With icy weather comes a challenge for home and business owners: power outages are more likely to occur, and those outages can pose a risk to not only your electronics and peace-of-mind, but also your health and overall well-being. Now is a better time than ever to purchase a backup generator to ensure that your family stays warm throughout the winter months.
Benefits of Home Standby Generators
Home standby generators are an alternative, backup energy source for a home that one can rely on during a power outage. If utility power is lost, that loss of power is automatically detected by a generator, which turns on to restore power to the home. Once utility power is restored, the generator cuts itself off automatically to avoid overloading your home electrical system.
Generators can run on a variety of fuels, but most commonly home appliances run either on liquid propane or natural gas. Attaching backup generators to home fuel lines ensures that even if power is not flowing, your generator can run on a fuel type that is still functional in your home. Additionally, generating power using fuels such as liquid propane and natural gas instead of battery power ensures that a generator can generate electricity continuously, rather than just distributing stored power.
To learn more about the benefits of backup generators, see our blog on the topic!
Portable vs Standby Generators
Portable generators are gasoline-powered generators that are generally more lightweight than standby generators, intended for a variety of uses. In the event of a home power outage, provided your electrical system is linked up properly to avoid any overloading issues, a portable generator is a viable temporary solution for powering vital portions of your home during an outage, such as a refrigerator or a sump pump. However, powering an entire home, even if possible with a portable generator, may not be feasible, since doing so would require a large amount of gasoline to be stored in or near a home. Additionally, these generators need to be kept away from the home, as they produce harmful exhaust.
Standby generators, by contrast, can provide up to 10 times the amount of power a portable generator can provide, and tends to be powered with the fuel lines already running through your home. As a result, these generators have the ability to provide the start-up wattage required for machinery such as air conditioners and other large, electrically-powered appliances. Not to mention that in the event of inclement weather, nobody has to make regular trips outside to re-fuel a standby generator. The power produced by standby generators tends to be "cleaner" than the power produced by backup generators as well, meaning that the generator provides AC power at the standard 60 Hz more reliably, which is the ideal for preventing damage to your electronics.