[Padgett]

" battery-assisted start, you must have a full inverter, and synchronize the frequency to the AC of a generator (which is going to be changing in frequency under load as that happens)."

Understand that but my thought was simpler: AFAIK a generator/inverter goes through three stages: motor driven AC, rectified DC, inverter to AC. Since there is a 12v DC pickoff for charging a battery, that made me wonder if stage 2 is 12vDC. If so why not plug a 12v battery there to smooth the momentary surge. Couple DC not AC. Of course it may still overload the inverter but my observation was that without any assist the genset would start the AC occasionally. In those cases the voltage would drop to 95-105v and then recover. When it stalled the voltage would drop below 75v and it would not recover. This led me to believe that the overload trip was not immediate and took a second or two.

That is when I tried delaying the fan to reduce starting current by a few amps. This helped but the long stroke Predator still had trouble ramping up quickly.

Now I am sure there may be a reason I don't know why connecting the 12v coach battery to the 12v charge point on the genset won't help but unfortunately my AC has the soft start installed so cannot test that way and a desperate friend now has my 15k test unit so am left with theory and not reality.