Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

One Star...but "I hate it" is not exactly fair. We love Kohler plumbing. We did a massive renovation and had both exceptional customer service and a wonderful experience with the quality of the product. This led us to buy this 14KW Kohler generator and the Service Entrance Automatic Transfer Switch. The installation in October went perfectly, The initial start up too. In mid December we had an outage that lasted about 3 hours and the unit was perfect. At some point since then, and we don't know when, the unit failed. It only has 4.8 hours on it and when we had our last outage last about 2 weeks ago, but the generator never kicked in. I called Kohler last week and they directed me to the local distributor who came out a couple of days later. Attached is a redacted copy of the report. Turns out the governor linkage was installed backwards at the factory. It also appears that one of the valve rockers came loose and jammed into the exhaust valve spring. This caused mayhem and the cylinder head has to be replaced. This is clearly a quality control issue on the factory floor. It will be fixed under warranty, but the elapsed time will be 3+ weeks. Had my pipes burst, there would have been a law suit. What I find particularly upsetting is that Kohler wants to charge $250 for the software that could have told me about the failure the moment it occurred, rather than finding out from the power company. I sent Kohler a note about why I was upset, but never heard back. On the flip side, I'm an engineer and everything about their product is clearly very well done. The failure has nothing to do with their engineering, but a mistake on the factory floor, so one cannot hold the entire firm or the product accountable for the issue. It's a management issue. In conclusion, I have mixed feelings. The Quality Control is lacking. The Customer Service is lacking. The engineering is excellent. Ownership of the issue is OK. I'm probably going to write Herb Kohler directly...after all, my generator has his name on it. Their OnCue software is a selling point, and should not be an add-on. I have a right to know that my generator failed after 4.8 hour, and I shouldn't have to pay for this information. They need to fire their QC manager and fix the factory floor issues.