A long time ago, in a universe far away, the U.S. Army had such a bad problem with wet stacking, that they at last accepted the problem, and tried to correct it. Hence, if you look at the MEP-006A, MEP-005A and MEP-004A TM, you will see an onboard load bank.
The gen sets DID NOT come with the load banks. And to my knowledge, only the 60 KW, MEP-115A, 400 Hertz load banks were ever issued in large numbers. That was for HAWK Air Defense Firing Batteries. Great idea, poorly executed.
They had to be put on by the owning unit. So the Duck Hunters ordered a bunch of them, and installed them. TROSCOM, (Troop Support Command, the responsible activity for power generation at the time) provided assistance in the issue, and installation.
As far as I know, no money was allocated for repair parts. The units got REAL hot. Burned the paint off the load banks. Then the metal rusted. Then the heater coils had metal fatigue due to the high heat, and often rapid cooling in the rain. The load bank was huge. It mounted on top of the gen set. Added lots of weight to the set and trailer. The door had to be now held open with hooks on top of the load bank. Impossible to do while standing on the ground. The hooks broke/rusted through. Often, after climbing on the trailer, hooking the door in the open position and troubleshoots a running gen set, the damn things fell down on your head. It happened to me a good number of times, and he who had no hat, often had scars to prove it. It was a 50 KW load bank, that could be stepped up from 0-50 KW, by a 5 position switch.
If the gen set was running at 40 KW, and you had the load bank at 12.5 (52.5 KW) and the radar suddenly turned on a heater, or went to full radiate, the automatic load reject system was supposed to kick the load bank off line. Didn't always happen. On a firing run, the thought of a compleat system failure was the nightmare, of all ADA nightmares. You are going to die. So as a rule, the load banks were seldom used, and if they were used, set a a way lower load. Hence not a lot of help fighting wet stacking.
By 1990, the DRMO's were full of them. Some were operational, but looked like crap, and no one trusted them. Most were missing parts, because there were no repair parts in the system. My shop harvested a truck load of them and there was a shade tree load bank constructed that could put a 200 KW load on the Patriot 150 KW gen set. It was so shade tree, that we set it up, and then fired the gen set up and we would not go within 30-40 feet of it. Tremendous heat, and the fear of being shocked.
There was also a model made for the MEP-113A, 15 KW , 400 Hertz gen set. That was the gen set made for Patriot Launcher Generators. It mounted on the front of the gen set, to the radiator grill. The air that was expelled through the gen set, and out the radiator, also cooled the load bank. Much better system. But rarely seen. It was also a PITA, but a better built PITA.
