Neither mine nor Rick's car battery chargers would work of Rick's generator today. But Ste's would, the difference was that mine and Rick's were large old style chargers with transformer power supplies and Ste's having a switch mode power supply. We didn't know why this mattered though. After a bit of Googling I think that it was because the generator probably only outputs a rough square wave which I think would have resulted in little power transfer through a coil transformer. Posh generators like Hondas have a sine wave generator, which is more like mains and the chargers would probably have worked fine on.

so is there anything i can do to sort this out? i seem to remember the other one ran a car battery charger, but that's died!

You mean you killed it!

yer i took it to the saturday prep for the regional, and it worked fine, to run the laptop, tried it on the sunday for glenn, and nothing, i thought the new one was the same as the last one, so one could be raped for spares you freak (directed at glenn) but it's not maybe ill look at fixing the other too

I think you can get inverters/regulators to clean up power outputs. I don't really know whether your genny needs this though, or whether there is something wrong with it and if it was fixed you wouldn't need one, or whether we just had two dodgy car battery chargers! I couldn't really find much definite about it.

You're so correct.