Generator Installation in South Florida

A standby unit sits on a pad outside, wired into your house through a transfer switch. When the utility drops, the switch senses it, starts the engine and moves your house onto generator power. Nobody has to go outside in the rain to pull a cord.

The size decides what stays on. A 10 to 14 kilowatt unit covers the essentials: one AC system, the refrigerator, some lights and the well pump if you have one. A 22 kilowatt unit will usually carry a whole three-bedroom house, including a second air handler.

Portable units are cheaper and they still beat nothing, but somebody has to fuel them every few hours. That gets old fast on day four of an outage.

We start with a load calculation and a walk of the property. Where the unit sits matters because of setback rules, and because you do not want engine exhaust near a bedroom window. Most jobs also need a gas line, so we coordinate that with a licensed plumber.

Then we pull the permit. Generator installation in Palm Beach and St. Lucie County usually needs an electrical permit, a mechanical permit for the fuel line, and sometimes a separate structural review for the pad.

Install day covers the pad, the unit, the transfer switch and the wiring back to your panel. After that we run the unit under load, confirm the automatic start, and hand you the startup paperwork the manufacturer needs for warranty registration.

If a gas main runs down your street, natural gas is usually the easy answer. There is no tank to bury, no delivery to schedule, and the unit will run as long as the gas keeps flowing.

Plenty of streets out west in Loxahatchee or Tradition have no gas service at all. Propane covers those. A 500-gallon buried tank will typically run a mid-size unit for several days of continuous use, though your actual runtime depends on how much of the house you are carrying.

Either way the fuel line has to be sized for the engine, not just for a stove. Undersized gas piping is one of the most common reasons a new unit starts fine and then stalls under load.

Generators are engines. They need oil, filters, plugs and a load test, and they need them on a schedule whether the power has gone out or not. A unit that sits untouched for three years will usually fail on the day you need it.

We service annually, and we push customers to book it in spring rather than the week a storm is named. Parts get scarce and calendars fill fast once a system enters the Gulf.

Most units also run a weekly self-test. If yours has stopped doing that, or it starts and then shuts down after a minute, call before the season rather than during it.

Three things drive the price. The unit itself scales with kilowatts. The transfer switch scales with whether you are backing up a few circuits or the whole panel. The site work scales with distance: every foot between the pad, the gas meter and the electrical panel is trench, wire and pipe.

A short run on an existing gas service with a whole-house switch is the cheapest version of this job. A long run to a buried propane tank on a lot with a driveway in the way is the expensive version.

We give you the number in writing after the site visit, broken out by unit, switch, fuel and labor, so you can see which part you are actually paying for.

We service and repair most major brands regardless of who put them in. Common failures we see are dead starter batteries, controller boards cooked by a surge, and fuel regulators that have drifted out of spec.

If your unit is under ten years old, repair is almost always the better answer. Past fifteen, and especially if parts are getting hard to source, we will tell you honestly when replacement is the smarter spend.

The honest way to size a generator is to decide what you refuse to lose. For most families that list starts with one air conditioning system, the refrigerator, the internet equipment and enough lighting to move around safely at night.

Medical equipment changes the calculation. If somebody in the house runs an oxygen concentrator or a CPAP, that load goes on the essential list and it stays on it.

Well and septic systems matter out west. A house on a private well loses running water the moment the power stops, so the pump becomes a priority load rather than a nice extra.

We build the list with you and then size the unit to it. Oversizing wastes money and makes the engine run poorly at light load. Undersizing means the unit trips out on a hot afternoon.

The transfer switch is what keeps generator power out of the utility lines. That is not a formality. Backfeeding a line can kill a lineman working to restore your street, and it is the reason cord-and-plug backfeeding is illegal everywhere.

An automatic transfer switch does the whole thing without you. It watches the utility, waits a few seconds to be sure the outage is real, starts the engine and moves the load across. When utility power returns and holds, it moves you back and lets the engine cool down before shutting off.

Manual switches cost less and work fine if somebody is always home. They just require that person to be there, awake, and willing to go outside.

Modern units run quieter than they used to, but a generator under load is still roughly as loud as a window air conditioner standing next to you. Placement is worth thinking about before the pad goes down.

Setback distances from windows, doors and property lines are set by code and sometimes tightened by the municipality or the HOA. We check both before we quote, because moving a unit after the fact is expensive.

In dense neighborhoods we often end up on a side yard behind a screen wall. That satisfies the association, keeps the exhaust away from bedrooms, and still leaves service clearance for the annual visit.

Generator lead times swing hard with the weather. In February you can usually have a unit on a pad within a few weeks. In August, after a storm has crossed the state, the same unit can be back-ordered and every crew in the county is already committed.

Permitting follows the same curve. Building departments run at normal speed in spring and slow considerably once a storm passes and everybody files at once.

So the practical advice is boring: start in the first half of the year. Get the load list settled, get the site walked, and get the permit filed while the calendar is calm.

If you have already lost power once this year and decided you are done with that, tell us when you call. We prioritise the site visit for people who are actively deciding rather than idly pricing.