ECE major here that slept through all his power classes. Say I have a basic single-phase generator like the kind you get at Home Depot. If I have long string of irons and light bulbs (essentially purely resistive loads) and draw more than the rated wattage, what happens? My intuition says that the engine must work harder, but what is the specific mechanism that causes this.
In: Engineering
Usually when overloading such small generators the voltage will drop and the generator will slow down and eventually stall. You can hear the difference in the generator engine as you load it up.
The generator always tries to maintain the fixed speed to output the right frequency of voltage. As you load it up it will slow down, and the engine governor will increase fuel to the engine to being the speed back to nominal.
Furthermore, increased electrical load results in increased fuel consumption.
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