When our electric fails and I use my little 4000 W generator to power the house, I have no problem with only powering essential loads (well pump, furnace, refrigerator, lighting) and not using non-essential loads (air conditioning, range, clothes dryer, etc.). I built a power meter for my generator, and the steady-state power is usually around 1500 W or so.
But let’s say I had a “whole house” generator instead, and I decided to only power essential loads in order to save fuel. A whole house generator is going to use considerably more fuel to provide me with 1500 W vs. my Honda generator providing me with 1500 W. (This is in addition to the significantly higher price for the whole house generator, the installation cost, higher maintenance costs, etc.)
In other words, if you have no problem with only powering essential loads, then you will save more money and use less fuel with a small generator vs. a big generator; you should only get a whole house generator if you want the luxury of turning on anything you want in the house.
We bought our whole-house Generac through Costco back in late 2021. It’s an 18kW unit and runs off of our natural gas line. The unit and installation ran about $11,000, and with Costco’s promotion we got 15% back on a Costco gift card. So the cost ended up being less than $10K.
We were and are very happy. Though we live in suburban NJ and don’t lose power often, we have a well so when we lose power we lose water. More than a day of that gets VERY unpleasant.
That quote is way out of line. I had mine installed (whole house Generac running on propane) installed about 6 to 8 years ago for 7K. Son recently was quoted 9 to 10K for same system - mostly increase in labor. Lots of trees in Maine so it’s very nice in winter - lots of drunk tourists in the summer hitting those same trees and utility poles, so it’s very nice in the summer.
I suppose it’s possible to have a system that might let you power EITHER you house systems OR the snow melt, or you know to turn everything else off when you want to use the snow melt (because the house will take time to cool down and you can just keep the fridge closed for a few hours if you need to)… but that is something you need to talk to someone on-scene about.
My son had a natural gas generator installed a couple decades ago. No problem with storing fuel. Two things it doesn’t power are the electric oven (the stove top is gas) and the dryer. There is a transfer switch that switches automatically. He has to run it every couple months to keep it happy. Basically it works. It cost him a bit over $10K I recall. Once when I was visiting it didn’t come on and he was at work. Over the phone he took me through the procedure for hand starting it and that worked. The neighbors complain it is noisy. The complained less when he invited them on one cold winter day to warm up.
My two cents. First, maintenance is crucial to the decision. Choose good maintenance over any other specification. Then decide how widespread the outage is likely to be. Down here on the Gulf Coast our power outages are from hurricanes and can last for days to weeks and cover a very large area. You would think a natural gas powered whole house generator would be obvious-and it is. Until people find out that the compressors the gas company uses to keep the gas pressure up are/were electrically powered. Oops. I understand that problem has been addressed around here but up north-worth checking. If there is a widespread power outage can the gas company keep the gas pressure up? And maintenance/testing. Where I used to work there were dozens of separate Government buildings. Most with their own generators for backup. 90% of the generators came online every month. But never all of them. It would suck to be one building that put the effort into protecting itself only to have it fail when needed.
We have a 20kw natural gas Generac generator. One of the best purchases I’ve ever made. Southcoast Massachusetts, so we’ve got the same weather issues as you - heavy snow/wind and hurricanes.
I used to work 24-hour shifts, my wife and then infant daughter would be home for an extended time without power if we had an outage and I was at work. We had a 5kw propane portable generator that I’d hook up if I was home - not in her scope of practice.
The generator self tests once a week. The way we have it oriented in the back yard (about 12 feet from the house), I can see the green/yellow/red LED indicators from the kitchen window. When the generator says it needs an oil change or a battery check, I usually pick up on it pretty quickly. I do all of the maintenance for it, its really simple.
I keep two oil change kits (oil, oil filter, air filter) in the garage in case we have a really, really long outage (when NH had the ice storm in 2008, generators were running for 2 weeks straight and were failing from oil issues). The kits are available from Amazon. I also installed a battery heater kit, we had an outage a few years ago when it was silly cold out and the generator cranked for about 30 seconds before it started. The battery heater has it starting within about 6 seconds year round.
When its running, you can barely hear it inside the house. You can hear it in the back yard, nothing at all if you’re in front of the house. The dead giveaway is that my house has lights on, but no one else’s does.
The circuit breakers on the generator are 180 amps total (240v circuit, two breakers). We’ve never been selective about whats running in the house, and we’ve never tripped the breaker on the generator. If you have 200 amp utility service and you’ve never tripped your main breaker, you’re probably fine. If you do trip it, reset it and don’t run all of that stuff again.
Sounds like the OP would benefit by consulting with a good electrician to advise on power demands and optimal whole-house generator model. I wouldn’t necessarily trust the generator dealer.
We had a Generac whole house generator, installed after a couple of miserable 4-6 day ice storm-related outages (and a host of shorter ones), for at least a dozen years. It worked fine, though naturally after installation there were no more major outages and much fewer short ones. You do get hooked into an annual maintenance contract, which I suppose you can opt out of.
When we moved to Kentucky I was interested in getting another one. But the quote was very high from the Generac dealer, and the pricey model wouldn’t even have powered the whole house. So we got a DuroMax portable that does what’s needed in the event of an outage, powering heating or A/C, refrigerator, freezers, stove and miscellaneous lamps and charging stations. Setup is easy with the interlock kit we had installed on the breaker box. Haven’t really needed it in the past few years, but the peace of mind is invaluable.
My employer is a private company. Each store has emergency generators, huge things far larger than any whole-house generator (unless you have a house like Bill Gates, maybe). They are tested regularly. They don’t always work when tested. I can verify, however, that they have worked every time we’ve suffered an actual power failure in the area. It’s a sort of blink-and-you-miss-it interval, except that one time it took until a count of three for it to kick in (three seconds is supposed to be the maximum).
Bottom line - all emergency generators, no matter how fancy or professional, require regular testing and maintenance if you want them to work when needed. And sometimes, very rarely, they don’t. So have some notion of what to do if that happens, or rather, doesn’t happen.
Since you already have spent money on solar, would a battery be a better investment than a generator?
Obviously if you’re planning for multi-week outages, a generator could run forever. But if you’re judicious in your energy use during an outage, a battery might cover your non-daytime usage.
As you’re probably aware, without a battery, your solar is useless during an outage. With a battery, you can use your solar during an outage during the day, and use the battery at night.
And, of course, during non-outages, you can run off of your battery at night instead of pulling from the grid.
The math never works for me so I don’t have solar myself, but since you’ve already spent the money, ten thousand for a Generac or twenty for a battery, the battery may make sense.
There are types of solar batteries these days called “solar generators”. They combine a battery with various types of output sockets and options. So you can run stuff off your solar panels during the day and the system switches to battery power at night, and if you’re not using all of the solar power being generated during the day the remainder goes to recharging the battery.
I don’t know if any would be practical for running an entire house for an extended period - it would depend on storage capacity and the amount of power the house needs. For a particular home and older style battery bank might or might not make more sense.
I live on the East Coast, prone to hurricanes. Several years ago we had a category 2 hurricane causing a neighborhood power outage lasting 9 days. We survived with a portable 1KW portable generator used mainly to power the refrigerator and I vowed, never again because it was a PIA. I then installed a 15KW whole house generator and during the following 12 years served us well during power outages lasting from several hours to days.
At the end of the generator’s life span, I replaced it with a 12KW unit for my 1400 sq ft home as the unit would be sufficient to power the entire house providing we don’t run the A/C and/or stove and electric clothes dryer at the same time. Our neighborhood has above ground power lines surrounded by numerous trees so summer storms also cause outages. I would never again go without a generator.
You mentioned your biggest draw is the 4000 watt driveway system which could probably be used on a ‘as needed’ basis so it appears the 20,000-24,000-watt range should work. Concerning the location of transfer switch, mine is outside next to the utility meter but I have no idea exactly how your solar is set up but an electrician could certainly advise on this.
When I researched whole house generators years ago, Kohler had a better and more reliable machine than Generac. Kohlers are just as expensive, though. Plan on spending just as much for installation as you paid for the generator.
I decided on a large portable (9000.watts) in a soundproof enclosure, converted to propane (1000 gal tank), wired into my house to a manual transfer switch. I did most of the installation myself and nothing is automatic at all, but it runs all of my house essentials including hot water and well pump for a fraction of the cost of a permenant standby generator.
We live quite remote, with VERY serious long winters. We do get some outages. The longest has been ~4 hours. Our heat is a propane stove, so we are good there. I’ve a UPC for my computer, so that’s ok.
Have portable jump starters in our cars, that will also charge cell phones.
We have a number of oil/hurricane lamps for light, and like to play chess or cribbage. So entertainment is not an issue. It’s actually kinda nice playing chess in front of our stove with the lamps burning. Sometimes it’s nice to turn the clock back.
We have verry long winters, so if it came to it we could take food and put it outside in coolers.
Not dissing the idea of a genny at all, but we have worked around it.
Just as a note of interest (tangentially related to the OP), Green Mountain Power (Vermont) is planning to install electric batteries in every house to mitigate power outages and to manage how the power is distributed. (eta – oops! already linked-to by @filmore )
Like many places, Vermont has been hit hard this year by extreme weather linked to climate change. Half a dozen severe storms, including major floods in July, have caused power outages and damaged homes and other buildings.
Those calamities and concerns about the rising cost of electricity helped shape Green Mountain’s proposal, Ms. McClure said. As the company ran the numbers, it realized that paying recovery costs and building more power lines to improve its system would cost a lot more and take a lot longer than equipping homes with batteries.
[…]
The company expects to invest an estimated $1.5 billion over the next seven years — money that it would recoup through electricity rates. The utility said the investment was justified by the growing sum it had to spend on storm recovery and to trim and remove trees around its power lines.
[…]
Green Mountain would control the batteries, allowing it to program them to soak up energy when wind turbines and solar panels were producing a lot of it. Then, when demand peaked on a hot summer day, say, the batteries could release electricity.
After a number of closely spaced, long outages we installed an automatic Generac, hooked to the natural gas running the furnace and water heater. There were of course no outages for the next 3 years.
Ours is set to self-test every month, and doesn’t kick on until an outage has been maybe a minute(? - at any rate, long enough to wonder if it is going to start - always has so far). We had an exciting time this summer during a windstorm where a branch was apparently whacking a power line somewhere that had the whole neighborhood flashing Morse code. Took a while before there was a long enough off cycle to get the generator to power on - my various electronics were very unhappy.
It’s sized big enough to run everything, but there were some power dips this summer when both ACs were on.
One of the reasons we bought this house was because of the underground utilities - we hadn’t considered that the power to them is on overhead lines. We are apparently at the end of a line - when there is a widespread outage our neighborhood tends to be one of the last to get power back. The longest outage (which led to buying the generator) was a week.
This is the reason spend a significant sum on a generator. Automatic whole house or portable doesn’t matter. There will be some formula based on the value of your house, your electric bill, and your financial status from which the exact amount can be calculated. Once that money is spent you are guaranteed several years without major outages.
I’ve lived in this area for the past 20 years. During that time we have lost power for more than 2 hours on approximately 3 occasions. Both of the towns I have lived in on the North Shore have municipal electric companies, so when our power is out, the lineman’s power is out, and they work hard and fast to get it turned back on. You seem comfortable spending the money, but it seems like a big investment for something you’re going to probably use once every half dozen years for half a day at a time.
More than a day of that gets VERY unpleasant.