Robert Kern Made Generators Light and Affordable. Founder of Generac, who has died at age 96, made a fortune on backup power equipment

Robert Kern, the son of a Baptist minister from Iowa, set up shop with five employees in a garage in Wales, Wis., in 1959 to make portable generators. Early customers for his Generac Corp. included farmers and construction crews. Soon all kinds of people were buying his generators under the Craftsman brand at Sears stores.

Mr. Kern diversified his range to include permanently installed generators for homeowners worried about power outages. Generac also developed equipment providing backup electricity for telecom networks, hospitals and other facilities. The Y2K scare yielded a rush of demand, as did hurricanes and tornadoes.

In 2006, when Mr. Kern was in his early 80s, he sold Generac to a private-equity firm for a price estimated at more than $1 billion. He and his wife, Patricia Kern, shared the proceeds by sending checks to the employees. Some got nearly $50,000, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

Mr. Kern’s philanthropy supports a variety of causes, including programs encouraging young people to study science, math and engineering. He donated well over $100 million to the Mayo Clinic, where he received charitable care as a child.

Now known as Generac Holdings Inc., the company went public in 2010. Though no longer the owner, Mr. Kern still offered free advice to the management. He died Nov. 8 at the age of 96 in Waukesha, Wis.

Robert Daniel Kern was born in 1925 and grew up in Osage, Iowa. Always interested in how things worked, he studied mechanical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he graduated in 1947. The next year he married Patricia Exter, who attended the same university.

He worked at Waukesha Motor Co., whose products included generators for railroad passenger cars. After Mr. Kern left that company, he and his wife launched Generac.

It’s great to see a Mechanical Engineer who did good! May he RIP.

We installed a whole-house Briggs & Stratton 26 kW generator a year ago. When we ordered it, it was 20 kW, but they replaced that model with a 26 kW for LESS money! We added an automatic transfer switch which is REAL handy. We also added two load-shed modules for the air conditioner and the electric oven. It there is too much load when the generator is starting or running, those modules prevent the air conditioner and oven from getting power. The oven load-shed module failed recently and it was replaced under warranty. They also changed the air conditioner module because there was a bad batch of circuit boards.

26 kW is huge and should easily run the entire house.

We get some serious outages in severe wind and snow storms up here in North Idaho, so this is good peace of mind.

It runs on natural gas so we should be ok as long as King Brandon doesn’t shut down all natural gas sales in the USA or drive NG prices to the stratosphere. The probability of that is clearly not zero.

The unit runs an exercise cycle for 15 seconds once every two weeks in the winter and once a week in the summer. It also runs a longer “burn off” cycle once in April and once in September to warm it up and drive off any condensed water. Older generators run for 20 minutes every week.

So far, we’ve had one four hour outage and it was really cool to have a well lit house when most of the neighborhood was dark!

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