Are you ready to weather the weather? Every year, foul weather in the form of snowstorms, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and the like knock the power offline for millions of people all over the country. Sometimes, if they’re lucky, the power only stays out for a few days, but if a storm is particularly bad, it can knock the grid senseless for weeks at a time, and then what?
Most people haven’t prepared for that sort of thing, so if you haven’t, you’re definitely not alone. Here’s the thing though: It’s going to happen. It’s probably happening right now in some part of this big country of ours, and it’s inevitable that sooner or later it’s going to happen where you live. If you don’t have a whole home generator for your Manassas, VA property, you’re going to be sitting in the dark just like everybody else, and when the lights go out, life as we know it comes to a screeching, sudden halt.
Over the course of any given day, you probably use scores of electrical appliances without even thinking about it. Now imagine that all of that is just gone. In the blink of an eye, gone. You’re back in time a hundred years. No morning coffee. No way to cook your food. No alarm clock to get you up on time, and certainly no internet.
Most people just figure that if such a thing happens, they’ll wing it. They’ll make it up as they go. Unfortunately, winging it isn’t much of a solution, and what actually happens is that the unprepared wind up doing one of three things:
- Camp out in the living room
- Go stay at a hotel
- Or go stay with friends and families
If it’s a relatively short outage, any of those three could be made to work, but outages aren’t polite. They don’t come with notices that inform you how long your lights will be out, so there’s really no way of knowing.
Camping out in your living room is okay if you only have to do it for a day or two. By day three, unless you stocked up on water, you’re in trouble. By day five, the smell coming out of the bathroom because you can’t flush the toilet is unbearable, and you’re headed for disaster. Not good.
Staying at a hotel is an excellent solution if you’ve got plenty of money or lots of room on the credit card. Assuming you can find a place that has a vacancy because remember, lots of other people probably have the same idea. And assuming it’s not two hundred miles away from where you work.
Even if you can find a room offered at a reasonable rate and fairly close to the rest of your life, the longer the outage grinds on, the less attractive that solution becomes. At a certain point, you will have spent more on hotels than you would have if you’d invested some money in a whole home generator for your Manassas, VA property.
Finally, there’s the notion of staying with friends and family. It looks great on paper. Friends and family understand. They’re not going to gouge you. Unfortunately, if your friends live close to you, they might not have power either, and the longer the outage lasts, the more likely it becomes that tempers flare and patience wears thin. More than a few friendships have been lost for no other reason than people just got sick of living on top of each other. Is it worth the risk? Most people would conclude it probably isn’t.
That brings us back to the importance of a whole home generator for your Manassas, VA property. In our view, it should be the centerpiece of any disaster planning scenario. It allows you to shelter in place while retaining some, and maybe even most of the trappings of modern life until the city you live in can get the grid sorted out and get the lights back on for everyone.
If you’ve reached the point where you’ve decided that having a whole home generator in Manassas, VA is a good thing, you might be inclined to rush right out and get whatever you can afford right now so you’ll be ready.
That could work, but more often than not, you’ll wind up with a generator that’s far too small to actually meet your needs, or one that’s far too big, which means you just spent a lot of money you didn’t need to.
Here’s the approach we recommend. It’s systematic and guaranteed to give you a generator of the optimal size for your home and family.
It Starts With a Home Energy Audit
Before you even think about breaking out your credit card and buying something, you should take steps to better understand exactly how much power you’re using. A home energy audit accomplishes that goal for you. It’s a careful assessment of every appliance in your home and how much power each one uses.
Armed with that information, you’ll have a clearer picture of how much generating capacity you’ll need, but it also gives you a number of other valuable insights. For example, once you’ve identified the biggest contributors to your monthly power draw, you can make medium and long term plans to retire certain appliances when they reach the end of their useful life and replace them with much more energy efficient models, dramatically lowering your energy footprint and thus, your generating needs.
Next, It’s Decision Time
Just because you invest in a whole home generator for your Manassas, VA property, that doesn’t mean that when the grid gets knocked offline, you’ll have every light in your house on and be running every appliance you own. It could mean that, but in practice, it almost never does.
Once your energy audit is complete, you can sit down and take a long, hard look at that list of appliances. In the event of an outage, which ones are the most critical? What can you live without until the power comes back on?
Start culling that list to further reduce the amount of generating power you need. The smaller your energy footprint, the less expensive the generator you buy will be.
Time to Go Shopping
Finally, once you’ve come up with a good plan about which appliances you’ll want to run in the aftermath of an outage, it’s time to go shopping for a generator that has the capacity you need, and that won’t dent your checking account to acquire.
There are scores of models to choose from, and they come in all shapes and sizes. At this point, the search can become overwhelming for a great many people. We totally understand that and can help make the process easier.
We carry a full line of world-class Generac generators and would be more than happy to not only help you find the right one for your home and family, but we can help with the energy audit too if you like.
Once you’ve made your selection, we can install it for you and instruct you on its use in the event of an outage. If you like, we can even put your generator on a preventive maintenance program so that when the day comes, and the lights go out, you won’t have to wonder if or whether your generator will turn on and do what you need it to do. Of course, it will because we’ve helped you keep it in optimal condition, so it’s ready to get to work when you need it.
The bottom line is, sooner or later, the power in this area is going to fail. It has happened before, and you can be assured that it will happen again. When it does, you want to be ready. You want to be able to continue living your life with a minimum amount of disruption, and a properly sized whole home generator can help make sure that’s possible.
When you’re ready to get started, we’re just a phone call away, and we’d love the opportunity to work with you.