A couple of years ago my wife and I got a Generac whole house generator after suffering through the Great Salem Ice Storm of 2021, which left us without power for twelve days (our 7000 watt Honda generator worked fine, but it isn't anywhere near as convenient and powerful as the 24,000 watt Generac).
Aside from an oil leak, which was fixed by the company, Northside Electric, we bought the Generac from, the only problem we've had with the generator is a spotty wi-fi connection. Wi-fi is built into the Generac, but it requires some connection steps via the notoriously buggy Mobile Link app that is the worst thing about our Generac experience.
At first I had no trouble establishing a wi-fi connection with our Starlink satellite internet. Then Mobile Link reported a wi-fi problem. The signal strength wasn't great at the Generac, so I bought another router from Starlink that became a mesh router located in our utility room, which is the nearest indoor location to the Generac.
That improved the wi-fi signal considerably. Currently Mobile Link is showing it at 62%, whatever that means. (Higher is better, obviously). But after a momentary power outage, Mobile Link notified me that the wi-fi connection had been lost. I thought it would be easy to get it working again, but I was wrong.
Whenever I'd get to the step in the reconnecting process where the Generac wi-fi system looks for available networks, the Mobile Link app would crash. I'd never get a chance to choose our Starlink wi-fi. The Mobile Link app suggested deleting the app, then reinstalling it. That didn't help. The app still crashed.
That spurred me to call Generac support. A woman led me through the steps that I'd already tried. Not surprisingly, I got the same result: Mobile Link crashing. Then she had me try to connect through the Safari web browser. No luck with that either. Her final piece of advice was that this appeared to be a hardware problem and I should contact the dealer who sold us the Generac.
When a Northside Electric guy came out to our house, we tried to connect to Starlink wi-fi using the familiar process. But again, the Mobile Link app would crash at the point the Generac was searching for available wi-fi networks. That led the guy to go to his truck and call a Northside Electric employee who was the company expert in wi-fi connecting.
Bingo! He said that I should log out of the Mobile Link app, then delete and reinstall it as I'd done before — but without logging out first. Once I logged back in to the reinstalled app, it was easy to connect to the 2.4 GHz Starlink wi-fi (Starlink lets you split the satellite signal into 5.0 and 2.4 GHz wi-fi networks; a Generac needs 2.4 GHz).
I have no idea why the Northside Electric employee knew more than Generac support about how to restore a wi-fi connection. I'm just glad that he did, because it never occurred to me that logging out of Mobile Link before deleting it would fix the problem. I delete and reinstall iPhone apps fairly frequently when they become glitchy. I don't recall ever needing to log out of an app before deleting it, but that did the trick in this case.
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