Quick question, how many electrical appliances do you use just getting up and getting ready for work in the morning? Don’t forget to count things like the hot water heater that provides hot water for your shower, your electric toothbrush and electric razor, the microwave, coffee maker, and your cell phone charger.
When you stop to think about it, there’s probably more than a dozen, and that’s just to get you up and out of the house in the morning. Over the course of the rest of the day, you probably use dozens of electrical devices without even giving it a second thought.
Now imagine what your day would be like if all of it was just suddenly gone. No lights. No coffee maker, no hot showers, and the moment your cell phone’s battery died, no cell phone either.
Without electricity, life as we know it would basically cease to exist. Even the simplest things would be orders of magnitude more difficult. Unfortunately, that kind of thing is inevitable. It’s not a question of if it happens, it’s only a matter of when.
Most people don’t fully appreciate just how dependent we are on electricity for almost everything we do, and because of that, few have made plans to protect themselves against it. One way or another, the prepared individual knows that an important part of planning for the inevitable revolves around having a whole home generator in Potomac, MD.
If you don’t yet have one, may we ask why not? The grid’s going to go down at some point, and possibly for an extended period of time. Every year, savage winter storms leave people without power for weeks at a time. Hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes do as well. If you don’t have a backup plan in place, you’re going to really struggle.
For most people, their impromptu backup plan when the lights go out takes one of three basic forms, which we’ll talk about next:
Camp Out At a Hotel
This is the easiest solution, but also the most expensive. Hotels tend to jack up their rates when demand spikes and during an outage, demand definitely spikes, so you’ll be paying a premium for the privilege of camping out in a hotel.
If you have lots of money to spare or plenty of room on your credit card, you can make it work, but the longer the outage grinds on, the more expensive it gets, and honestly, if you’d spent that hotel money on a whole home generator in Potomac, MD, you wouldn’t even have to leave home!
Camp Out With Friends And Family
This is another incredibly common solution. It’s cheaper than going the hotel route, but it might be ruinous to your relationships. Ben Franklin once said ‘Fish and visitors begin to smell after three days.’
There’s truth in that. While your friends and family might welcome you with open arms initially, if the outage extends much past a week, it’s going to start putting a strain on your relationship. Tempers are bound to flare with everybody camped out on top of each other. Maybe your friendships will survive and maybe they won’t, but either way, it’s an awful predicament to be in.
Just Try To Ride It Out
If the power is only out for a day or two, this can work. You can treat it like camping indoors. Sure, you’ll have to get a bit creative to make sure you’re up on time so you can get to work, and preparing meals will be a challenge, but if it’s just for a couple of days, it’ll probably be okay.
If the outage lasts longer than that, you could be in real trouble. Where will you get water? How will you cook meals in the longer term? What about flushing the toilet? All of these things require power and your home is going to turn into a genuine health hazard in short order without it.
Trying to ride it out for anything more than a few days is a disaster waiting to happen.
All of this then points to the need to have a whole home generator in Potomac, MD. Consider it to be cheap insurance. Your protection against a grid failure. When it happens, your life will carry on without too much in the way of changes.
Unfortunately, buying a whole home generator in Potomac, MD isn’t as simply as going online, picking one at random and whipping out your credit card. You can do that, but if you do, there’s no guarantee that what you get will be what you need. To make sure that it is, there’s a process you should follow. We’ll go over that process next.
Step 1 – Perform a Home Energy Audit
You can find all sorts of resources online to help you do this, or if you’d rather have help, it is one of the services we provide.
Basically, this is a detailed accounting of every electrical appliance in your home and how much it contributes to your monthly power use. This allows you to identify how much power you use in a typical month and which specific appliances are the biggest contributors to that figure.
Armed with that information, you’re ready for step two.
Step 2 – Reduce Your Energy Footprint
The smaller your energy footprint, the smaller your whole home generator in Potomac, MD will need to be. Smaller generators are typically less expensive generators so anything you can do to reduce your energy use will help here.
There are a number of simple things you can do, but the big three are:
- Swap out your incandescent bulbs with LEDs, all over your house.
- Put your appliances on smart power strips to eliminate phantom loads.
- And make a list of your most power-hungry appliances and plan to retire them when they reach the end of their useful lives and buy high-efficiency models to replace them.
The first two you can do quickly, but the last item will be a longer-term project.
Step 3 – Make Strategic Decisions
Once you’ve done something to reduce your monthly power draw, now it’s time to put your thinking cap on. In the event of a power outage, which appliances do you want to be able to run, and which ones can you live without?
Some people like to plan to just run everything, while others will make hard choices here. There’s no one right approach, but again, understand that if you plan on just running everything, you’ll need more generating capacity than someone who is more strategic here.
Step 4 – Begin Scouting For the Right Generator For You
Once you’ve completed the steps above, you’re ready to begin shopping for the best generator for your home and family. There are a dizzying number of makes and models to choose from. They come in all sizes and are powered by a broad range of fuel types. You can find gas or propane powered generators, solar generators, and even generators that will accept multiple types of fuel.
This comes down to personal preference and what works best in your area.
Based on your preferences and energy needs, you’ll begin to narrow your search until you finally arrive at the right generator for you and your family.
If all of the above has left you feeling a bit overwhelmed, we can help with that too. After we perform your home energy audit, we can make recommendations to help lower your energy footprint, and we can point you in the direction of the right generator for you.
In fact, we carry a full line of exceptional Generac generators, and if you buy from us, we’ll install it for you and instruct you on how to use it. We can even put your new generator on one of our preventive maintenance programs, so you don’t have to worry about that either. When the lights go out, your generator will just work, and at the end of the day, that’s exactly what you want.
Don’t sit in the dark! Plan for the inevitability of a grid failure and let us help you guard against it. Call our office today.