So - is this a coincidence or a problem.

In the recent hurricane/tropical storm, my home was running on generator for a few days. It's a Honda, older model (from 1998), and it's got an "auto-throttle" feature to save gas when there's no load.

Now, two of my loads are a refrigerator and a freezer. The others are just pumps that come on based on pressure or float switches.

About 2 days after the power came back on, we noticed the refrigerator wasn't quite keeping stuff as cold as it should and soon after we had a service technician come in and the compressor motor was dead. Cost to repair was near cost to replace, it was 11 years old, so we replaced it.

But I've been thinking about how auto-throttle works and was wondering if I may have accidentally killed my refrigerator. The generator drops the voltage and slows down until it detects a load of a bit more than 1 amp. This fridge had an "energy saving mode" that drew less than an amp at times - I wonder if there could have been some kind of issue with the compressor attempting to run on 50 volts while the generator was in slow mode.

Does anyone think/know if this is possible or is it just bad luck.