Do you have a commercial standby generator for your Centreville, VA business? If not, why not? What plans, if any, do you have in place for when the power fails? It’s not a question of if, it’s a matter of when. It’s inevitable.
It doesn’t matter what the root cause is. It could be a severe winter storm that knocks the grid offline. A hurricane. Tornado or another natural disaster. It could be an act of vandalism or even terrorism. Whatever the root cause though, the end result is the same. The lights go out, and they stay out. Maybe for just a few days if you’re lucky, but the grid could be down for weeks at a time, or even longer.
It has happened before. It will happen again. When it does, what’s that going to do to your bottom line? What is it going to do to the health, well-being, and long-term viability of your company?
There’s a powerful strategic advantage in being the first company to be up and running again in the aftermath of an outage, and having a commercial standby generator in Centreville, VA is a critical piece of the puzzle that makes that possible.
Before you break out the company credit card though, there are a few important precursor steps that need to be taken. For starters, you need to come to some understanding of how big a commercial standby generator in Centreville, VA you actually need. The first step in doing that is to have an energy audit performed on your business.
We can help with that. We’ve been proudly serving the region for years, and energy audits are just one of the many services we provide. Working with you, we’ll step through your operation and identify exactly how much power it takes every month to run your business. There’s power in that. One of the key things it allows you to do is identify what the major drivers of your power usage are, which in turn, facilitates long term planning.
If you identify one or more pieces of equipment that draw vastly more power than the rest, it’s easy to begin planning to phase them out. Use them until they’re fully depreciated and you’re ready to retire them, then replace them with high-efficiency models that sip electricity. Problem solved.
In any case, once you have a firm handle on how much energy your business uses, move an important step closer in determining the size of the commercial standby generator in Centreville, VA you actually need, but there’s more to it than just that.
After we complete the energy audit and give you the results, the next step is to sit down and start making some hard decisions. In the face of an outage, what specific pieces of equipment do you actually need to get your business up and running again? Odds are, you won’t need absolutely everything, although you can certainly plan for that if it suits you, but it’s usually more cost-effective to identify the most critical pieces of equipment. The minimum necessary to get you functioning again, and plan around that when sizing your generator.
Armed with that information, the last piece is, of course, your budget. Since this is essentially a part of your disaster recovery planning, you don’t want to spend so much on a commercial standby generator in Centreville, VA that it breaks the bank, which would defeat the purpose.
Somewhere in the intersection of those three data points, you’ll arrive at how much generating capacity you need in the event of an outage, and what you can afford to spend, and at that point, you’re ready to start shopping for generators.
If your needs are extremely minimal, you may be able to get by with a portable generator, but in practice, most businesses need much more power than that. This is especially true if you are in any food-related industry as your freezers and other equipment will all require power. Odds are excellent then that you’ll be looking at a fixed generator.
One final thing to consider as you narrow your search is fuel source. Just as generators come in all shapes and sizes, they also come powered by a staggering variety of fuel sources. You can find solar generators, gas powered ones, generators that run on propane or natural gas, and even some generators that can make use of a variety of fuel sources.
This mostly comes down to personal preference and an understanding of what types of fuels are readily available in your area.
While it’s entirely possible to find a great generator from a variety of online sources, if you’d like to simplify the search, you should know that we sell a full line of world-class Generac generators, so we’ve got something to fit a wide range of power generation needs and budgets.
If you decide to buy one from us, we’ll come to your place of business, install it, instruct you and your employees on its use, and if you like, we can also sign you up for our comprehensive maintenance program.
Maintenance is one of those things that too often gets overlooked in the equation, but its importance cannot be overstated. After all, when the lights go out, your backup system needs to kick in immediately. It simply needs to work, no exceptions, no question. Maintenance is the key to ensuring that happens.
Although generators are hardy and robust pieces of equipment, they’re still machines, and if they don’t get regular maintenance, they’re not going to work as reliably as they should. Even worse, a big backup generator represents a significant investment and the absence of regular maintenance will significantly shorten its useful life. Not good.
Fortunately, there’s a simple fix for that. Our preventive maintenance contract is among the best in the industry. Its main value lies in the fact that it allows us to inspect your system at regular intervals, which gives us the ability to spot and correct issues while they’re still small and relatively inexpensive to repair. Not only does that save you money in the long run, but it also ensures that when your generator is in use, it runs more efficiently and will last longer.
Of course, generators are only one small part of what we do. We also offer a full range of electrical services, so if you need to upgrade the wiring in your office, or if you’re expanding and need a new section wired for power, we’ve got you covered.
Another important thing we handle is home and office automation. If you’ve been interested in or curious about automation but haven’t yet taken the plunge, it’s something we highly recommend.
Consider how many smart appliances there are on the market today. You probably have several of them in your office right now. Imagine having the ability to monitor your energy usage from an app on your smartphone, and being able to make money-saving changes on the fly. With our business automation system, you can do exactly that.
If you’ve gone home for the day, and later in the evening you realize that you’ve left one of your power-hungry machines running, it’s easy to log into the app and power the device down, saving your company money on your monthly power bills.
It’s also easy to monitor your energy usage in real time, which gives you an even better and more fine-grained ability to plan. While everything we’ve talked about to this point is important, automation can really take things to the next level, allowing you to exert a heretofore unimaginable level of control. It puts you firmly in the driver’s seat of one of your company’s biggest expenses and gives you the ability to better manage and control your energy use.
The bottom line is, whatever your needs are where your company’s electrical systems are concerned, from backup power to general electrical contracting service to business automation, we’ve got you covered, and we’d love to add you to our growing family of satisfied customers. Give our office a call today. You’ll be very glad you did.
