Generator Tracking & Monitoring: Turning the One Asset That Never Moves Into the One Asset That Never Lies
Every fleet has one machine that breaks the normal rules of tracking. A generator does not have a route, a driver, or a destination — and yet it is often the single most expensive asset per hour that a business owns. It sits in a shed or a container, burning diesel nobody watches, accumulating engine hours nobody verifies, and waiting for the one moment — a blackout — when its entire reason for existing is tested. Kendaall’s generator monitoring platform exists because a generator’s silence is exactly what makes it easy to misreport. We put an independent, wired witness on every genset: true runtime hours, fuel level to the litre, unauthorised-start alarms, mains-failure and changeover reporting, and theft protection for the portable units that disappear from sites overnight.
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A Generator Cannot Be Tracked Like a Vehicle. It Has to Be Interrogated Like a Witness.
To understand what generator monitoring actually does, it helps to separate the generator itself from the questions people ask about it. A diesel generator, or genset, is simply an engine coupled to an alternator, producing electrical power on demand. It has no odometer, no speedometer, no natural record of its own activity. Everything a vehicle tracker measures — distance, speed, route, idle time — has a direct equivalent that a generator does not produce by itself. What a genset produces instead is a small, closed set of high-value questions: Did it run, and for how long? What did it consume while it ran? Who told it to start? Did it respond when the grid failed? Is it still where it is supposed to be? Every module in Kendaall’s platform is built to answer one of these five questions with instrumentation, not with a caretaker’s word.
These five questions are not independent of each other — they are relationships between entities that a monitoring platform has to model correctly to be useful. Runtime hours are meaningless without knowing whether a run was authorised. Fuel burn is only informative when it is compared against runtime hours, because litres-per-hour is the number that reveals theft, and litres-per-hour without hours is just a falling tank level with no explanation attached. A mains-failure event is only a success or a failure once it is paired with the genset’s start response and the time it took to pick up load. And a generator’s location only matters against its expected, geofenced position, because a stationary asset has no “normal” movement to compare against — any movement at all is the signal. Kendaall’s platform treats runtime, fuel, start events, mains events, and position as connected records about the same machine rather than five separate feeds, which is the difference between a dashboard of numbers and an actual account of what happened.
Runtime, fuel, starts, and mains events — the five questions, answered by wire instead of by caretaker. (Replace with your genset installation photo.)
Kendaall answers the five questions with instrumentation rather than testimony. A monitoring unit wires to the genset’s control and charging circuits to capture true crank-on runtime, independent of the panel’s own hour meter. A calibrated fuel level sensor fitted inside the tank logs every litre in and out, continuously, at a resolution fine enough to catch a bucket of diesel leaving through a hose rather than a pump. Start events report instantly, matched against a working-hours rule that flags the run nobody scheduled at eleven at night. Mains-sense wiring records each grid failure alongside whether — and how fast — the genset picked up the load, converting “we assume it works” into a dated, timestamped record. And GPS remains fitted even on generators that are supposed to be permanently static, quietly, because the day a “static” asset moves is precisely the day its position becomes the single most important data point on the account; a genset moving without a transfer order is a genset being stolen, and the platform treats that event with the same urgency our stolen vehicle recovery service applies to a car.
Generators also sit inside a wider category of equipment that this kind of monitoring naturally extends to. An automatic transfer switch (ATS) is the component that physically moves a building’s load from mains to generator supply, and it is the piece of hardware our mains-sense wiring listens to when logging a changeover event. Internationally, generating sets used for standby and prime power are specified against the ISO 8528 family of standards, and critical facilities such as hospitals commonly design their emergency power systems around the principles set out in NFPA 110, the U.S. standard for emergency and standby power systems that many institutional specifications in East Africa still reference. Kendaall’s platform does not replace any of this engineering — it verifies, in operational data, whether the system built to those standards is actually performing the way it was designed to.
This distinction between engineering and verification matters more than it might first appear. A generator can be correctly specified, correctly installed, and still fail on the day it is needed, because mechanical specification answers the question “can this system work” while operational monitoring answers the separate question “did this system work, this time, on this day.” The two questions are commonly confused, and a business that has only ever answered the first one is, in practice, running its backup power on an assumption. Monitoring exists to convert that assumption into a record — the same shift that turns a generator from a piece of standby equipment into an asset whose actual performance can be reported, audited, and improved over time, in the same way a fleet of vehicles is reported on rather than simply trusted to exist.
The economics of generator ownership concentrate almost entirely in two of the five questions: fuel and hours. Diesel consumption scales roughly with load and set size — a 100kVA standby set commonly burns in the order of 20 litres per hour under a substantial load, according to typical genset fuel-consumption tables published by manufacturers, and a telecom or borehole site running daily backup cycles can move hundreds of thousands of shillings of diesel through a tank with no independent witness across a single year. Site-level fuel loss through siphoning, short deliveries, and phantom “top-ups” behaves exactly as it does on the heavy machinery side of a fleet: commonly cited in the 10–20% range of throughput, invisible until it is actually measured. For generator hire companies, hours are revenue itself: every disputed meter reading is disputed income, and an independent runtime feed converts hire billing from a negotiation into a statement of fact. The platform scales from a single standby set behind a Nairobi office to distributed genset estates spanning telecom towers, borehole pumps, and event fleets across Kenya and the wider region, all visible beside a business’s vehicles and machines inside one fleet management account.
Six Ways Generators Lose Money in the Dark — and the Signal That Exposes Each
Every one of the six problems below traces back to the same root cause: a generator produces very little data about itself, so the gap gets filled by whoever is closest to the machine — a caretaker, a hired-out client, a night guard, a fuel attendant. Kendaall’s job is to close that gap with a wired, timestamped record before it becomes a loss on the books.
The Tank That Empties Faster Than It Burns
Genset fuel theft is the closest thing to a perfect crime available on an unmonitored site: the tank sits outdoors or in a semi-accessible plant room, refills happen irregularly and are logged on paper if at all, and consumption is “estimated” against a delivery note that nobody cross-checks. A calibrated sensor ends the estimating. Every litre is logged continuously, every delivery is verified against the supplier’s invoice at the moment it happens, and any abnormal drop — the signature of a siphon hose rather than an engine burning fuel under load — triggers a real-time alarm with its timestamp attached. On distributed estates such as telecom sites or borehole networks, fuel curves across every site sit on one screen, and the site whose curve looks different from its neighbours is, almost without exception, the site with the problem. Full capability detail lives on our fuel monitoring service page.
Hire Billing Built on a Meter You Cannot See
Generator hire companies bill by the hour against a meter that physically lives on the client’s site, is read by the client’s own staff, and is photographed and sent back when convenient. This arrangement puts the party being billed in charge of the number the bill is based on — a structural conflict that has nothing to do with anyone’s honesty and everything to do with incentives. Kendaall’s independent runtime feed streams true crank-on hours to the hire company’s own dashboard regardless of whose compound the set sits in, building per-contract hour ledgers, automated over-run charges, and invoices backed by telemetry rather than trust. It is the identical dispute-ending logic our car hire clients already apply to kilometres, applied here to engine hours.
The Midnight Runs Nobody Scheduled
Gensets get borrowed without ever leaving the compound. A night run powers a neighbour’s welding job; a caretaker charges a side business off the socket behind the plant room; an event next door quietly taps a “spare” generator for the evening. None of this shows up as theft in the conventional sense, because the machine never moves — but it is your diesel, your engine hours, and your service interval being spent for someone else’s benefit. Start alerts with working-hours rules flag every unscheduled run the instant it cranks, and the runtime ledger attributes every single hour to either a schedule or a flagged exception. Most clients discover their genset’s secret life within the first fortnight of monitoring going live.
The Blackout Test You Only Fail Once
A standby generator has exactly one job, and it is performed on the single worst day possible, with no rehearsal. Hospitals, cold rooms, data closets, and hatcheries routinely discover a failed changeover only after the fact — as spoiled vaccines, a downed server rack, or dead stock. Mains-sense monitoring records every mains failure and whether the set actually started, how long pickup took, and exactly when mains power was restored, turning “we assume the generator works” into a per-blackout report that can be checked at any time. A failed auto-start at two in the morning triggers an alert immediately, so the response happens before the freezer temperature climbs rather than after.
Service by Calendar on a Machine That Ages by the Hour
Generators are typically serviced “quarterly,” while their real mechanical wear accumulates by the hour, not the month. A set that ran 400 hours through a bad-grid season is overdue for service by the second month of that quarter, while an idle standby set wastes money on oil changes it never needed. True runtime metering drives service scheduling by actual hours run, with threshold alerts and per-set service histories that protect manufacturer warranties and resale value — the same predictive maintenance discipline our vehicle fleets already run, applied to assets whose failure can take an entire site down with them.
The Portable Set That Walked Off the Site
Small and towable gensets rank among the most-stolen categories of equipment on Kenyan construction and event sites — high resale value, universal demand across trades, and gone in a single pickup load overnight. The monitoring unit’s GPS layer arms the moment a set is expected to be static: movement without a logged transfer order triggers an instant alert, live pursuit tracking, and recovery-team coordination, backed by an internal battery that keeps transmitting even if a thief physically cuts the power supply. For hire fleets specifically, every set’s location becomes inventory truth in real time — which client site it is on, since when, and whether it is actually still there.
Not All Gensets Ask the Same Questions: Matching the Monitoring to the Role
Before specifying a monitoring configuration, it helps to be precise about what kind of generator is being fitted, because the role a genset plays changes which of the five questions matters most. The industry generally sorts generators into a small number of duty categories, and each one has a different relationship to runtime, fuel, and mains data.
Standby (Emergency Backup) Generators
A standby set exists purely to answer the mains-failure question. It sits idle for most of its life and is judged entirely on how it performs during the small number of hours a year the grid actually fails. For this category, mains-sense and changeover monitoring dominate the specification, with fuel sensing added to guard against a tank running dry exactly when it is needed most — a failure mode that is invisible until the one moment it matters.
Prime Power Generators
A prime power set is the sole or primary source of electricity for a site, common on remote construction projects, off-grid farms, and some telecom installations without a stable connection. Here, runtime hours and fuel burn dominate, because the generator is essentially the site’s utility company, and its cost-per-kWh needs to be understood the way a business would understand any other major recurring cost.
Hire Fleet Generators
A hired-out genset is, first and foremost, a revenue-generating asset that happens to sit on someone else’s property for weeks or months. Runtime hours drive billing directly, GPS position drives inventory and recovery, and fuel data protects against consumption disputes at handover. All three modules typically apply together on hire stock.
Portable and Towable Generators
Small petrol or diesel units used on construction sites and at events are valued for their mobility, which is precisely what makes them vulnerable to theft. For this category, the GPS and geofencing layer is the dominant concern, with runtime and fuel data added mainly to support billing at events or hire jobs.
Distributed Backup Estates
Telecom towers, borehole pumps, and multi-branch retail or banking sites often run identical small-to-mid gensets in large numbers across a wide geography. Here, the priority shifts to fleet-wide comparison: fuel curves, runtime patterns, and mains-failure rates benchmarked site against site so that the one location behaving differently from its peers stands out automatically, rather than requiring someone to notice it manually.
This taxonomy is the reason Kendaall configures every installation to the set’s actual role rather than selling a single fixed package. A standby hospital generator and a hired-out 60kVA set on a construction site are both “generators,” but they are asking almost entirely different questions of the platform, and the hardware and reporting reflect that difference from day one.
It is also worth noting that a genset’s duty classification can change over its working life, and the monitoring configuration should change with it. A set bought new as a hospital’s standby unit may, ten years later, be sold into a hire fleet once the institution upgrades to a larger installation; a portable unit bought for a single event may end up doing regular prime-power duty on a small off-grid farm. Because Kendaall’s monitoring unit is fitted independently of the genset’s own control electronics, reconfiguring the platform to match a new duty — adding GPS theft protection when a set moves into a hire fleet, for instance, or adding mains-sense wiring when a portable set is installed as permanent backup — is a software and light-wiring change rather than a hardware replacement, supported through the same transfer support used whenever a set changes hands or changes role.
Five Modules That Give Every Genset a Voice
Each module below corresponds to one of the five questions introduced earlier. They are designed to be deployed individually or together, and most installations combine two or three depending on the genset’s role in the taxonomy above.
MODULE 01 · True Runtime Metering & Hire Billing
Crank-on to crank-off runtime is captured directly from the genset’s own circuits, independent of the panel’s built-in hour meter, immune to the excuse that “the meter was faulty,” and exportable per day, per site, and per contract. Hire companies receive per-contract hour ledgers with automated over-run calculation the moment a job runs past its agreed hours; owners get honest diesel budgeting and utilisation truth across an entire estate; and every other module on the platform depends on this feed, because fuel burn, service intervals, and cost-per-kWh are all expressed as a rate against runtime hours.
- Circuit-wired runtime capture, independent of the panel meter
- Per-contract hour ledgers and automated hire over-run billing
- Load-band logging (where supported) separating idle from working runs
- Estate-wide utilisation views for multi-site operators
MODULE 02 · Fuel Monitoring: Tank, Delivery & Burn
A calibrated capacitive sensor logs the day tank — and, where fitted, the bulk storage tank — continuously at roughly ±1-litre resolution. The platform reads the resulting curve rather than a single number: deliveries are verified in litres against supplier invoices at the moment they arrive, burn-rate is benchmarked per set and flagged the instant it drifts from its own historical baseline (drift is as often an early engine-health signal as it is a theft signal), and any drop in fuel level while the engine is stationary triggers an instant siphoning alarm. Bowser-to-tank-to-burn reconciliation closes the loop that most site-level fuel theft depends on staying open.
- ±1-litre continuous monitoring, calibrated per tank geometry
- Delivery verification: litres received vs litres invoiced
- Instant siphoning alarms with time and site identification
- Burn-rate benchmarking as an engine-health early warning
MODULE 03 · Start Governance & Security Alerts
Every crank event reports instantly and is tested against the set’s defined schedule: authorised runs log silently in the background, while unscheduled starts alert the owner within seconds of ignition. Panel-door sensing, battery-disconnect alarms, and tamper detection guard the machine itself against interference, while working-hours rules turn the runtime ledger into a true attribution record — every recorded hour belongs either to a schedule, a blackout response, or an exception that someone has to explain.
- Instant start/stop alerts with schedule-based exception flagging
- Panel, battery, and wiring tamper alarms
- After-hours and weekend run reports per set and site
- Escalation chains: caretaker, manager, owner, response team
MODULE 04 · Mains-Failure & Changeover Monitoring
Mains-sense wiring, tied into the site’s transfer switch, records every grid failure alongside the genset’s actual response: start delay, successful pickup, run duration, and return-to-mains — logged per blackout, per site, indefinitely. Standby owners get genuine uptime assurance, plus an alert at two in the morning if the auto-start sequence fails; multi-site operators get a grid-reliability map of their own estate built from real events rather than assumptions; and facilities teams get the changeover audit trail that service-level agreements, insurers, and hospital boards routinely ask for after an incident.
- Per-blackout event records: failure, start delay, pickup, restoration
- Failed-start alarms the moment the set should have run and did not
- Estate-wide outage and runtime mapping across sites
- Exportable uptime reports for SLAs, audits, and insurers
MODULE 05 · Position, Theft Protection & Portable Fleet Inventory
The GPS layer that “static” assets need precisely because they are assumed not to require one: geofenced home positions with instant movement alarms, live pursuit tracking with backup-battery transmission that survives a cut power supply, and a transit mode for authorised relocations so a legitimate move never trips a false alarm. Hire fleets run this module as live inventory — every set’s site, tenure, and status visible on one map — and towable or trailer-mounted units pair naturally with the long-life magnetic asset trackers deployed across our asset tracking service more broadly.
- Home-position geofences with instant unauthorised-movement alarms
- Live recovery tracking with internal battery fallback
- Transit mode for approved deliveries and site transfers
- Hire-fleet inventory: which set, which site, since when
A genset estate on one screen: hours, fuel curves, blackout responses, and every set’s position. (Replace with a dashboard screenshot.)
The Vocabulary Behind Generator Monitoring, in One Place
Generator monitoring pulls together terms from three different worlds — power engineering, fleet telematics, and fuel management — and conversations often stall simply because a term means something slightly different in each. The definitions below are how Kendaall uses each term across the platform and this page.
Genset
Short for “generating set,” a genset is the combined unit of an engine and an alternator that together convert fuel into electrical power. The word is used interchangeably with “generator” throughout the industry and this page, though strictly a generator is only the alternator half of the pairing.
Runtime Hours
The cumulative time a genset’s engine has actually been running, measured from crank-on to crank-off. Runtime hours are the basis for hire billing, service scheduling, and cost-per-kWh calculations, which is why an independent, circuit-wired measurement matters more for a generator than for almost any other class of equipment.
Automatic Transfer Switch (ATS)
The switching device that detects a mains power failure and physically transfers a building’s electrical load from the grid connection to the generator, then transfers it back once mains power is restored and stable. Mains-sense monitoring listens at this switch to log the timing of every changeover.
Mains Failure / Changeover Event
The record of a single blackout, from the moment grid power is lost through the generator’s start delay, successful (or failed) pickup of the load, the duration of the run, and the moment power reverts to mains. Each event is logged individually rather than as a running total, because the details of any one failure — particularly a failed start — matter far more than an aggregate count.
Fuel Burn Rate
Litres consumed per hour of runtime, typically benchmarked against a set’s expected consumption at a given load. A burn rate that drifts upward without a corresponding increase in load is one of the clearest available signals of either fuel theft or a developing engine fault.
Load Band
A rough classification of how heavily a genset is loaded during a given run — idle, light, or full load — used to make fuel-burn benchmarking and cost-per-kWh figures more accurate, since an idling engine and a fully loaded one consume very different amounts of diesel per hour even though both count identically toward runtime hours.
Geofence
A virtual boundary drawn around a genset’s expected, static location. Because a generator is not supposed to move at all in most deployments, its geofence is typically drawn tight around the home position, and any crossing of that boundary is treated as a high-priority alert rather than a routine notification.
Prime Power vs. Standby Duty
Two of the duty classifications referenced in international genset specification standards such as ISO 8528. Standby duty describes a generator that only runs during a mains failure; prime power duty describes a generator that is the primary, ongoing source of electricity for a site. The distinction affects both the engineering of the set and, in Kendaall’s platform, which monitoring modules matter most.
What Changes When the Genset Starts Reporting for Itself
The clearest way to see the value of instrumentation is to compare what a business knows before monitoring against what the same business knows in the first month after it goes live. The pattern repeats across nearly every client, regardless of set size or industry.
| Question | Before Monitoring | After Monitoring |
|---|---|---|
| How many hours has the genset run this month? | Panel meter reading, self-reported by site staff or client | Independent circuit-wired runtime feed, exportable per day and per contract |
| How much fuel was actually delivered? | Delivery note taken on trust; tank checked visually, if at all | Litres logged automatically at delivery and reconciled against the invoice |
| Did the generator start when the grid failed last week? | Assumed yes, unless someone happened to notice a problem | Timestamped record of the failure, start delay, and pickup for every event |
| Was the genset used outside working hours? | Unknown, unless a fuel or hour discrepancy was noticed weeks later | Instant alert at the moment of an unscheduled start |
| Is the portable unit still on site? | Confirmed by physically visiting, if it is confirmed at all | Continuous geofenced position with instant movement alarms |
Where the Numbers Actually Move: Fuel, Hours, Uptime, and Assets Recovered
Business owners evaluating any monitoring platform tend to ask a version of the same question: where does the subscription pay for itself? For generators specifically, the answer is more concentrated than it is for most equipment, because so much of a genset’s total cost of ownership sits inside just two of the five questions the platform answers — fuel and hours — with uptime and asset recovery acting as the less frequent but far higher-stakes payoffs.
On the fuel side, the return is arithmetic rather than promotional. A business that has never measured its genset’s fuel consumption independently typically has no reliable baseline for what “normal” burn looks like, which means theft, short deliveries, and drift caused by a developing engine fault all hide inside the same unmeasured number. Once a calibrated sensor establishes that baseline, any deviation becomes visible immediately rather than accumulating quietly over months. For a site burning meaningful diesel volumes — a telecom tower running nightly backup cycles, a hospital standby set, a hire company’s fleet — the value of the first exposed discrepancy commonly exceeds months of the monitoring subscription on its own.
On the hours side, the return depends on who is paying whom. For a hire company, independent runtime data is close to a direct multiplier on billing accuracy, because every hour previously lost to a disputed or under-reported meter reading becomes an hour actually invoiced. For an owner-operator, the same data instead protects against over-servicing and under-servicing in roughly equal measure — the quarterly oil change that was never needed, and the service interval quietly missed because the panel meter under-read.
Uptime and theft recovery sit at the far end of the same spectrum: lower in frequency, but often the single largest financial event a generator will ever be involved in. A failed changeover at a hospital or cold-storage site can cost far more in a single incident than years of monitoring fees, and a recovered portable genset after a theft attempt can represent the entire replacement value of the unit. These are the events that a business hopes never to need the platform for, and the reason the platform is built to catch them regardless.
Every Business Whose Worst Day Depends on a Machine in a Shed
Generator Hire Companies
Independent hour meters on every hired set, live fleet inventory across client sites, telemetry-backed invoices that end billing disputes before they start, and theft protection on the assets that earn their keep away from home. Hour data feeds directly into service scheduling as well, so warranty and resale value are protected across the whole rental stock, not just the units currently on hire.
Telecom & Infrastructure Sites
Distributed genset estates carry the industry’s worst fuel-loss exposure, because each tower or cabinet site is visited infrequently and often relies on a local caretaker for fuel top-ups. Per-site fuel curves, delivery verification, runtime attribution, and outage mapping bring an entire network’s backup power estate onto one screen, with the outlier site surfacing on its own.
Hospitals & Institutions
Changeover assurance where failure is measured in more than money. Per-blackout response records, failed-start alarms, and the uptime audit trail that boards, insurers, and health regulators expect after any incident involving critical power, aligned with the emergency power principles set out in standards such as NFPA 110.
Construction Sites
Site gensets monitored on the same platform as the excavators and graders working beside them — fuel control, unauthorised-run alerts, and theft protection for equipment that thieves typically load first, because it is smaller and easier to move than the plant around it.
Events & Entertainment
High-value portable sets deployed to fields and venues for days at a time: live location tracking, run-hour billing per event, fuel reconciliation between load-in and load-out, and movement alarms when the show has ended but the genset has not returned home on schedule.
Farms & Borehole Operators
Pump gensets running unattended cycles far from the farmhouse: runtime verification, fuel curves that expose the caretaker economy that tends to build up around unsupervised diesel, and start alerts — alongside the tractors on the agriculture platform already visible in the same account.
One Monitoring Unit, Configured to the Set — From the 5kVA Portable to the 2,000kVA Plant Room
Installation wires the monitoring unit to the genset’s battery, control, and charging circuits, fits and calibrates the tank sensor, and adds mains-sense connection to the transfer switch where changeover monitoring has been specified. A typical single-set installation takes 60–120 minutes, performed at your site by certified technicians, with multi-site estate rollouts scheduled regionally to minimise disruption across a distributed network. Hardware ships from the Kendaall shop (see monitoring units, fuel sensors, and accessories), carries the standard hardware warranty, and stays healthy under the repair & maintenance service, with transfer support available whenever a set is sold or redeployed to another site.
| Genset Class | Recommended Configuration | Primary Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Standby sets (offices, institutions) | Runtime + mains-sense + fuel sensor | Changeover assurance, fuel control |
| Hire fleet sets | Runtime + GPS inventory + fuel sensor | Telemetry-backed billing, live inventory |
| Telecom / borehole sites | Runtime + fuel + delivery verification | Estate fuel-loss elimination |
| Portable & towable sets | Compact unit + movement alarms + battery backup | Theft protection and recovery |
| Prime-power plant rooms | Full suite + load-band logging | Cost-per-kWh truth, service by hours |
Compatibility note: the platform instruments the genset independently of its control electronics, so it fits engines and controllers from manufacturers such as Perkins, Cummins, CAT, FG Wilson, and Lister, alongside the wider range of Chinese-market sets common on East African sites. Where a modern digital controller such as a Deep Sea Electronics or ComAp unit is already fitted, Kendaall can read its data as an additional layer rather than replacing it.
What Generator Owners and Hire Companies Ask Before Fitting Monitoring
Will monitoring work on my generator’s make and size?
Yes — the platform instruments the genset independently rather than depending on its brand electronics, so it fits Perkins, Cummins, CAT, FG Wilson, Lister, and Chinese-market sets alike, from small portables to plant-room installations. Where a modern controller offers data (Deep Sea, ComAp and similar), we read it as an additional layer; where the set is a bare engine and an alternator, our own sensors supply everything the dashboard needs.
Can it really verify that my night guard or caretaker isn’t running the genset privately?
Every crank event reports instantly with its timestamp, and each run is matched against the schedule you define — so an eleven p.m. two-hour run appears on your phone as it starts, and again in the weekly exception report with its fuel burn attached. Owners rarely need a confrontation: simply displaying the dashboard at the site tends to end the practice within days. The record is there if the conversation is needed.
How does the hire billing feed work if the genset is on my client’s site?
The monitoring unit reports over the mobile network directly to your dashboard — the client’s site, Wi-Fi, and staff are not in the loop. You see true hours, fuel, and location for every set on hire, per-contract ledgers accumulate automatically, and month-end invoices attach the telemetry statement. Disputed meter readings end because there is no longer a meter to dispute — there is a feed.
What happens during network outages at remote sites?
The unit buffers all data — runtime, fuel, events — through coverage gaps and uploads on reconnection, so records stay complete even at sites with unreliable signal. Alerts queued offline transmit the moment any network returns. For permanently off-network sites, satellite-fallback hardware is available; ask when requesting your quote.
What does generator monitoring cost, and what’s the payback?
Configuration drives cost: runtime-only units sit at the entry tier, fuel sensing adds the calibrated sensor, and mains-sense or load logging add wiring time rather than much hardware. Per-set pricing is on the pricing page with estate volume rates from five sets. Payback concentrates in fuel: on any set moving meaningful diesel, the first verified delivery or first exposed siphoning event typically covers months of subscription — hire companies see it in the first billing cycle instead.
We run vehicles, machines, and generators. Can everything live in one account?
Yes — that’s the design. Gensets appear beside your trucks, plant, and cars in one fleet management account, each asset class carrying its own data layers and rules, with consolidated fuel and cost reporting across all of it. Mixed estates also qualify for combined volume pricing.
Do you monitor the transfer switch itself, or just the generator?
Mains-sense wiring connects at the transfer switch, so the platform sees both sides of a changeover event: the moment mains power drops, the moment the genset starts and picks up the load, and the moment mains power returns and the switch changes back. This is what allows a per-blackout report rather than a simple “did it run” record.
Can monitoring tell the difference between an idle generator and one under real load?
Where the genset’s controller or charging circuit exposes load data, the platform logs load-band information alongside runtime, so an hour spent idling can be separated from an hour spent carrying a full building’s load. This matters for fuel-burn benchmarking, since an idling set and a loaded set have very different expected consumption, and treating them the same would make the burn-rate alarms far less accurate.
How quickly will I see the first useful alert after installation?
Most clients see their first meaningful signal — an unscheduled start, an unexpected fuel drop, or a delivery reconciliation — inside the first two weeks of live monitoring, simply because the behaviours these modules are designed to catch tend to be habitual rather than one-off. A caretaker running private jobs, a driver skimming diesel on delivery, or a fault in the auto-start sequence all tend to recur on a schedule of their own, which the platform is built to notice quickly.
Does fitting a monitoring unit affect my generator’s warranty?
No. Installation taps into existing battery, control, and charging circuits rather than modifying the engine or alternator itself, and is carried out by certified technicians using standard low-voltage wiring practice. Manufacturer warranties on the genset itself are unaffected; the monitoring unit carries its own separate hardware warranty.
Can I monitor a generator I don’t own, such as a landlord’s or a client’s set?
Yes, with the owner’s consent. This is a common arrangement for tenants running critical operations — a cold room or server room, for example — inside a building whose backup generator is owned and maintained by the landlord. A dedicated monitoring unit gives the tenant independent visibility into whether the changeover actually worked during a blackout, without requiring any change to the landlord’s own maintenance arrangements.
Give Every Genset a Witness Before the Next Delivery, the Next Hire, the Next Blackout
Tell us the sets you run — make, size, role (standby, prime, hire), and where each one sits — and we’ll return a per-set configuration and price against the fuel, hours, and risk it will start reporting on day one.
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