what, when you go throw that on the generator, boy, if you want to suck the generator down real quick, those things, when you throw a inverter generator and you go to charge one of those.

I've tried that.

Boy, it sure sucks the power right out of that inverter generator because it's going, oh, let's charge.

Let's go into fast charge.

Yeah.

So they'll pull a lot of power to get them to recharge, to try to recharge quicker.

But it still takes two to four and a half hours to recharge one fully.

Yeah, absolutely.

But they are so great.

I mean, to me it's changed tailgating, it's changed camping.

You know, my daughter always borrows mine because she goes to a three day festival out there so she can power some lights.

And it's a, you know, we don't have to put seal shield on that one because it's Totally emissions free, totally quiet.

They're fairly lightweight, very portable.

And a great solution for those kind of applications.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And it's great.

And I think it's great for.

And again, people that are in condos, people that need to, to run the wifi or run the, run a couple lights in there, maybe plug the fridge in for a little bit to keep it going.

My favorite picture that I have in my home, we were working on a puzzle, and my wife and I like to do puzzles.

Power went out.

I got on my little power station on my little clamp lamp right from the chandelier that, you know, was not lit and lit up the kitchen table so we could finish that puzzle and plugged it right into a power station.

And where you go, see, that works.

I mean, that's the fun of that.

You know, it's like, all right, we got the solution, we fixed it.

Yeah.

Home standby, though, is really kind of what I would say is the gold standard out there.

When you're like, okay, this happens every year and I just sold the house that I had there that I, you know, I'm in a better spot now.

I don't have all these legacy trees that are 500 years old that nobody wants to cut and trim, so that always go down across the power lines.

I've got a lot of underground power now, so I'm a little better off.

But if you're losing power once a year, it really makes sense to go home standby.

And especially if you're an area where it's either really hot, really cold, or both, that way that thing will fire on whether you're home or not.

Agreed.

And I mean, that's, that's the two key elements of home standby.

One is it's a whole house solution.

You know, a lot of.

Let's compare it to a portable.

So usually what people do with portables is they put it outside, they run some extension cords into their house, and then they have to run around and unplug this to plug it into the power cord that they brought inside the house to run off their generator.

So they're really only firing up selected items at a time and, you know, got to kind of work at it to dig the, you know, the outlet out and get it all plugged in.

And all that kind of stuff might be running cords upstairs, an all around type thing.

Or you could hook a portable up to what's called a manual transfer switch, which is something that mounts next to your power panel and then you select circuits out of your Power panel into this switch.

Like, a total of six.

Hey, I want the living room, the kitchen, my bedroom, you know, these three or four circuits.

And those will be the outlets that are hot running off your portable generator when the power's up.

But you have to manually flip the switch from power coming from the power company to power coming from a generator.

You got to be there.

Yep.

The home standby is one.

It's automatic, so it comes with an automatic transfer switch that is.

Most of the solutions are called whole house.

So this box that goes next to your breaker panel, basically the power flows from the power company to that box first.

Then it goes to your power panel.

So when your power goes out, it senses the power stopping from the power company, triggers the generator to start almost instantaneously.

Like it.

It's pretty quick.

And then boom.

Power is transferred to the generator and all of your circuits.

Every outlet in the house is hot.

You don't have to worry about running cords around or all that kind of stuff.

Every light switch you flick on, it's hot.

And all you're doing now is you are still limited to the total output of the generator as to what all you can flick on.

So you might not be able to run that ac depending on the size of the home standby.

But once you get over 22 kilowatts or something like that, you're.

You're pretty well covered.

But it is a wonderful solution.

It's permanent, it's installed outside your home automatic, and it runs off of natural gas or propane.

So you do need a permanent supply of power.

And either you've got that big propane tank, or you've got natural gas flowing into your house.

Yeah, it's brilliant.

And I tell you what, guys, when you're out there planning for these things, just go bigger.

And I say that because the lot of the expenses, of course, in the unit, but you've got all the labor of putting in the.

The electrical and tying that into the house.

Whether you're doing a 22 or 14 kilowatts, that really doesn't change what the electrician's doing that much.

So you might as well just spend a little bit more and get it so you're comfortable all year round.

Versus, wow.

If I had to spend another 2,500 bucks, I'd have AC in this.

In the summertime might be the smart way to go, Especially if you're living down south, where a lot of your storms are happening in the summer anyway.

Yeah.

So, you know, and.

And it's always Good to get a professional installer out there to do a site survey first and check things out, ask you questions like, you know, what all do you want to be running and what you're going to say.

Everything anyways.

But they'll do a pretty good job of recommending the right size unit and where to put it and all that kind of stuff, and then professionally install it.

So you're good to go.

It's not a do it yourself project.

It's uniting an electrician.

Sure.

But then a lot of times you got to pour a little pad to set the thing on.

Then you got to plumb in your natural gas or.

Or lg.

So that's not electrician, that's another guy.

And it's.

It's a fairly complicated install.

So certified professional seller like Champion has, you know, a national network of these guys ready and available to.

To get you up and running.

Yeah.

And then they can work with you as well as making sure that you get the right size unit as well, because that's part of it.

You know, when you've got the installer coming in, they're going, hey, you know, that's way too big for what you got here.

Maybe you're wasting a little money.

Maybe you went, because I tend to overbuild and I.

You know, for me, it would be probably pretty good to have somebody go.

Seems a bit excessive, Eric.

You know, that.

That can happen.

No, no, absolutely.

And then I smile and go, but I want my hot tub to work.

You know, and that's what a lot of people forget.

They forget that, you know.

Yeah, but I want that hot tub to work.

So you got to add those things in.

If you want it, let them know.

Yeah, and it's.

I think it's really cool because you guys really have got just as far as, you know, I mean, you guys make a lot of tools out there.

I, you know, I love going into you guys at the builder shows and the hardware shows and things like that and seeing what you got going on.

You know, I was at the national hardware show last year going through your booth, and I was like, all right, that's a cool pressure washer.

That's a cool chipper shredder.

You know, you guys make a lot of bright yellow tools, but our equipment stuff, as far as generators, inverters, and power stations at home, standby, you pretty much have 90%, it seems, of the market covered there.

Yeah, we do.

And we basically sit there and say, you know, anything that you would strap a engine onto, you know, we would be involved with.

I think the only thing we don't get involved with is lawnmowers and that type of thing.

But we dabbled in snowblowers.

We're heavily into log splitters, chipper shredders, tillers of all kinds.

So pretty much engine driven products is, is where we sit.

And we're always looking at avenues and different product lines that maybe extend into.

Based on being engine driven.

That's our forte.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, we're going on 20, 20 couple years here and we had our 20 year celebration two years ago, I guess so.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And very sound company.

Love the people we work with.

I mean, that's the crux of it all is we got really, really good people.

And you know, interestingly enough, our owner, you know, he is, he's just a stickler about service and he's like, you know, we get asked all the time, hey, why don't you, you, why don't you come down here to South America and sell down here?

Or yeah, you know, come on down to Mexico, you know, you want to open up shop down here?

And we're like, unless we have infield service and technical support in an area, we're not going there.

And that's, that's a little, you know, part of our owner's belief is, you know, this is power equipment.

Something's going to go wrong and people want to be able to pick up the phone and get an answer.

And when you call us, we actually have live people, I mean, real people, and they're there to get you up and running.

It's interesting because when you finally get in touch with a customer and just walk them through a lot of time, it's like, look, I put this away last summer after, after hurricane season.

I didn't use it or whatever.

I, I packed it away and all that kind of stuff and storms are coming.

I pulled it out, I can't get it started.

You know, what's going on?

You know, and you sit there, go, well, probably when you turn the unit off and packed away, you, you turn the fuel valve off, right?

The valve between the gas tank and the engine let the residual gas to burn off.

Oh, you're right, I did.

Okay, turn that fuel valve back on.

Yeah.

And there you go.

And you get somebody live on the phone.

And we do that every day, troubleshoot, get people up and running.

That's what we do.

And that's the thing too, especially for people running gas out there.

And you know, a lot of people, if you're, if you're older, you know, you could leave that gasoline in the older days.

When I was a kid, you could leave that gasoline in there for a couple of years and it wasn't really going to hurt anything.

Tell you what, these days, after about three or four months sitting in there, that unleaded low octane gas that you put in there is getting really gummy and nasty.

So be careful of your fuel supply out there, guys.

Yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, a simple solution is, you know, throw a little stable in there if you're going to store it or whatever.

But a better solution is to really drain the gas tank or turn off that fuel valve and at least let any of that residual gas that's sitting in the carburetor or whatever burn off.

So there's nothing sitting there for six months.

And then treat that gas that's still in that tank.

Yeah, yeah.

And you guys are based in what, Milwaukee, Wisconsin?

Correct?

That's actually where our R and D center is.

So, yeah, we really got.

That's kind of where our engineering and.

And R and D center is in Milwaukee, which is, you know, kind of the small engine capital of the world.

A lot of engine manufacturers are based in Milwaukee there, but headquarters is actually in Las Vegas, Nevada.

And then we have distribution centers in.

In Santa Fe Springs, California, Fontana, which is basically L A.

And then one in Jackson, Tennessee.

We try to have that so that we're within 24 hours of getting product out to our retail partners in the event of disasters.

So we're right there in California for the west coast to serve the Pacific Northwest during your ice storms in California, during, you know, windstorms and fires and things like that.

And then for hurricane and winter season, Jackson, Tennessee is really close to where you want to be.

Down to Texas or over to Florida.

Over to Carolinas.

Yeah.

Nice, nice.

And you guys, what I like about you guys too is you guys really do a lot with your engines.

You know, when you're talking about generators and stuff, you know, with your V twin, I mean, that's this thing looks like it probably should come off a Harley or something, but they look good.

You know, a lot of people say, well, an engine is an engine, but there's some different tweaks and things that you can do.

And the industry is somewhat standardized and they're all overhead valve engines.

They have been for years.

We have some unique things that allow our engines actually start better in the cold weather.

Even our home standby Units start better in the cold.

That's kind of a little design unique thing that we have that's patented.

And just the, the quality of them and the longevity of them.

You know, we take a lot of pride in that consistency of production, a lot of pride in that.

And you know, engines and generators are just getting bigger and bigger.

So they're just, especially portables.

They're just asking us to put these larger engine V, twin engines in order to drive these higher wattage outputs because people want more power.

And just like you said, hey, to be on the safe side, just get a little bit more, get a little bit more than what you need.

You're probably going to always use it anyways, you know.

Yeah.

And it's just good to have and it's.

And to me, I always think of it too as I don't want that thing running at full speed all the time, you know, especially when you're talking like an inverter, if you've got it powered correctly, you're not having to spin it up to its full horsepower and it's, and it's in its more standby power mode because it's down given off its base power.

It's just easier on the fuel, it's easier on everything else, including the emissions coming out of it.

So a little bigger, sometimes a little better.

Yeah.

And same thing.

Even you get it like we currently make an 11,000 watt inverter and we'll actually be going larger later on this year.

That thing comes with a 50amp outlet right on it, you know, so it's, it's giving you a lot of power right off the, right off the generator, but it still has that variable speed thing to where, you know, hey, I'm not loading it up.

And you know, right now the, a lot of people, don't you see that?

But a refrigerator pulls about 700 watts when it's running.

But when it starts, and back in the old days, your lights would flicker when your refrigerator started.

It's pulling 15, 18, 100 watts to start it.

And then when running it drops back down.

You got to take care of that starting wattage.

And that's why generators are rated two different ways.

There's always two different sets of wattages.

When you look at a generator, one is called it's running watts or it's consistent output.

And the other one's called starting watts or peak watts.

That's the engine even on a regular portable, being able to surge a little bit, you know, for instantaneous to get those motors to start Your sub pump, when that motor kicks in, that's a two, two half, two horsepower motor.

An air compressor.

That's a three or four horsepower motor.

Pulls a lot more wattage to amperage to start, wattage to start than it does to run.

Same thing even happens with LED lights.

You, if you turn an LED light on and you watch that power and if you've got 50 of them in the house and you crank all the lights on at once, you'll see this big thing because there's that starter on the LED to fire the LED off that does the same thing.

And I've seen people go, wait, what was that?

That was the lights turning on, you know, so it makes a lot of sense.

Well, Todd, we're running out of time.

What have we not talked about today?

Because I tell you what, you guys have such a great selection of, of generators.

And coming into wintertime, I think it's a really important time of year for everybody out there.

Whether you're in the south, whether you're in the north, anywhere across the United States, this is a great idea.

So you're backed up, ready for the next natural disaster.

Yeah.

I think the one thing we didn't touch on might just be maintenance and that type of thing.

Yeah.

And it is.

And if, although most people don't.

I know I don't even with my lawnmower.

But if you just follow the basic rules of engine maintenance, it does take oil.

You need to change the oil every hundred hours or so.

You need to change.

Some of the larger units have oil filters on there.

You would need it like a big V twin.

They all have air cleaner filters in them that need to get changed.

So it's all in the manual, even if you don't read it.

Get on this 100 every hundred hour cycle that hey, I better change my oil and change my air cleaner.

And if you keep up with it, it'll keep up with you.

You'll have it for life.

Just keep up.

That's smart.

And I tell you what, I love the accessories you guys have too, because I'm a big fan of Gen Tent and those guys.

And I love that you guys have a yellow on the matches.

You know, it's matchy matchy with everything else.

It's, it's so cool that you guys have yellow ones for what you're, you're doing over there.

I think it's a smart addition to any generator when you got it outside in the weather.

Yeah.

No, and, and we partner with Gen 10 on what we call Storm Shield, that's our version of Gen 10 that they make for us quite frankly.

And so there are things out there called generator covers which are just storage covers.

It's just when you store the unit, it's a cover that protects it from the elements.

But a gen 10 and or storm Shield Champion Storm Shield is basically one that you use when the generator is running.

So it's sitting outside.

You could be in the elements in the middle of a downpour during a hurricane or in the middle of a snowstorm.

And it's protecting the generator, allowing you to run it in the middle of all that.

The cool thing is it also has a flap on it so you can refuel it without having to take the COVID off and all that kind of stuff.

You never refuel while the generator is running, but you could shut it down, open up that flap, let it cool off, put more gas in it or whatever, fire it back up and.

And you're off and running.

So yeah, a number of accessories.

The other thing, you know, we make power cords.

Covers are the two primary and gas cans, but we don't make those.

But everybody should have a gas can.

Absolutely.

And I mean you guys have all the covers and everything else too, you know, whether it's just for storage or whatever.

So it's great with all those accessories.

That way you can just kind of one stop shop it, get what you need, call it a day and be done with it.

Absolutely.

We are a one stop shop.

Absolutely.

So Todd, how do people find you guys?

You're like, all right Eric, you got me talked into getting a generator or upgrading mine.

What's the best way for people to locate you guys?

You can always go to our website, championpowerequipment.com to learn more about our products and that type of thing.

And then we also of course provide a where to buy kind of button that you can kind of click on and see where we're at.

But pretty much we are carried in stock by most major big box retailers, whether they're, you know, a Home Depot or Menards or something like that, or even in the recreational side like a Bass Pro Shops or Cabela's.

We're also very strong in distribution at farm ag stores like Tractor Supply or World King or, or those types of guys.

And then we're also online at Amazon and most of the other major online websites.

Walmart.com depot.com Lowe's.com we're out there pretty well.

You know, we, we don't distribute direct to consumer.

That's just a little rule we have so you can find us pretty much everywhere at retail.

Nice.

And yeah, if it's bright and yellow it should grab your attention and that's probably champion.

That's probably champion.

Exactly.

Todd, thanks for coming on today man.

I appreciate the knowledge.

It's always great when I get to even learn stuff today and go, oh, I hadn't thought about that.

Really smart man.

I appreciate you coming on and spreading the wisdom and helping us get the right generator for that next power outage or the next time we're going out playing.

Sounds great Eric.

Thanks for having me.

Thanks again brother.

I'm Eric G. And you've been listening to around the house.

Thanks for tuning into the around the house show.

Make sure and check out our website@aroundthehouse online.com while you are there.

Make sure and like and follow all of our social media channels.

We will see you next time.