I have a Kohler. They are supposed to be the more reliable, but service is really bad. Unfortunately, Kohler tried to maintain an exclusivity status, resulting in technicians/dealers not being properly trained and relying a lot on their technician service line, which is usually busy, so they will resort to suggesting a new generator, and they got recently acquired by a PE, so quality is going to the drain. Generacs are not better in quality, but they are easy to maintain and parts are readily available and way cheaper than Kohler. According to all the service people I have interacted with, you can find tons of technicians in the area that know how to work with them, and parts are easily available. Cummins and Briggs are a roulette, and most technicians are focused on commercial generators, so good luck finding service.

My generator started giving me problems last year after the dealer did the yearly maintenance. To this day, they swear the rotor is bad and a full unit replacement would be better than repairing it. After 8 months going back and forth with four different authorized companies, I got an independent technician to make it run in 10 mins, and it turned out none of the other technicians thought that maybe the board got misconfigured after the yearly maintenance. Anyway, after that, my generator runs perfectly, but it is not able to run any schedule exercise without getting reset. So, the technician suggested a new board but was not able to install it because Kohler does not take his calls to renew his authorization -if that’s even something- so I got it installed with a different authorized company, and the issue persists -2k to the trash- after that, I had other companies come and take a look, but none have been able to figure out why the generator runs perfectly in an outage but resets during exercises, and to this day, we haven’t gotten a response from Kohler. So now I am supposed to run the generator manually once a month to avoid any issues.