Honda Generator Oil Change

Changing oil in Honda generator

Our Honda generator oil change. Thanks for joining us for this video. It’s a very exciting day. We get to change the oil in our generator. It’s so much fun mechanicking. It’s always a good thing to do. So we have our little Honda inverter generator which is an EU 3000 i. It’s the wheeled handy model. Super fun so working really good for us.
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If you’ve been following our blog we’re doing an off-grid homestead and this has been our power bill for the last two and a half months and it’s going to be for a while until we get our solar system set up and then hopefully it’ll just be a backup system. Anyway so we’ve been running it for quite a while. Everything Is actually been going really well. It’s very fuel efficient but we need to service the generator and the only thing really to service on the whole entire thing is the oil. So we’re going to do a Honda generator Oil change today.

Honda generator manual

If you’ve read the manual or if you’ve looked at your manual or you own this one and you notice that there’s actually an oil access compartment here on the side and that allows you to get to both the fill neck and the dipstick where you check the oil and then on the bottom side there’s actually another plug or a port on the bottom where you can open the drain plug to drain the oil out. So I’ve been running the generator for a little while just to heat up the oil so it’s easier to change it out. It’s been cooling down also for a couple minutes so we don’t burn ourselves and we’re going to drain it out the bottom there.

We’ll put the fill plug back in. We’ll go ahead and add oil. For this we actually chose to get ten thirty genuine Honda oil just to keep our warranty intact since this is our lifeblood. We want to make sure that it lasts us a really long time. We pick this up at our local Honda generator dealer. So we’re going to use probably about eight ounces I believe. Don’t hold me to that it’s about eight ounces I think of oil for this particular model. So let’s get started changing the oil in our generator okay. Now the first thing that we did actually as I mentioned earlier was we ran the generator for just a little while that heats the oil up and makes a little easier to change.

The drain plug

As you can tell it’s snowy outside. So if we just try to change cold oil it’ll be very difficult to change but we didn’t just turn it off and change it all right away. We might end up burning ourselves. So we’ve let it cool down here for about 15 minutes or so. Now everything should be nice and cool to the touch except for hopefully the oil still nice and fluid. So we’re going to pull the drain plug which is on the bottom side here and to do that we actually need a 10 millimeter socket and I find that having an extension is going to work the best. We want to make sure it’s set to reverse and forgive me I’m not going to be able to get the camera underneath here.

But there’s a small drain plug right on the bottom of the oil compartment so we’re just going to loosen that and assuming we’re loosening, it very hard to see. There we go. So we’re going to loosen it first and then we’re going to move our little container underneath here so we don’t get any on the tailgate and then we’re going to pull it the rest of the way out. Now I’m just threading it out with my finger. Hopefully I can pull the bolt out so you can actually see what it looks like. It’s definitely a tight compartment down there but it’s big enough that you can get two fat fingers in there.

Drain the oil

Usually when you’re changing oil like this the drain plug just falls right into whatever you’re catching the oil in. Which is annoying though no one’s ever died from it I don’t think. Almost done threading the drain plug and there we go and as predicted the drain plug is now being swallowed up by the oil. So we’ll let all the oil drain out and we’re almost done. So I’m actually going to revise my previous statement that we’re going to put eight ounces of oil in there. It looks to me like it’s considerably more maybe even as much as a pint or 16 ounces. So well we’ll take a look at that when we get a chance to fill it up here.

I don’t have the manual handy so maybe in the comments below we can put the amount of oil that the generator actually takes and if you’re not sure just check your manual. It’ll tell you what you need to know. It’s always a good idea to have some paper towels handy because I don’t care what your changing oil and it’s always messy. So it’s good to have something you can just wipe your fingers off with. Now before I go any farther I actually need to pluck the drain plug out of there. Because it’s sitting in this little pool of oil and if I was more dexterous I wouldn’t let it fall in there in the first place.

Replace drain plug

I don’t know if you’re much of a fisherman if you’re watching this video but I have just gone drain plug fishing and I caught one nice good-looking drain plug there. Not a bad idea to kind of keep an eye on the oil to kind of see if you have any metal shavings or anything in there. I mean ideally with a brand new generator like this we wouldn’t have any of those problems but you know what, keep an eye on things but try to get like preventive maintenance. So there’s a little drain plug comes out of this particular generator.

Next I’m going to go ahead and try to put that drain plug back in without dropping it back in the bath of oil. In fact it’s not going to be possible. It’s just too small so I’m going to put my drop cloth underneath here to catch the oil that’s dripping and now I should be able to reach up in there and I probably could have put that on the socket with the extension. be my life a little bit easier but you know what why make things easy. Alright So now we’ll go ahead and tighten up our drain plug again and a lot of times these drain plugs are not super tight. They’re what I would call snug. So don’t over tighten this.

Don’t overtighten

You don’t want to risk stripping out the threads on it okay and then we’ll ratchet it tight. Now I’m just gonna go til it’s snug and then just a tweak farther just to make sure it’s nice and nice and firm in there. Very good so let’s work on adding oil. Now alright so to fill the oil we’re going to gently pull on this cover. Remove it and we’re going to open up the dipstick / fill hole and ideally we’re going to get the dipstick about half full. There so um I am very prepared here.

The funnel that we have is in storage and I want to get this job done because it’s overdue. So we’re going to go ahead and try the old get the oil in the small hole trick which is always fun. The best way to do that is probably to tip the generator just a little bit and if you look the hole kind of has a little bit of a spout to it anyway. AAlright so we filled it up until it’s just at the bottom of the threads here and the the fill hole so that should be just the right amount of oil there. We’ll go ahead and put the dipstick back in and of course try to clean up as much as you can around the fill hole. If you’re smart like me and you’re not using a funnel you’ll have a little bit.

Refill

But actually it’s pretty easy to fill that. It wasn’t tragic. It’s definitely kind of challenging because you have to tip the generator up. But you know what you got to do there so should be good go ahead and top this off. Good and dipstick is in nice and firm. If you can, try to keep all this oil stuff around here clean. Tends to build up and gets kind of gunky and that just traps heat. So anyway we’re now filled with oil there and we can go ahead and put our cap back on this oil cover. And the last thing here we’re going to put this small cap back on which is the the drain port on the bottom here. It’s kind of just a rubbery plug.

Alright it’s in there nice and firm and so we don’t cause a UH exxon-valdez here in our driveway we’ll move our oil. So everything looks like it’s all done there. Having these little wood blocks helps or something like that. Maybe some concrete blocks or a workbench or something would definitely be helpful if you have to do it in the field. Distant firewood like that. Alright so we’re all done. It probably took us about 10 minutes to do that oil change is pretty simple looks like we used about 16 ounces of oil so I was off on my first calculation.

Use Honda oil

Oh I tried to look up the manual here and now oh try to put the information in the description of this video so you have something reliable but if you’re watching the video and you’re not sure just look at your Honda user manual. It’ll tell you how much oil to use. So use Honda genuine oil. Oh it should be changed we’re supposed to do that I think now every hundred hours or so. They say every three months or 100 hours. That’s going to be a little more frequent for us because we run our generator quite a bit when we’re doing construction things.

So thanks for joining us for this video. That’s how you do your Honda generator oil change. If you’re new to our videos please follow us on our blog. it’s pure living for life com. We’re building an off-grid homestead here in the Pacific Northwest as you can tell it’s a snowy day and we’re going to be doing some timber framing or also working on some solar project stuff like that. so if that’s interesting to you please subscribe to our YouTube channel, follow us on our blog and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Here is a link to Honda generator oils on Amazon