Lister Generator - New Electrics

When I got this old Lister generator, it was wired for 3-phase, and it didn't have much in the way of overload protection. The previous owner said the generator came off a boat, and I'm thinking it was a commercial vessel of some sort, as the generator is quite loud. The outlets on it were also on the sketchy side.

I pulled off the junction box cover on the generator to see how the thing is wired. It looks to be parallel wye 120/208 3-phase:

Fortunately the generator is of the "12-wire" variety and all 12 wires were properly tagged, so it was fairly easy to rewire it for 120/240 single phase. I used the "double delta" wiring scheme:

The following photo shows the original "overload protection", if you can call it that - three 60-amp one-time-use cartridge fuses. And the 120-volt outlet box was wired directly to one of these fused legs. I think the 12-gauge wire running to the outlets would melt before the fuse blew.

One of the first orders of business is to make this generator safe to use, so off to the local hardware store I go. $150 later, I have all the stuff I need. And two days of installing the goodies got me to this point:

On the right in the above photo are three outlets wired in to a modern circuit breaker panel sized appropriately for the wire (what a concept), one 120-volt, 20-amp duplex outlet and two 240-volt, 30-amp outlets. The upper of the two is a 2-conductor (with ground) 240-only welder outlet, and the lower of the two is a 3-conductor (with ground) outlet that has a semi-permanently-mounted cord running from it to a 240-volt, 30-amp wall outlet, which will be used to power the house with 120/240-volts when the power fails.

I also mounted an hour meter and a digital readout in the panel. The digital readout displays volts, amps, watts, watt-hours, frequency and power factor (capable of reading from only one 120-volt leg, not both). I mainly bought the digital readout to display volts and hertz.

The following is a video of the new equipment being put to the test:

Update 7/8/2019 - I made a change since I first wrote this post. The 120 volt duplex outlet only ran from one of the two 240 legs, which would then only run 20 or so amps of 120-volt load (2400 watts). Wanting more, I removed the single duplex and installed a double duplex box, with each outlet being run from opposite 240 legs. This way I could run 40 amps of 120-volt load (about 4800 watts) if I so desired. Here's a photo of the new setup:

I also ran the hour meter and digital readout sensing wires directly to one of the generator output lines, mainly so the hour meter would start counting as soon as the generator was started. Previously the wires were connected to one of the 120 volt circuit breakers, so the breaker would have to be turned on to energize the hour meter and digital readout.