Just wanted to throw this up here in case anyone is in the market for a small portable gen. I have a 5500 that I've used for the house/camping the last few years. It weighs 160lbs and even on a wheel kit is a bitch to get in and out of the truck. Since I bought the 5er it has to go in front of the 5er hitch in the truck ( too tall to go behind it). This made it a real pain in the ass to deal with every weekend now that bow season has started.
I started reading with the main plan to get a honda eu2000i. The cheapest I could find the honda for was $919 shipped. I then stumbled across a thread on an RV forum about the new Champion 2000i gens. I read a lot about them and people had good things to say about them. I bought one a month ago and it's a kick ass generator......the best part.....it was $449 at Sam's club. Costco carries them too I believe and saw where some had got them onsale there for $389 but we don't have Costco's locally. On paper it's almost identical to the Honda......53db, 46lbs, and runs 9.6hrs on 1 gallon of gas. That last part is cool as hell.....I can run it all night for $3.39 where my old one used ~ 4 gallons a night. Over the course of a 9 day trip that's a pretty significant savings.
It really only differs in 2 places that I can tell.....engine size and the way it feeds gas. Honda's have a 98cc engine vs an 80cc engine in the Champion. That means the Honda has more balls starting power equipment like table saws. The other difference is the way they draw gas. The honda has a fuel pump and the champion is gravity fed. Honda makes an extended run tank you can use if you need to run the gen for long periods and are too lazy to go fill the tank every 10 hours......it's expensive if you buy the pre-made kit. Champion doesn't offer a kit due to it being gravity fed but you can make one yourself using a portable boat tank with a pump bulb on it. I have no problem filling mine every 10 hours so I'm not worried about either. It's a great gen for the money if you're just looking for a small gen around the house or shop. It's an inverter generator so it has clean power just like the honda for running computers and other sensitive electronics. You can also parallel 2 of them just like the honda's to get 4000 watts (actually like 3600 but Honda advertises there's as 4000 even though they have the same 10% dead loss with paralleling them).