Why Your Breaker Keeps Tripping (And When It Is Actually Dangerous)
A breaker that trips is doing its job. The question is what it is protecting you from — an overload, a short, …
Georgia loses power to summer storms, winter ice and the occasional hurricane remnant, and rural feeders can stay down considerably longer than suburban ones. Backup power is a reasonable investment. Choosing the wrong kind is an expensive one.
The two honest options
Portable generator with an inlet and interlock
You buy a portable unit, we install a weatherproof inlet box on the exterior wall, a circuit to the panel, and either a mechanical interlock or a small transfer switch. When the power fails you roll the generator out, plug in one cord, start it, and flip the interlock. Selected circuits come alive.
Suits: occasional short outages, tighter budgets, people who are usually home.
Limits: manual startup, refueling every several hours, noise, and the unit must be outdoors well away from the house because of carbon monoxide.
Permanently installed standby generator
A fixed unit on a pad outside, connected to natural gas or propane, wired to an automatic transfer switch. It senses the outage, starts, transfers the load and returns it when utility power stabilizes, typically inside 30 seconds. It exercises itself weekly.
Suits: frequent or long outages, well pumps, sump pumps, medical equipment, home offices, and anyone often away from the house.
Limits: substantially higher cost, requires a fuel supply, needs annual service.
Sizing: the part that goes wrong
Generator sizing has to account for two different numbers. Running watts is steady-state demand. Starting watts is the surge when a motor spins up, and it can be three to five times the running figure for well pumps, compressors and air conditioners. A generator sized only for running watts will stall the first time the well pump and the air handler start together.
The practical method is to decide what genuinely must run, total the running watts, then add the single largest starting surge on top. For many Georgia homes an essentials package — refrigeration, well or sump pump, furnace blower, internet, a few lighting and outlet circuits — is far smaller and cheaper than whole-house coverage, and covers 90 percent of the discomfort.
Load management changes this calculation favorably. A mid-size unit with a load shedding module briefly drops the air conditioner when the well pump starts, then restores it. You get most of whole-house behavior from a smaller, cheaper machine.
The safety point that is not negotiable
Never connect a generator to your home with a double-ended cord into a dryer or range outlet. This backfeeds your panel and pushes power out through the utility transformer at line voltage, where it can kill a lineman working to restore your service. It also bypasses every overcurrent protection in the house. An inlet and interlock is not expensive, and it is the difference between a safe connection and a lethal one.
Maintenance is not optional
Standby units need oil and filter changes, battery replacement every few years, and an annual load test. The most common reason a standby generator fails during an outage is a dead starting battery on a machine nobody has serviced. Whatever you install, put the service on a calendar.
To have your actual load measured and get a straight recommendation, call (866) 651-5242 or see our generator installation service.