A surprisingly competent little generator and an amazing value.

I purchased this generator because having emergency back up power for northern New England winters is a good idea. I kept putting it off because of price and never being truly motivated to get one except those times of the year when generators are hard to come by and command top dollar. At $200 and generally good consumer reviews, I finally ran out of reasons to procrastinate. Besides the absurdly low price, the most enticing thing about this little generator is the surprisingly positive user reviews it has received on Amazon and Youtube. I’m happy to report my experience thus far has also been positive. After removing the shipping brace, adding gas and oil (and the optional, extra cost wheel kit), this thing fired up on the very first pull. That's kind of amazing when you think about it. It did run very rough for the first half a minute until I realized the choke isn't necessary for more than a few seconds if you’re starting it in warm weather. After shutting off the choke, it settled into a nice mechanical purr. I let it run for about 20 minutes and plugged in a few appliances just to confirm it was actually generating electricity. It's surprisingly quiet for a budget generator. Not whisper quiet like those $1000 Honda and Yamaha inverter generators, but noticeably less noisy than my neighbor's 8000 watt generator. This unit's modest power output is an acceptable tradeoff for its small size and fuel efficiency. I live in a small one bedroom dwelling and my emergency electrical needs are very modest. I understand that a mid winter power outage is not the time to run an electric clothes dryer and a microwave oven. Dislikes begin with the fact that it’s made in China. I'm not philosophically against Chinese products like some people are, but I think critics do have a point that this is not a high grade unit. Back in 1997 we had a nasty ice storm up here in Maine and some people were without power for over 2 weeks in the dead of winter. I’d hate to rely on a cheapie imported generator running 24/7 for 14+ days. Am I saying that this little Durostar couldn’t do it? No, but I hope I never have to find out. My user review, like many, has to be taken with a grain of salt because I haven't had to use this unit yet in a true emergency. But I am encouraged by the level of quality and performance I can see thus far. I give it 4 stars, withholding that 5th star merely because it hasn't yet been put to the test. A few tips: 1) Contrary to some reviews, buying a long necked funnel for adding crankcase oil isn't necessary; the unit comes with a very nice little funnel for this exact purpose, along with a double sided screw driver, metric spanner and a spark plug socket wrench. I wasted $6 because I didn't realize that. 2) I read somewhere about a guy who purchased something like 10 of these generators for some kind of business. He found an almost 7-fold increase in service life using synthetic versus conventional motor oil. Synthetic certainly doesn't cost 7x as much and even if it did, this unit only uses 20oz at a time. If synthetic merely doubled the generator's useful life, it would be well worth it. 3) Invest in a heavy gauge extension cord with a NEMA L5-30R male plug on one end and regular female outlets on the other. It'll allow so you use this generator's 30 amp receptacle. Or do what I did and buy a $20 10-gauge extension cord at Harbor Freight and splice a NEMA plug onto that.Read full review