Power. That invisible thread that makes the modern world possible. Stop and think about your daily routine and how many times you make use of electricity just to do the basics.
Your alarm clock goes off. The vast majority of the time, unless you’re one of the few holdouts still using a wind-up clock, you can thank electricity for getting you out of bed in the morning.
Hot water. Electricity. That morning cup of coffee. More electricity. Checking the morning’s headline on your computer or phone. Yep. More electricity. You get the idea. Without it, we’d be frankly lost. If the lights were to suddenly go out, not only would you not be reading these words right now, but you’d instantly be cast back in time a hundred years or more. Life as we know it would simply stop.
Unfortunately, no matter who you are or where you live, that’s going to happen to you at some point. Think about it. Every year, winter storms knock the grid offline for millions of people, often for days or even weeks at a time. Hurricanes do the same. Tornadoes, floods, earthquakes. It doesn’t matter what type of natural disaster befalls the area you live in, the power grid is almost always one of the first casualties because it’s fragile. This invisible friend we rely on so heavily is incredibly fragile.
And it’s not a question of if it’s going to happen, it’s just a matter of when. When it does, what’s your backup plan? Do you have one? Does your plan include a whole home generator for your Mclean, VA property? If not, may we ask why not?
If your current post-disaster plan doesn’t yet include any type of generator, you’re hardly alone. As a percentage of the overall population, relatively few people have them. Mostly, that comes down to people just not being prepared or thinking that it’ll never happen to them, or that they’ll just wing it if something does happen to knock the power out.
Broadly speaking, people adopt one of the following fallback positions after a power outage:
- They just try to ride it out and hope for the best.
- The go stay at a hotel until the lights come back on.
- Or they go stay with friends and family who have power.
The first option can work if the outage is short-lived, but the big problem is, you have no way of knowing that when disaster strikes. Maybe you’ll get lucky, and the power comes back on in a day or two. Maybe it’ll be off for a month.
In any case, it won’t be at all like camping indoors. You won’t have lights. You won’t have running water. You won’t be able to flush the toilet or cook food. If the outage runs longer than a few days, you’re going to be in increasingly bad shape.
The second option can work and offers better and more comfortable accommodations than camping out with no lights in your living room but has some serious drawbacks. First of all, if the lights are out where you live, then you may have to drive quite a distance to find a hotel that has power.
Second, lots of other people are going to be thinking the same thing, so there’s no guarantee that anyplace reasonably close to you will even have a vacancy. Third, supply and demand. You can expect that the per night cost of a room in those situations will be through the roof.
If you have plenty of disposable income or lots of room on your credit card, you can make that work but the longer the outage grinds on, the more expensive it’s going to get. It won’t be long before you’ve spent so much on hotel rooms that you could have just used the money to buy a whole home generator for your Mclean, VA property and enjoyed most or all of the comforts of home despite the power being out.
Finally, there’s the option of staying with friends or family. That can work, and the accommodations might be even better than a hotel, but it too has a number of drawbacks.
First, if your family lives close to you, they might be without power too. If they live farther away, it may be too far to even be a viable solution. Even if it isn’t, the longer the outage continues and the more time you spend living in cramped quarters like that, the more tempers are going to flare. More than one friendship has been ruined under similar circumstances, so you have to ask yourself if it’s a risk you’re willing to take.
Again, while any of the above solutions can work, especially for relatively short periods of time, all of them have major drawbacks, not the least of which is that when an outage happens, you don’t really know how long it’s going to take to get the lights back on.
Buying a whole home generator for your Mclean, VA property is the answer. It solves for all of those problems because you’ll be able to ride out the outage from the comfort of home and while still having access to most or all of the appliances that make modern life possible.
If you’re convinced that’s the way to go, you might be tempted to start looking for a good generator right now. You could do that, but if you buy without a plan, it will be hit or miss. Maybe you’ll get a generator that meets all your needs and maybe you won’t.
To ensure that you do, here’s the process we recommend:
Step 1 – The Energy Audit: This, in our view, is the necessary first step. After all, how can you know how big a generator to buy if you don’t know how much power you’re actually using month to month? An energy audit isn’t hard to do, but it is a process. Essentially, you’re walking through your house and measuring exactly how much electricity each of your appliances uses.
Doing this not only gives you a much better understanding and appreciation of your energy consumption patterns, but it also allows you to identify the biggest drivers of your energy consumption. This, in turn, let’s you start thinking more strategically.
Step 2 – Right Sizing the Whole Home Generator for Your Mclean, VA Property: The phrase ‘whole home’ doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be powering every appliance you own. It could mean that if you want it to, but it doesn’t have to.
We recommend reviewing your energy audit results and making some hard decisions about which specific appliances you’ll want to run and how long of an outage you can realistically plan for. You may even want to create a few different scenarios that involve progressively scaling back the number of appliances you plan to run the longer the outage becomes as you try to conserve your fuel.
This part can and will take some time, but the end result will be that you arrive at a number. Some amount of power generating capacity you’ll need to keep the lights and your most important appliances on in the event of an outage.
Whatever that number is, that tells you how big a whole home generator you’ll need for your Mclean, VA property.
Step 3 – Finding Your Generator: Once that’s done, the hunt can begin! There are scores of generators on the market of all shapes and sizes, so finding the right one for you can be a daunting task. If you’d like some help in that department, that’s something we can provide. We carry a full line of Generac generators which are best in class, and we’d be more than happy to help you find the one that best meets your needs, install it for you and teach you how to use it.
Give our office a call. We’ll be there when you need us.