I purchased one of these in July 2020. I refused delivery of the first unit as it was damaged by the freight carrier, obviously this is not the fault of Lifan or Factory Pure. The factory did not want to ship out a second new unit until they received the damaged one back from the shipper which would have taken two to three weeks. Ok, no problem REFUND MY MONEY AND CANCEL THE ORDER. Funny how when you let them know you will dispute the charge, cancel the order and demand a refund that they will be more accommodating. Ok, so the second new unit arrives, its missing the battery charger. No problem, they sent me the missing charger and it arrived quickly. I did notice however that on the control panel there is as USB port plug where the "automatic idle" on/off switch is pictured on all their sales brochure pictures. I called and spoke with Madi and I was told that this was an update that Lifan removed the on/off feature of the automatic idle. I was not too happy about this. All the current sales pictures show that there is an on/off switch for the automatic idle function. Home Depot also sells this model and in their pictures and description it is represented that it does have an on/off switch for the automatic idle function so either people at Lifan are lying or none of the sales information has been changed. I suspect that I am not the only person questioning this. Factory Pure represents that this is made in the USA but when you get the unit there is markings on it that state it is a product of the CCP (China).
Now for the use of it. A week or so after getting the unit there was a major storm in my area and we were out of power for a couple of days. I didn't want to dig out my 15kw unit that I run my house on so I decided to try this out with my motor home which by the way has a Onan 5500 watt QG that I bought new that had multiple failures in less than 300 hours and still did not work. I started up the Lifan, let it warm up and plugged my motor home shore power cable into it and turned on the AC to full cold I want to see snow flakes mode. I turned on my cell phone booster system and hot spotted my cell phone so streaming Netflix was no problem. The generator ran all night through noon the next day without any problem. The only thing I didn't like was hearing the the generator engine surge when the motor home electrical system increased the load. Obviously when the AC compressor kicked in the generator went into high rpm to accommodate the load. No doubt if had there been the idle on/off switch and it was in the off position the generator would have consumes a lot more fuel during its time in operation.
All in all I am happy with the unit though I would like to be able to turn the automatic idle function on and off as all the sales brochures claim. I bought this generator to replace the defective Onan unit in my motor home but after involving the President and CFO of Cummins / Onan I was given a brand new Onan QG5500 generator with NO WARRANTY. Just goes to show Onan's level of confidence in their own product. Maybe I'll just sell the Onan while it is still brand new and never been installed or used. I would definitely spend $1500 or so on this7kw Lifan inverter genertor before spending $4000 plus for an Onan QG5500. Would I buy another Onan - NO Would I buy another Lifan ESI7000ER - YES